Matt Yglesias

Local Taxes Down

One problem we have in the United States is that so much of public revenue and spending is in the hands of state and local governments who are set up to run strongly pro-cyclical fiscal policies. When times get tough, revenues go down. Thus, instead of increasing spending to help tide people over during the downturn, balanced budget rules force spending to go down which tends to deepen the downcycle. With the downturn in the housing market, we’re seeing a somewhat different spin on this as the mortgage collapse leads to declining property tax revenues. It’s not clear yet to what extent these housing issues are going to spill over into the jobs and income picture — so far a well-timed uptick in exports seems to be keeping people employed — but the tax side is one of several mechanisms by which it threatens to do so, undermining local budgets even in the absence of a recession.

Photo by Flickr user jffmrk used under a Creative Commons license

Speaking Ill

Via Robert Farley, a brilliant 1863 editorial by The New York Times on what they mistakenly believed to be the occassion of John C. Breckenridge’s death. First sentence: “If it be true, as is now positively declared, that a loyal bullet has sent this traitor to eternity, every loyal heart will feel satisfaction and will not scruple to express it.”

Rocking the Boat

This effort from Stuart Rothenberg really makes me hope John Edwards wins. The best part is when he explains that working class voters should fear Edwards because his populist rhetoric will case stock market declines:

Scare the stuffing out of Corporate America and watch the stock market tumble. That’s certain to make retirement funds – including those owned by labor unions and “working families” – happy, right?

Uh huh. Look. If you think Edwards’ substantive policies are radically left-wing and bound to crush the national economy then, obviously, people have no good reason to vote for him — working class or otherwise (for the record, the vast majority of stocks are owned by a small minority of very wealthy people). But Rothenberg doesn’t so much as try to make the case. After all, it’s a hard case to make. It’s an especially hard case to make since Rothenberg wants to negatively contrast Edwards with the more mainstream talk coming from Clinton and Obama. But they all have similar policies. But to Rothernberg, the main thing is that we don’t want anyone who’ll say mean things to those poor little CEOs. We all feel super-sorry for them, sure.

UPDATE: I actually probably should have said this more seriously — if Edwards wins in Iowa by running left and pissing people off, that’ll be a good thing for the world. By contrast, while there’s a lot I like about Barack Obama, if he wins Iowa it won’t have been by running hard on the things I like best about him.

Constitutional Amendments

Tim Russert apparently thinks it’s hypocritical to believe it’s sometimes a good idea to make them.

DC Schools

I’m with The New Republic in favoring efforts to make it easier to fire employees at the inept DC Public Schools central administrative office. I don’t, howeve,r see why one would frame the issue this way:

Only three members of the 13-person board–one of them was Marion Barry–sided against Rhee. In short, the sclerotic establishment can no longer count on its old political patrons. And her victory was an important object lesson for other cities: Reformers can now battle the teachers’ unions–and trounce them.

Back in the real world, this was a pretty mild reform limited to non-union employees. The public sector unions are bound to oppose it, of course, but the proposal was designed to minimize opposition, thus maximizing the odds of it passing and something useful actually getting done for DC kids. Framing every reform effort as a death blow to the unions seems like a good way to make sure reform efforts fail. Meanwhile, the reality is that the Washington Teachers Union is a relatively weak union. People know that DCPS is a low-performing system by big city standards, and people “know” that strong teachers unions are responsible for urban school systems being bad, so it just must be the case that DC’s schools are bad because of a super-strong union.

The Nature of the Threat

I know some people feel that the Celtics have had a soft schedule, but I feel like the extent to which they’re dominating the league isn’t well appreciated. But to get a taste, look at what Dave Berri noted a couple of days ago: “The Bulls in 1995-96 won 72 games and posted a differential of 13.0. This is the best mark in the league since 1973-74. The Celtics currently have a differential of 14.9. Yes, the current Celtics are posting a better mark than the team considered the best in NBA history. To give this result even more perspective, the Spurs differential this season is 6.9 (which is very good). Still the Spurs mark is only about half of what we see from Boston.”

And of course that was before yesterday’s 19 point win on the road against the Lakers. Right now, the Celtics average margin of victory — around 14 — is leaving everyone else in the dust. It’s not just the best in the Association, they’re putting up historically great numbers:

ESPN – Boston vs. Los Angeles Recap, December 30, 2007 via kwout

Of course that same table shows that not every team that starts out better than the ’96 Bulls ends up with a better record than the ’96 Bulls. But coming on the heels of the Patriots’ perfect regular season and the Red Sox’ World Series win, decent non-Boston people need to seriously contemplate the possibility of a record-breaking Celtics season. And, indeed, of all the Boston sports triumphs the Celtics are surely the most egregious: Kevin McHale trades away one of the best players in the league for peanuts. To his former team. Whose general manager is an ex-teammate and good friend. After having rejected numerous better offers. In any well-run fantasy league that would have gotten vetoed.

