Saturday, April 30, 2011

Michael Connelly - The Fifth Witness

I have now read all 4 of Connelly's Mickey Haller novels. This is a good one---as good as any of them.

The plot is first rate. The misdirection is well-done. Throughout the book you wonder if Mickey's client is guilty and at the very end you get the answer. The problem with crime fiction is generally the ending. Rarely is the ending satisfying. Things are neatly wrapped up in this one.

There isn't much development of the character of Mickey Haller though there is a surprise at the end regarding his future. The underlying personal current is that he's twice divorced and hoping to reunite with his first wife and mother of his teenage daughter. The other underlying current in the 4 novels is his feelings about what he does for a living---defending society's undesireables who are usually guilty as charged.

All in all, this is good stuff if you like crime fiction and legal drama.

Friday, April 29, 2011

The Causes of the Civil War 2.0

From the NY Times
April 28, 2011, 10:07 pm
The Causes of the Civil War, 2.0
By EDWARD L. AYERS



A new poll from the Pew Research Center reports that nearly half of Americans identify states’ rights as the primary cause of the Civil War. This is a remarkable finding, because virtually all American textbooks and prominent historians emphasize slavery, as they have for decades. Even more striking, the poll shows young people put more stock in the states’ rights explanation than older people. The 38 percent of Americans who believe slavery was mainly to blame find themselves losing ground.

Of course, there’s no denying that states’ rights played an important role as the language of secession. But how might historians convey a more precise, comparative sense of the role slavery played in the states’ decision to secede? New computer-assisted techniques allow historians to draw clearer conclusions from immense amounts of data, including newspapers, public records and legislative proceedings. And few states left behind a better, more information-rich record of their secession debates than Virginia.

Virginia, a visitor from South Carolina during the secession crisis noted with exasperation, would “not take sides until she is absolutely forced.” In retrospect, it may seem surprising that Virginia took months to decide what to do. The state, after all, had more enslaved people than any other, became famous as the capital of the Confederacy, suffered more battles than anywhere else, and held to the memory of the Lost Cause with a special devotion, long after the war had ended.

But in 1861 it was by no means clear what Virginia might do. After South Carolina seceded in December 1860, quickly followed by six other states in the Lower South, Virginia’s General Assembly responded by calling for a special election in February 1861. Each county in the state would send delegates to a convention to debate the matter thoroughly and then recommend a course of action for the Commonwealth. The great majority of the 152 delegates arrived in Richmond that winter as Unionists, expecting to find a way to save the nation, the state and slavery. Virginia’s convention debated until April — so long, in fact, that secessionists built bonfires of protest in the streets of the city.

The weeks of debate in Richmond were transcribed by local reporters and then gathered and edited in 1965, totaling nearly 3,000 pages. Historians have long mined this record for material to support a wide range of arguments, but until recently it has been impossible to assess the debates as a whole — to measure, for example, exactly how often and in what contexts delegates invoked various words and phrases.

New computer-assisted tools and techniques can find and evaluate patterns of language and emphasis, otherwise hard to see, among those debates. Researchers at the University of Richmond have developed a computerized text that allows us to explore those hundreds of speeches over time and space, to find connections buried beneath parliamentary procedure and exasperating digressions. Those tools, available to the public online, also make it possible for people to explore the Virginia debates themselves, to address this enduring question with their own curiosity and ingenuity.

Some of the patterns in the speeches quickly undermine familiar arguments for Virginia’s secession. Tariffs, which generations of would-be realists have seen as the hidden engine of secession, barely register, and a heated debate over taxation proves, on closer examination, to be a debate over whether the distribution of income from taxes on enslaved people should be shared more broadly across the state. Hotheads eager to fight the Yankees did not play a leading role in the months of debates; despite the occasional outburst, when delegates mentioned war they most often expressed dread and foreboding for Virginia. Honor turns out to be a flexible concept, invoked with equal passion by both the Unionist and secessionist sides. Virtually everyone in the convention agreed that states had the right to secede, yet Unionists in Virginia won one crucial vote after another.

The language of slavery is everywhere in the debates. It appears as an economic engine, a means of civilizing Africans, an essential security against black uprisings and as a right guaranteed in the United States Constitution. Secessionists and Unionists, who disagreed on so much, agreed on the necessity of slavery, a defining feature of Virginia for over 200 years.

