Got to admit it's getting better

This is the President sitting on the same bus where Rosa Parks kicked off the civil rights movement. In my parents' lifetime, we have gone from a nation where black people had to give up their seats to a nation led by a (half-) black man.

I'm increasingly optimistic about the direction of our world. Of course it's not perfect. There remain a multitude of improvements to be made, but to say that no progress is being made is silly. Gitmo is bad, but we are not locking up whole ethnicities of Americans like we did to George Takei and other Japanese-Americans in the 40's. The Vietnam and Korean Wars would make Iraq and Afghanistan look like minor border conflicts. We retain the power to annihilate ourselves, but the number of nuclear weapons in existence today is a fraction compared to the height of the Cold War, and the main nuclear threat is a terrorist organization getting one or two devices, not two superpowers shooting tens of thousands at each other.

There is a lot of doom and gloom in our political discourse these days. The parties fall over each other to convince voters that we are all doomed if we don't enact their policies immediately. There's this tendency to believe that things were better years ago, whether it's the 90's or the 80's or the 50's or, for Ron Paul, the 1880's. But today, the world is healthier, richer and, as demonstrated by the picture above, more fair and ethical than it has ever been.

Obama comment unnecessarily confrontational

At an event today in Elyria, President Obama said the following while discussing his job training policies:

I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Michelle wasn’t. But somebody gave us a chance, just like these folks up here are looking for a chance.

It's clear even in context that this is a jab at Romney. Obama's best electoral strategy is to emphasize that he has been the "adult in the room" trying to get things done while Republicans blindly opposed him at every turn. It hurts this narrative when attacks on Romney's personal history come from the President.

That's what surrogates are for.

Cut out the middle man

I'd intended a mathematical breakdown of Romney's tax policies, but this article beat me to the punch.

So let's talk more broadly about taxes. You don't have to listen to talk radio for long before you hear someone refer to the rich as "job-creators". And it's true that part of what the rich do is start and run businesses that allow punks like me blog and watch soccer instead of worrying about billing and scheduling and many other aspects of my field I find repulsive. I am all for cutting the hell out of taxes in support of creating jobs.

But why do we choose to subsidize rich people, who may or may not use the subsidy to hire people, instead of subsidizing hiring people? We spend tens of billions of dollars a year on capital gains tax cuts and other advantages for the wealthy on the premise that it will spur job growth. Rather than cutting taxes for every rich person, why not only cut tax for those who actually create jobs by directly tying the cuts to hiring?

So we raise the top tax rate by X%. With the increased revenue, we cut the employer's share of payroll taxes by Y%.

Democrats get their tax increase on the idle rich. Republicans get their tax cuts for job creators.

Secret message Mitt

Mitt Romney continues to play games to send signals to one group of voters or another. He has spent the last five years tacking to the right, but then he has sympathetic columnists "report" that his private views on things like immigration might not be as conservative as he sounds. He proposes huge tax cuts to be paid for by "closing loopholes", but the loopholes he suggests only offset about a fifth of the cost of the cuts (more on this tomorrow). His public vague comments about reform are backed up by slightly less-vague recent "behind closed doors" comments about eliminating/reorganizing entire cabinet departments.

It's perfectly legitimate to advocate for huge changes to the structure of government. But voters deserve to know what those plans are before they vote. And Romney, if he is so sure that his policies are correct, should be willing to discuss his positions openly. But Romney seems to be trying to make everyone happy, through sometimes-contradictory overt and covert messaging.

More on 92.3%

Mitt Romney has used a meaningless statistical quirk that men's unemployment relative to when Obama took office is almost back to zero to say that Obama is anti-woman, since they have still lost jobs. I think it would be useful to go into the math at play a little bit more.

Since Obama took office, statistics show that men have lost 57,000 jobs, while women have lost 683,000 jobs.\

Female jobs lost/total jobs lost = share of jobs lost by women
683,000/(683,000+57,000) = 0.923

So let's assume that next month the job market grows by 110,000 jobs next month, equally split between men and women. So the share of all jobs lost since Obama lost by women would be:

628,000/(628,000 + 2,000) = 0.997

Since the two lines for changes in male and female unemployment will most likely cross Zero at different times, it is inevitable that at one month or another, there will be a time where one line is very close to zero, giving the temporary result of a huge majority of jobs lost by one side or the other.

So why does the men's line hit zero first. Men were more likely to be in industries hit early on in the downturn, like construction and manufacturing. So the market for men hit bottom sooner, with most of their losses coming before Obama's term, and their recovery began sooner.


The above chart shows change es in jobs since the start of the recession, with the employment at the start of Obama's administration as the baseline. Here we see that men had more of job losses earlier and primed for a quicker recovery.

What's particularly dishonest about Romney's attack is that he neither proposes a mechanism by which Obama supposedly waged his war on women, nor does he propose a remedy.

One possible remedy would be increasing hiring in fields in which women are more likely to be employed, such as education. Obama proposed funding to states to hire teachers as part of his jobs bill, but he was opposed by Republicans who now blame him for the state of women's employment.

Muddying the waters

(Source)

Mitt Romney is getting destroyed in polls among female voters. His poor performance makes sense when you consider that, as the above image points out, Republicans across the country have in multiple substantive ways sought to limit the rights of women. Losing women by 19 points is no way to win an election, so Romney has to do something to get women back on his side.