Helping Hands

BryklynLibrul demands speculation about the possible impact of a third party wanker ticket: “If this turns out to be serious, who does it help, the GOP or the Dems? Idle speculation at this point, but I’m curious to know what MY and others think.”

The cop-out answer is that it depends on who the nominees are.

But taking a wide-angle view, the rise of a serious third party challenge typically signifies the collapse of the incumbent governing coalition. Certainly Perot in 1992, Wallace in 1968, and Roosevelt in 1912, Van Buren in 1848 fit that pattern, and Strom Thurmond in 1948 probably does as well. But that’s not to say that the third party insurgent always helps the challenger party. The Humphrey-Nixon race in ’68 ended up extremely close and it seems reasonable to assume that the bulk of the Wallace vote would have gone to Nixon (as it did in 1972) had he not been in the race. And it can get even more complicated, as Perot’s presence in the 1992 race probably helped Bill Clinton win the election but there’s good reason to think he could have won even without Perot, and in a one-on-one fight maybe could have secured a majority and thus had a stronger hand dealing with congress in 1993.

Now, of course, the weird thing about Bloombergism is that there’s no sign that he’s filling an open ideological niche. Pat Buchanan, by contrast, drew half a percentage point in 2000 at a time when his campaign didn’t really have much of a rationale. By 2008, immigration is going to be a higher-salience issue, economic populism will have a larger constituency, and nationalist anti-war sentiment will have gone unrepresented in mainstream politics throughout years of failed war-fighting. You could imagine either Buchanan or, perhaps more likely Ron Paul, having a real impact. Otherwise, there’s really nothing doing.

Blame the Constitution

As Scott Lemieux says there is a real obstacle to “getting things done” legislatively in the United States, and it’s not partisanship, it’s the institutions of American government which are specifically designed to operate in a small-c conservative manner. Many people think this is a good thing. My view is that it’s a bad thing. But either way, it’s a fundamental aspect of our politics — we operate in a system with many more veto points than exist in many other countries. If you worry that not enough “gets done” that’s where you need to point the blame.

More F.U.s

Jackson Diehl starts his latest column on a promising note: “For five years Washington-based officials and pundits have repeatedly made the mistake of predicting that the next six or 12 months in Iraq would be decisive.” He then, however, just goes on to engage in the same fallacy: “Yet, for once, saying that the next six to 12 months will win or lose the war just might be right.” And it becomes even less promising from there:

The number of American soldiers in Iraq started coming down last month. By July it will have dropped from the peak of 180,000 it reached briefly in November to 130,000, or 15 brigades, the force level before the surge. The Pentagon has until March to judge how Iraqis react to the initial withdrawals — whether violence in volatile places such as Anbar province remains low or escalates again as U.S. troops depart. Then another decision will be made, on whether to reduce the force by five more brigades, to a total of about 100,000 troops, by the end of 2008.

This decision ought to be based entirely on whether Iraq’s progress can continue with an American force 40 percent smaller than it was at the surge’s peak. But external politics is already intruding: Gen. George Casey, the architect of the failed U.S. military strategy in Iraq pre-Petraeus, is already pushing for the full reduction, on the grounds that the Army needs to reduce its exposure in Iraq. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, whose strategic preoccupation has been arriving at a force level in Iraq that could win bipartisan acceptance in Washington, has said publicly that he’d like to hit the 100,000 target.

The idea that America’s policy toward Iraq “ought to be based entirely” on conditions in Iraq, and that anything else constitutes the intrusion of “external politics” is really foolish. When considering US policy toward Iraq — or toward Mexico or Afghanistan or Kenya or Pakistan or Russia or wherever else — we have to try to do the right thing all things considered. To observe that were we willing to commit an unlimited quantity of resources to the country for an unlimited period of time we might be able to improve conditions in Iraq is silly. Suppose we dedicated infinite resources to security and economic development in nearby Haiti? Or Jamaica — slightly further away, but conveniently inhabited by English-speakers? Our willingness to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in Jamaica forever and ever ought to be based entirely on the crime and unemployment rate of Kingston, but unfortunately external politics is already starting to intrude.