The language of slavery, in fact, became ever more visible as the crisis mounted to the crescendo of secession in mid-April. Slavery in Virginia, delegates warned, would immediately decay if Virginia were cut off from fellow states that served as the market for their slaves and as their political allies against the Republicans. A Virginia trapped, alone, in the United States would find itself defenseless against runaways, abolitionists and slave rebellions.

But the omnipresence of the language of slavery does not settle the 150-year debate over the relative importance of slavery and states’ rights, for the language of rights flourished as well. The debate over the protection of slavery came couched in the language of governance, in words like “state,” “people,” “union,” “right,” “constitution,” “power,” “federal” and “amendment.” Variants of the word “right,” along with variants of “slave,” appear once for every two pages in the convention minutes. When the Virginians talked of Union they talked of a political entity built on the security and sanction of slavery in all its dimensions, across the continent and in perpetuity.

Contrast this with white Republicans in the North, for whom the real issue was the threat slaveholders presented to the nation. For too long, Republicans argued, slaveholders had overridden popular majorities at home and in the United States as a whole, dragged the country into war, and corrupted the Supreme Court, the presidency and the Senate. The Republicans pointed out that only a quarter of white Southerners owned even a single slave and that the rest of Southern whites suffered from the dominion of slaveholders.

But the Republicans miscalculated, underestimating the unanimity of white Southerners, whatever their other divisions, over slavery. Entire states, not merely individuals, possessed and were possessed by slavery. Secessionists and Unionists in Virginia sought to protect the single greatest unifying interest in the state — enslaved labor — with the single language they possessed for doing so, a language of political right. The South sought to protect slavery’s interests in the only way available to them, through shifting their allegiance to a new federal system, the Confederate nation.

In short, the records of the Virginia secession debate demonstrate how the vocabularies of slavery and rights, entangled and intertwined from the very beginning of the United States, became one and the same in the secession crisis. Virginians saw themselves as victims, forced into action. Walter Leake, a delegate from Goochland County, lamented that “Northern fanaticism” had brazenly claimed “the power of the Federal Government for the purpose of advancing their selfish interests, and not for the purpose of saving the Constitution or advancing the rights and interests of all.”

The “disease which has called together this convention,” Leake lamented, was the North’s fixation on slavery. That fixation was not a mere “derangement; it is chronic, it is deep-seated,” and it must come to an end. “It is necessary for the Northern people to correct their sentiments upon the subject of slavery, it is necessary that they should abstain from intermeddling with the institution before any harmony or quiet can be restored.” No one could doubt who, or what, was to blame for the crisis of the Union.

Lincoln’s call for non-seceding states to contribute militia to put down the rebellion in South Carolina after the firing on Fort Sumter forced a choice. Virginia, willing to stand aside while the Union was dismantled, would not raise its hand against the “subjugation” of a “sister” slave state. If the federal government could coerce South Carolina it could coerce Virginia. The call for troops drove a choice between the North and the South and the secessionists seized that moment to push Virginia into disunion.

Perhaps, given new tools and perspectives, Americans can change the focus of our arguments about the “primary cause” of the Civil War. If the North fought to sustain the justice, power and authority of the federal government, the corollary, many assume, must be that the South fought for the opposite, for the power of the states.

But the equation did not balance in that way: the North did not fight at first to end slavery, but the South did fight to protect slavery. It is vital that we use the tools newly available to us to grasp this truth in its immediacy and complexity, before it fades even further from view.

Trumping Trump

Editorial from The New Republic


Liberals: Don’t Even Consider Gloating About Donald Trump Share the Wealth Some Questions About Obama’s Speech April 29, 2011 Now that Donald Trump appears on the verge of launching a presidential campaign, it is worth reflecting on the meaning of this low moment in American political history. Trump is a clown and a buffoon, and the odds of him winning even one Republican caucus or primary appear slim. But there is no denying that Trump has managed to tap into something genuinely worrisome in American politics. Democrats may be tempted to take pleasure in the fact that Trump will likely push the GOP presidential field to the right, and thereby help Obama in 2012. But this would be sheer myopia, and any delight over Trump’s arrival on the political scene is entirely misplaced. The Trump ascendancy calls not for glee, but for serious concern about the state of our country.

