Why I'm a social liberal

The conservative (or, at least, Republican, along with too many Democrats) view of social issues is that government knows better than the individual what is best for the growth and development of the individual. This is why I'm a social liberal.

So what separates a law preventing self-insurance for health care, which I support, and a law preventing gay marriage or marijuana use, which I would oppose? In the case of the former, there is a demonstrated direct harm to others which results from the banned behavior (unreimbursed costs of care), while in the latter, there is no such evidence.

Republican Party needs to be punished

There is this ridiculous false equivalence that Obama and the GOP are equally to blame for the current environment in Washington. Critics on both sides lament the ability of Washington to get anything done. The only things that did manage to pass were feats of partisan dominance, with 0 House Republicans and 3 Senate Republicans voting for the stimulus bill, and 0 Republicans in all of Congress voting for Obamacare.

This is not a situation where voters should blame both sides. It would be one thing if such overwhelming, automatic Republican intransigence were in response to an extremist, socialist agenda. If Obama were pushing for single-payer health care, a 70% top income tax rate, and released all the prisoners at Gitmo. But the huge Republican freakout is about a President who has passed an individual mandate that was supported by such flaming liberals as Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Milton Friedman, and the Heritage Foundation. He has sought to raise taxes all the way up to where they were during the 90's boom, which was a great decade to be rich. He has continued many elements of Bush's foreign policy, and has in fact taken a more aggressive stance on drone attacks and targeted killings. He supports cap-and-trade, which used to be a Republican idea. Obama is not in any sense an extremist President worthy of such uniform opposition.

While President Bush garnered a significant degree of hatred from the left, including from yours truly, the major achievements of Bush's administration encountered nothing near unanimous opposition. His 2001 tax cut was supported by 11 Senate Democrats (by my quick count) and 28 House Democrats. The resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq got 82 Democratic votes in the House and 29 in the Senate

What should be the consequences for a party plunging our political system into the abyss in which it currently finds itself? The only way to do it is to inflict losses at the ballot box. The system just won't work if major legislation can only pass when one side or the other has 60 votes in the Senate. So hopefully enough voters will say enough is enough to keep either party from acting like this ever again.

Why I'm an economic liberal

The traditional conservative view of a free job market is that an employer and and employee freely come together to negotiate an agreement regarding work and wages. If one side or the other feels the division of the products of the arrangement is unfair, they are free to leave and pursue arrangements with someone else. Sounds great, right?

But consider the effects of the "freedom" of the transaction if one side would starve to death without entering into an agreement with someone (i.e., if you can't find a job that would pay subsistence wages). And there are millions of other people in your situation. And there aren't enough jobs for everyone. And employers know it.

Employers would be able to demand long hours, low pay, no benefits and whatever else they wanted to extract from the worker, because if the worker refuses, the worker's life is in peril and the employer finds someone willing to work for peanuts. They know they will always be able to find a worker willing to work for less than they're worth, because the worker has no bargaining strength.

Ours, thankfully, is not by and large a society set up like this. Through a combination of government programs and private charity, we don't require that people have a job for their very survival. Workers have the option of grants and student loans to go back to school to gain marketable skills. They have access to basic needs through food stamps, federal housing programs and shelters. It would be great if we could add a more robust guarantee of access to health care, which is necessary for a long, healthy life, but the current set-up is better than it has been in the past.

There is this movement amongst some conservatives towards an Ayn Rand laissez-faire capitalism. The thinking goes that by removing these basic protections and "allowing the free maket to work", everyone will be made richer. But without a guarantee of basic economic security for every citizen, it allows millions to be left behind and forces them into uneven agreements. If the goal is a just society with truly free involvement in the economic sphere, there can't be a system where the very survival of one side of the negotiation is at risk. So until and unless we have a robust system of private charity which can guarantee basic security for everyone, we have to come together through the government to provide that guarantee.

Ryan won't be the VP nominee

Romney has dedicated his campaign to being a blank, generic candidate who won't take a firm stand on anything. Paul Ryan is the personification of a controversial, explicit policy. Therefore, Romney will not choose him as his running mate, because it he did, he couldn't "etch a sketch" his way out of supporting/defending it.

The folly of long-term projections

Ezra Klein makes a great point about long-term budget projections in a column today titled "Don't Worry About Deficit That Will Heal Itself":

[T]here’s something ridiculous about extrapolating current trends all the way
out to 2080. By that point, we’ll probably either be robots, the servants of
robots or a bit of both. Either way, the health-care system will probably
undergo dramatic change.

Look what happens when you turn back the clock 70 years from today. That
puts you in 1942, the year John Bumstead and Orvan Hess first saved a patient’s
life using penicillin. There were no pacemakers, oral contraceptives or
chemotherapy. Water wasn’t fluoridated, and health insurance was a niche
product. Imagine trying to predict the trajectory of today’s health-care system
from that vantage point. How incredibly, hilariously wrong would we have
been?

In part for that reason, we don’t balance the budget for 70 years at a
time. Indeed, we usually don’t even balance it for 10 years at a time. Instead,
we muddle through, striking deals that are smaller than wonks like, but
sufficient to keep us out of the woods. That’s what we did in the 1990s, which
featured deficit-reduction bills in 1991, 1993, 1995 and 1997. We’ll probably
follow a similar path in the decade to come.

My day with Paul Ryan's face

Over the last several days, I did so much googling about Paul Ryan's budget using so many different iterations of keywords that an ad for his Super PAC is popping up on just about every page I vist.

Damn you, Google!