But, of course, nobody would write something like that. But if General Casey thinks we need to expeditiously reduce our force levels in Iraq to 100,000 in order to rescue the Army from dangerous “overexposure” to Iraq, isn’t that worth taking seriously on the merits? Diehl doesn’t seem to want to grapple with it, but Casey and the joint chiefs seem to me to believe that because it’s true. Now Diehl also says that if we reduce to that level, the security gains of the “surge” are likely to go away. I tend to agree with that as well. Which is what makes the surge so foolish — why embark on an unsustainable course of action? Certainly it’s what makes talk of the surge’s success so foolish. The goal, after all, was to put Iraq on a sustainable path. But the surge force levels aren’t sustainable. And the security gains are unlikely to be sustainable if we move our force levels to a sustainable level.

That’s not “external politics” meddling with a solid plan, it’s reality crashing down.

DoD photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Sean Mulligan, U.S. Navy

Wire and Reality

The new Atlantic has a really great article on The Wire by Mark Bowden that we’re releasing early — and for free — online in light of the pending debut of season five. Regular readers of this blog will probably be familiar with the stuff covered in the beginning of Bowden’s article — best show ever, etc. — but he goes quite a bit deeper than other profiles, getting into the ways in which the show, despite its “realism” departs quite a bit from reality but doesn’t suffer as drama as well as offering a real under-the-hood look at some of the Baltimore media issues that will be the subject of season five.

Bowden’s got a background in the Charm City newspaper world just like Simon and it gives him a perspective you don’t get elsewhere. Check it out.

Belief

I, for one, believe Daniel Pipes when he says he’s not a child molester. It does seem to me that widespread belief that he’s a child molester might hamper his career, but he says he’s no child molester so I’ll believe him when he says he doesn’t molest children.

Quitting Time

Last year, after two failed attempts earlier in life, I decided to quit smoking as my New Year’s resolution. I was a pretty heavy smoker, picked it up when I was sixteen, did about a pack a day through college, and then stepped it up to more like a pack and a half a day plus some more on top of that on heavy partying nights after I graduated. Thus far, I’ve been totally on the wagon, smoke free since around 4AM on 1 January 2007.

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Kristol’s In

I’ve heard some complaints about it, but I actually think The New York Times‘s coverage of The New York Times‘s crazy decision to add Bill Kristol to their stable of op-ed columnists is pretty good:

Mr. Kristol, 55, has been a fierce critic of The Times. In 2006, he said that the government should consider prosecuting The Times for disclosing a secret government program to track international banking transactions.

In a 2003 column on the turmoil within The Times that led to the downfall of the top two editors, he wrote that it was not “a first-rate newspaper of record,” adding, “The Times is irredeemable.”

I wonder what I need to say in order to get a column: Maybe the Times‘s editors should be detained without trial in Gitmo and tortured until they confess to deliberately running a second-rate newspaper in order to undermine American resolve. Does that work?

Tariq Ali on the Future

I’d never found Tariq Ali’s thoughts on international relations particularly enlightening, though he’s always had a great prose style. On the ins-and-outs of Pakistani politics, however, he’s been consistent must-reading throughout the crisis. The latest:

Some of us had hoped that, with her death, the People’s Party might start a new chapter. After all, one of its main leaders, Aitzaz Ahsan, president of the Bar Association, played a heroic role in the popular movement against the dismissal of the chief justice. Mr Ahsan was arrested during the emergency and kept in solitary confinement. He is still under house arrest in Lahore. Had Benazir been capable of thinking beyond family and faction she should have appointed him chairperson pending elections within the party. No such luck.

The result almost certainly will be a split in the party sooner rather than later. Mr Zardari was loathed by many activists and held responsible for his wife’s downfall. Once emotions have subsided, the horror of the succession will hit the many traditional PPP followers except for its most reactionary segment: bandwagon careerists desperate to make a fortune.

It’s hard to tell if that prediction of a split should be read as a genuine prediction or else just an expression of what he hopes will happen, since it’s clear that Ali doesn’t care for Nawaz Sharif and views himself as a PPP supporter of sorts.

The Huckabee Void

On a Christmas Eve CNBC broadcast that I’m sure nobody watched, John Fund and I wound up agreeing that there was something remarkably vacuous to Mike Huckabee’s economic populism. It doesn’t even rise to the level of a lie the way George W. Bush’s “different kind of Republican” schtick did in 2000 — there’s just nothing there. Earlier on the same show, John Harwood had interviewed Huckabee, went over Huckabee’s dislike for outlandish CEO pay and the outsourcing of jobs, then asked Huckabee what he planned to do about it as president. Well, the answer turned out to be nothing.