It’s true that the media erred in awarding Trump such a large spotlight—did all the cable news networks really have to cover his press conference on Wednesday?—but, at this point, the Trump phenomenon does not seem to be a mere media creation. His popularity (he currently leads in several polls) can no longer be denied. So what is Trump’s appeal? Why do his message and vulgar personality resonate with such a significant percentage of Americans? Trump’s embrace of birtherism has been the most widely discussed aspect of his rise. But this only scratches the surface of the Trump phenomenon.



What Trump actually stands for is an exaggerated sense of victimhood. This is the theme that unites his personal style with the political views he has thus far expressed. Are you tired of being pushed around? Are you tired of our country being pushed around? Trump’s political acuity lies in his ability to take these grievances and turn them into politics. His foreign policy views in essence consist of a pledge to bully other nations. China is “decimating our country.” OPEC is imperiling the economy. And ungrateful Libyans and Iraqis are trying to build a society from oil that is rightfully ours. (“We won the war. We take over the oil fields. We use the oil.”) When Bill O’Reilly, in an interview with Trump, seemed taken aback by the idea that we could simply force OPEC or China to do our bidding, Trump appeared surprised that anyone could view international relations as anything more than a contest of machismo. “The messenger is the key,” Trump told O’Reilly. “If you have the right messenger and they know how to deliver the message … you’re going to scare them, absolutely.”



Trump’s thinly veiled accusation that President Obama benefited from affirmative action when he applied to college derives from the same theme. This time the victims aren’t Americans as a whole, they are white Americans; but the message—of anger, resentment, and victimhood—is identical.



America is currently engaged in three wars. The country faces major economic challenges. Global warming is continuing apace. There is no chance any of these issues can be solved by yelling at foreign countries, or stirring up anger at Iraqis or Libyans or minority applicants to elite colleges. Donald Trump has appointed himself spokesman for some of the nastiest impulses in American politics, and he seems to have a following. The sooner the Republican mainstream rejects him, the better. And we liberals should be cheering them along as they do.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

The Republican Crackup

The Republican Crackup
By Joe Klein Tuesday, April 26, 2011 Ezra Klein–this is boring, but it’s almost always the case–has yet another smart piece today in which he posits Barack Obama as a moderate Republican from the early 1990s. I don’t know about the label, but the substance is right on target: Obama favored an individual mandate universal health care plan, which–as I’ve insisted here before–was originally a Republican idea (the first version I saw in the early 1990s was Stuart Butler’s Heritage Foundation plan, if you can believe it). Obama favored a cap-and-trade plan to limit carbon emissions; the first Bush Administration passed a (very successful) cap-and-trade plan for acid rain emissions. Obama favors a mix of tax increases and program cuts to melt the deficit, so did George H.W. Bush. (And that worked, too, in large part because Bill Clinton kept Bush’s discretionary spending freeze and added higher rates for the wealthy.) I could also add in Bush the Elder’s successful non-crusading foreign policy, which has been emulated by Obama (with a few exceptions, like Libya, but then Bush had his exceptions, too: Panama).

Given the success of all these programs, my thoughts turn not to Obama–but to the Republicans. Why aren’t they moderate Republicans anymore?

Seriously, the early 1990s were a fecund time for policy thinking–especially for programs, like those above, that seemed to combine liberal ends with conservative means. There were severe blind spots, to be sure: both Bush the Elder and Clinton were in the thrall of Wall Street greedsters; Clinton, especially, worked overtime to prove his bona fides and eligibility for campaign contributions by joining in the parade of financial deregulation. But there did seem to be a mainstream consensus–or, at least, negotiable differences–on many, if not most, important issues.

Now we have this craziness. The Republican party has rejected all of the polices mentioned above, except for financial deregulation. It has gone off the deep end on taxes. It has denied the long-term economic and societal benefits of universal health insurance. It has gone into climate change denial…it is hard for any card-carrying Republican to say: I believe that Darwinian evolution is God’s plan. These sad realities probably led to Haley Barbour’s decision not to run for President and may well lead to the same decision for Indiana’s Mitch Daniels. They have led Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty to make mortal fools of themselves.

A hundred years from now, historians will be having a field day: How did the Republicans go so far astray? Why did it work, from time to time, electorally? Why weren’t the Democrats more effective in stopping them? Why didn’t the society’s major conservative economic stakeholders (outside the uber-reactionary Oil Patch) renounce the sideshow and demand a more reasonable brand of conservatism?