He appears to be trying to increase support by saying it is in fact Obama who is attacking women. To any objective observer, his attempt is futile. But to the conservative voter who generally supports Republicans but are uncomfortable with their policies on women's issues, stories like the meaningless 92.3% statistic discussed yesterday, as well as the freakout over a comment by a liberal pundit, serve to provide psychological cover. If they can in any way convince themselves that Democrats are even on the same spectrum as the GOP when it comes to women's issues, they can pull back some support. This potential benefit comes at essentially zero cost, as most liberals and moderates are already horrified by the legislative actions of Republicans vis-a-vis women, so a few disingenuous attacks on Obama on the matter won't turn anyone else against them.

Great explanation of Romney's 92.3% boondoggle

Romney has been repeatedly saying in recent days that 92.3% of all jobs lost during the Obama administration were lost by women. Romney is attempting to use a statistical anomaly to say that a linberal war on women is being waged. While researching a post on this subject, I came upon this great summary.

In a nutshell, Romney is exploiting the fact that the net number of jobs held by men has returned to the level it was at when Obama took office. When you then compare the change of jobs held by men and by women, most of the decline is in female employment, since men's employment has returned to baseline. Romney makes no attempt in what way Obama has perpetrated this war. He makes no specific proposals of how to increase female employment. He instead is making a pointless ad hominem attack in a desperate attempt to obfuscate which party is attacking women.

Rosen's comment doesn't matter

Gaffes happen. People say stupid things that sound terrible, whether or not they're in their full context. Not all gaffes have the impact of "I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it." The gaffes that stand out are the ones that reinforce preexisting ideas in a campaign.

Hilary Rosen's attack on Ann Romney as having "never worked a day in her life" has been the focus of the political world today. But unlike the Romney campaign's etch-a-sketch gaffe, which crystallized concerns about Romney's sincerity, the comment by Rosen does nothing to dramatize Obama's principles. Unless you want to make the argument that this attitude toward women somehow subconsciously permeates liberal thought in general, or President Obama in particular, it doesn't hold any water and isn't worth all the fuss.

We need public funding of elections

Thanks to the huge influx of cash allowed under Citizens United, spending on all elections, from dog catcher to President, is expected to rise to $9.8 billion, up from about $7 billion in 2008. In exchange for providing the lion's share of this amount, corporate America exerts a huge influence over the policies of government at every level.

Why do we allow corporate America to buy our government so cheaply? $9.8 billion is less than the federal government spends every day ($3.796 trillion/366 days = $10.3 billion/day). Since the $9.8 billion figure includes spending at all levels, not just federal, we determine that it takes less than 14 hours for government to spend this amount ($6.3 trillion/366 days/24 hours = $717 million/hour, 9.8 billion/717 million = 13.7 hours).

So why not institute massive public financing of elections? In exchange for say three days of government spending (just over $50 billion), taxpayers could swamp corporate election spending, leading to the other $6.2 trillion being spent far more efficiently.

In 93% of House races and 94% of Senate races in 2008, the candidate with the most money won. For a congressional candidate without public financing, there is enormous fundraising pressure. The average winner of a House seat in 2008 spent just over $1 million. If the taxpayers gave each candidate $2 million (and had money left over to support independent and minor party candidates through a system using petitions and performance in previous elections, as we've got over 5 times the previous spending levels to play with, if we spend $50 billion where the current system spends $9.8 billion), then candidates won't have to sell their souls to the highest bidder, because even if they raise nothing from corporate America, they'd still be competitive.

For a tiny fraction of our tax dollars, we can keep corporations from controlling how the rest of our taxes are spent. Our leaders need to listen to us, and we have the capability to make sure corporations can't buy their attention.

RIP, Tea Party

Remember when the Tea Party railed against RINOs (Republicans In Name Only)? Or when they began to define what it meant to be a Republican, with several Republican figures beaten by the likes of Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell?

That Tea Party is gone, co-opted by the Establishment of the Grand Old Party as personified by Willard Mitt Romney. After years of arguing that what they need is a strong Reagan conservative to argue their case, they go with a former Massachusetts governor whose history includes support for cap-and-trade, abortion rights and the model on which the dreaded Obamacare is based.

In fact, Romney's vanquishing of Santorum exposes the lie that the Tea Party was ever anything other than the traditional base of the Republican Party. Republicans in power have portrayed the Tea Party as a bold new voice in American politics, a force that cannot be resisted. "I'd like to make Compromise X, Mr. President, but the Tea Partiers in my caucus..."

The best evidence that the Tea Party was the traditional Republican base in silly hats is that there has been no separate Republican base for the past 3 years. It's not like there were three groups: Establishment Republicans, the Tea Party and the Republican base. The Tea Party was the base. Romney's victory shows that the Establishment was always the most powerful faction in the party and could have stood up to the party's radical base if it had wanted.

But the party didn't want to do so, because the myth of the Tea Party helped push the entire country to the right. Obama has taken over John McCain's all-of-the-above energy policy and cap-and-trade, has continued elements of Bush's foreign policy and fought for Mitt Romney's health care policy.

Romney's victory breaks the stranglehold the Tea Party held over the GOP. The myth had an influential run.