At any rate, via Ambinder, the governor explains that he doesn’t need policy proposals to be a worthwhile presidential candidate: “I can hire people, once I raise the money, who can come up with all kinds of proposals. That’s fine. That’s good. But the real question is: Am I going to be able to be a leader? You know there is a difference between a leader and a manager.” But no. Leadership is, yes, an important part of the job of being president. But there’s no such thing as generic “leadership” people need to know what sort of thing you want to do. That doesn’t mean detailed legislative language on every aspect of your agenda, but you need to say something about what your top priorities are and what general direction you want to move in.

If You’ve Got Nothing Nice to Say

I just hope The New York Times Book Review is as kind to my book when the time comes as they were to Jonah Goldberg (of course, realistically we’re all just desperately hoping to be reviewed at all): “Yet the title of his book aside, what distinguishes Goldberg from the Sean Hannitys and Michael Savages is a witty intelligence that deals in ideas as well as insults — no mean feat in the nasty world of the culture wars.” Yes, that’s right, Liberal Fascism is a step away from the nastiness of the culture wars. The reviewer, David Oshinsky, does concede that Goldberg’s main thesis is false but that didn’t seem to bother him.

I actually would be somewhat interested to hear what Sherri Berman, author of The Primacy of Politics thinks about the Goldberg Thesis, since her book does posit common roots of fascism and social democracy (which she prefers to and distinguishes from progressive liberalism) in the revisionist Marxist movement of the pre-WWI era.

Your Year in Iraq Predictions

A year from now there will still be over 100,000 American soldiers in Iraq.

What’s It All About?

As usual with calls for less partisanship and more moderation, the striking thing about this new initiative is its vacuousness. There are two kinds of thing a centrist movement might reasonably stand for. One would be a middle-ground approach to issues — “Democrats think federal revenues should be at X percent of GDP, Republicans think it should be at Y percent, but we say it should be at (X+Y)/2 percent of GDP.” Another would be to hold a mish-mash of left-wing positions on some issues, and right-wing positions on others “we should reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050 through a 100 percent auction of tradable emissions permits and we should privatize Social Security.” One might, of course, also have a combination of the two sorts of things.

So what do we hear?

Well, according to Stu Loesser, press secretary for Michael Bloomberg, “As mayor, he has seen far too often how hyperpartisanship in Washington has gotten in the way of making progress on a host of issues.” Which issues? And what would constitute progress on them? Loesser doesn’t say. Similarly, David Boren says that “Our hope is that the candidates will respond with their own specific ideas about how to pull the country together, not just aim at getting out their own polarized base.” This, though, is just talk about political strategies. And if both countries put forward policies designed to appeal to the median voter, the result will be . . . polarization and election outcomes that hinge on the mobilization of one’s base. Missing from Boren’s account is any hint of what kinds of positions he thinks are being squeezed out in the current dynamic.

And there’s the rub. There are only two political parties. Under the circumstances, polarization is all but inevitable. Third parties, meanwhile, never succeed in the United States but do often wind up having an impact on the course of events. But to have an impact, you have to have some kind of point of view that you’re advancing. Big-time third party candidacies — Strom Thurmond 1948, George Wallace 1968, Ross Perot 1992 — aren’t based on generic appeals to bringing the country together, they’re based on policy agendas that neither major party reflects. You could imagine a third party campaign based on Ron Paul’s brand of libertarian nationalism, but all Boren, Bloomberg, et. al. have are platitudes.

The Bhutto Party

Pakistan People’s Party’s new chairman will be a nineteen year-old whose main qualification is that he’s Benazir Bhutto’s son. I was going to say something snarky about how that reflects on the PPP’s credentials as tribunes of liberalism and reform, but of course the odds of us going Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton in the White House look pretty good so there’s really no call for jokes. The Times, meanwhile, looks further afield and refers to “an abiding dynastic streak in South Asian politics — three generations of the Nehru-Gandhi family have dominated politics in India, and hereditary politics pervade Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as well.”

Suing HRC

It seems the RIAA believes it’s illegal to rip CDs onto your computer:

The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.

Radley Balko points out that Hillary Clinton has said that she has Beatles songs on her iPod, songs that she couldn’t have purchased through the iTunes store, and wonders if the RIAA will show the courage of its convictions and sue her.