Two words immediately come to mind: Fox News. And two more words: Rush Limbaugh. And two more words: Newt Gingrich. And two more: Frank Luntz. But it seems clear that all eight of these words are part of the same, superficial, demagogic media phenomenon. And it also seems clear to me that there is a lot more to the profound political swing to the right that we’ve witnessed than telecharlatanism. The fear that has accompanied our economic slump has made the fear that right-wing demagogues sell a more attractive product. There is also the accumulating decades of educational incompetence, since–let’s face it–a whole lot of smart female teachers were liberated to pursue their dreams and we were left, as Albert Shanker used to say, with the bottom 20% of college graduates to preside in our classrooms. And another thing: Perhaps this is just rear-view, rose-colored glasses, but after Bill Clinton took his lumps in 1994, he learned how to out-argue and out-think the extremists. His message was complicated, but his persona was clear–he was the McDonald’s-eating, lounge-singer-screwing, good ol’ boy with the 800 SATs, who really did understand how Americans (especially blue-collar American males) think, and really cared about their welfare. It was just flat embedded in his DNA after a childhood of having the cool athlete guys laugh at his sax-playing obese butt.

These are still early days for this President, a cooler cat than Clinton. His policies track with the Bush-Clinton sanity of the 1990s. He has arrested some truly dreadful trends that Bush the Younger launched us upon overseas and at home. He would have to be considered a favorite to be reelected in 2012, especially given the loony-bin nature of the current Republican party. But I do wonder why Obama isn’t more forceful, at times, in defense of sanity. And even more than that, I wonder about my media colleagues: Why are we so often chasing the palpable nonsense that Fox News peddles? Why aren’t we continually pointing out that there was a time–as Ezra implies today–when we had something resembling a consensus on some of the most important issues facing us? Why aren’t we going back to basics–I’m looking at you, CNN–on some fundamental things like evolution and the science behind climate change? (On the other hand, CNN has done a sensational job explaining what is actually in the federal budget.)

Last night, I watched two examples of the media at our best: Lawrence O’Donnell quietly filleting Rush Limbaugh on the subject of Jesus of Nazareth’s economic policies and Anderson Cooper proving the utter non-existent nonsense of Donald Trump’s “investigative” efforts to discover the “truth” about Barack Obama’s birth certificate in Hawaii. Regular readers here know that I’ve avoided all mention of Trumpet from my posts on the grounds of life being too short for me to be played a sucker by that lame fool, but Anderson’s work is probably a necessity for a mainstream outlet.



For most of the 40 years that I’ve been a working reporter, the country chugged along pretty damned well. There were plenty of important issues, but none that threatened the essence of our American miracle. That’s no longer true. We face a future dominated by the celebration of ignorance and sloppy short-term thinking. I think those of us who are trying to actually report the world as it is–flawed and mistaken as we sometimes are–are facing a great challenge right now. We really owe the public a good, smart, rigorous couple of years between now and election day, 2012.

Budget DeficIt FACTS

Budget Showdown Wednesday, Apr 27, 2011 08:01 ET
How The World Works Don't believe the Obama big spender hype
The GOP just can't handle the truth: Tax cuts, war and the financial crisis created our huge deficits
By Andrew Leonard


President Barack ObamaHow many outright errors of fact can you spot in the following paragraph from an op-ed by Mitt Romney published this Monday?


[Barack Obama's] approach has been to engage in one of the biggest peacetime spending binges in American history. With its failed stimulus package, its grandiose new social programs, its fervor for more taxes and government regulations, and its hostility toward business, the administration has made the debt problem worse, hindered economic recovery and needlessly cost American workers countless jobs.


Let's see. We're at war in Afghanistan, so "peacetime" is dubious. Obama has cut taxes -- income taxes, payroll taxes, taxes for small businesses. Private sector economic forecasters say the stimulus increased GDP growth and kept the unemployment rate from rising higher. We could even range into the subjective, and argue that from the left side of the political aisle, Obama has been anything but hostile to business and hasn't done nearly enough to regulate the financial sector. And we could note, just for fun, that Obama's "grandiose" social program is modeled explicitly after the healthcare reform enacted by none other than Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. (And this guy, most political analysts think, poses the biggest threat to Obama's reelection!)