Ryan's ridiculous budget, Part 2

I've been frustrated this evening trying to find any specifics about the tax changes proposed by Paul Ryan and passed by the Republican House. I can't find anything apart from a vague outline of changing to a system of only two tax rates of 10% and 25% and making up the difference with elimination of unspecified tax deductions and "loopholes". Ryan appears to be proposing massive changes to our entire economy without having any idea how his own proposal would work. When asked if his tax policy would result in distributional changes (that is, would the rich and poor pay more, less or the same in taxes compared to what they pay now) last month of Fox News, Ryan refused to answer, saying "I don't know" and "It's impossible to answer that question".

While his budget claims hundreds of billions of dollars a year in eliminated tax credits and deductions, he makes no effort to state where exactly these vast sums will come from. He is essentially offering a "free lunch" of lower tax rates without explaining how the lower rates will be paid for. Such offsets would likely require changes to popular deductions like the mortgage interest deduction, which benefits just about all homeowners. By following the Romney tactic of hiding the true implications of your policy ideas, he is hoping to get Americans to vote for the benefits without discussing the costs.

Ryan's ridiculous budget, Part 1

Last week, the House of Representatives voted to pass Paul Ryan's budget without any Democratic votes. Mitt Romney "applaud[s] it" and calls it "an excellent piece of work, and very much needed." Over the next few days/weeks, I'll examine various aspects of the budget. Sneak peak; there are some problems with it.

Today, let's look at the effects of the Republicans' budget on the discretionary budget. Ryan batches all discretionary spending together to include both defense and non-defense discretionary spending, along with "mandatory" spending. He takes several pages in his proposal discussing that cuts should not come from the military, leaving non-defense spending on the chopping block.

First off, non-defense discretionary spending includes just about everything that the government does except for Social Security, health care spending (Medicare/Medicaid), servicing the debt, and, of course, defense. It includes food stamps, Pell grants and other education aid, national parks, unemployment insurance, the EPA, housing assistance, and just about everything else you think of when you think of the government.

In the Congressional Budget Office analysis (.pdf, Table 2 on page 13) of the Republican plan, we see the long-term impact of Ryan's proposal relative to current law/policy. Under the Republican plan, total federal spending on defense and non-defense discretionary spending will fall from the current level of 12.5% of GDP to 3.75% by 2050, a 70% cut, or under half the percentage of GDP under current law.

What would a cap of 3.75% mean? Ryan famously stated a few years ago when asked about the implications of his policies, said "I'm a budgeteer; I just bring down the cap". But a 3.75% cap would devastate the millions of Americans who depend on all those programs listed above.

With the 3.75% cap including defense and non-defense spending, it's worth looking at the history of American military spending. Since World War 2, there have been only four years (1998-2001) where just defense spending was below this level all by itself. There is also the matter in the future of the rise of China as a true world superpower, with military spending increasing by 10% or more every year for the last two decades. It is foolish to think, given the history of such things in America, that we wouldn't respond to China's rise by exploding our own defense spending. But with caps in place and a Republican Party unwilling to raise them under any circumstances, vital domestic programs would be cut even further.

The Republican strategy, as previously discussed and as the "budgeteer" Ryan admitted, seems to be to only talk in vague, general terms about the implications of their policies and brush under the rug the actual effects on average Americans. Along with massive cuts to health care spending previously discussed, Republicans hope to "save" trillions of dollars from programs which mostly benefit the poor and middle-class. They would take these "savings" and give huge tax cuts to the wealthy, which we'll investigate tomorrow.

Prisons in a "civilized" nation

What country has the world's highest incarceration rate, as measured by inmates per 100,000 people? Is it a communist country like Cuba or China? Or a chaotic, poor country like Rwanda? Or Putin's Russia?

As Fareed Zakaria points out in an excellent article (only a portion linked, as the whole thing is behind a pay-wall), the United States dominates all other countries when it comes to locking up its own people. The incarceration rate is 25% higher than the rate in any other country in the world, and it's 3 times the rate of any other large/wealthy country (Brazil). Even comparing our present to our past shows our current system is out of control. Our incarceration rate was only a quarter of its current level just in 1980.

It's not like our prisons are a model of rehabilitation, or even safety. A recent study by the federal Department of Justice, as reported in Reason, estimated that over 200,000 inmates are sexually assaulted every year. In 2003, Congress unanimously passed Prison Rape Elimination Act. A bipartisan commission came up with a batch of solutions to the toxic environment in our prisons. These solutions were rejected by Attorney General Eric Holder on the grounds that they would be too expensive to implement.

Even without trying to implement a system where we don't allow our citizens to be raped while in our prisons, we spend a fabulous amount of money on prisons. Zakaria discusses that the rate of increase in prison spending has increased 6 times faster than spending on higher education since 1992. In my lifetime, California has built one college and 21 prisons.

So what's the solution? One easy place to start is to roll back the War on Drugs, which we'll discuss more in the near future. The rate of arrests for possession went up tenfold between 1980 and 1996. There were 1.66 million arrests in 2009 for possession. By not wasting billions locking up stoners for simple possession, we can free up enough money to implement the Prison Rape Elimination Act recommendations and to put some money back into states' coffers.

Romney fumbles Obama's open mic gaffe

Libby and I decided on a house today (in Bath, close to her parents and mine), so no full post today. Here's an article about Romney's utter failure to capitalize on Obama's being caught on tape telling the Russian President he will have more flexibility after the election. It should have been a big problem for Obama, given the sense among conservatives that Obama's only pretending to be non-radical and is only waiting until after the election to turn us into a socialist state, but Romney stepped on the story by calling Russia our greatest geopolitical foe, which is just silly.

It's things like this that give me hope for the election.

Obama does need to be more careful though. Fuckin' pitchers and catchers put their baseball gloves over their mouths every time they have a conference on the mound, so Obama shouldn't discuss these things in public, even if there aren't microphones around.