But nothing is more ridiculous than the notion that Obama is a "binge" spender. Paul Krugman rightfully calls this scurrilous accusation a "zombie lie." No matter how many times you kill it, whether by decapitation, a spike through the heart or immolation -- it just keeps coming back. It's enough to make you despair -- particularly when you consider how many more times we're going to hear this nonsense from Romney and the rest of the Republican presidential candidates from now until the last precinct closes on Election Day 2012.

But as long as the undead keep coming, we have no choice but to fight hellspawn with our own holy fire. So let's review the facts.

The current budget deficit is predominantly an outgrowth of the Bush tax cuts, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Medicare Part D and the financial crisis.

Here's the first thing to understand. Before Obama took office, before he was able to spend a single dime as president, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that the 2009 deficit would be $1 trillion dollars. According to an analysis published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in June 2010, about half of that total -- $500 billion -- can be attributed to the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Another $400 billion was a direct result of the "changed economic outlook" -- the collapse of "tax revenues and swelling outlays for unemployment insurance, food stamps and other safety-net programs."

In the summer of 2009, the New York Times's David Leonhardt (recently awarded a Pulitzer prize for his economic coverage) conducted an indispensable analysis of the budget deficit for 2009. (By that point it was projected to hit $1.2 trillion; ultimately it reached $1.4 trillion -- in part because of stimulus spending and in part because the economy continued to get worse.) Leonhardt observed that since 2000, the year that Bill Clinton bequeathed George Bush with an $800 billion surplus, there had been a negative $2 trillion swing in the health of the government's finances. Crunching the numbers from a decade's worth of CBO reports, Leonhardt discovered:


The 2001 and 2007-2009 recessions accounted for 37 percent of the swing -- again, because of decreased tax revenue and automatically higher spending on social welfare.
Legislation signed by George Bush accounted for another 33 percent -- the tax cuts and Medicare Part D.


"Mr. Obama's main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies -- together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama -- account for 20 percent of the swing."

"About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama's agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas."


The CBPP includes a neat little chart in its analysis that brings home the long-term consequences of the decisions made by Bush and Obama. Yes, the stimulus added to the budget deficit in the short term, but over the next 10 years, its contribution to the ongoing deficit -- along with TARP and the Fannie-Freddie rescue -- is minimal. The real drivers of the deficit will continue to be the Bush tax cuts and the wars -- if both continue. The tax cuts alone will account for some $7 trillion of the additional national debt over the next 10 years. And the interest payments on the debt accrued simply to pay for the automatic safety-net response to the Great Recession will also continue making a meaningful impact for years to come, long after a full recovery.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Krugman vs. Leonard

I hope that in essence Leonard is correct; that this President has achieved all that could be achieved progressively, that a more aggressively progressive leader would have achieved less.

by Andrew Leonard

Paul Krugman Tuesday, Apr 26, 2011 15:25 ET
How The World Works Paul Krugman and the disillusioned left
A profile of Obama's toughest critic inspires liberal gloom. But is there an alternative history that makes sense?
By Andrew Leonard

Wikipedia/ProlineserverEven though it recapitulates a narrative that has been explicit and endlessly discussed since the very beginning of the Obama administration -- leftist disillusionment with Obama -- Benjamin Wallace-Wells' New York Magazine profile of Paul Krugman, "What's Left of the Left," has been getting plenty of attention.

Maybe it's the paradoxical tone of Wallace-Well's eloquently articulated elegy for liberalism -- Krugman's got a lot going for him, after all -- Nobel Prize, prominent public intellectual bully pulpit, hugely trafficked blog -- but somehow Wallace-Wells uses the profile to tell a story of defeat: of Obama's failure to deliver true progressive change, and Krugman's failure to get Washington to listen to his liberal "purism."

For close followers of the political and economic scene, Krugman's Obama critique is all too familiar: the stimulus should have been bigger, healthcare reform should have included a public option, the banks should have been nationalized, et cetera. Krugman staked out his position before Inauguration Day -- Obama is insufficiently aggressive and ambitious -- and he has stuck to it ever since. But for those on the left who are feeling a sense of outright betrayal, Krugman delivers a bit of a surprise:


Krugman has been suspicious of Obama since the beginning of the campaign, and his early doubts have remained. "It's not so much -- it's not a values difference. I think Obama was and is committed to the welfare state." What has always troubled him, Krugman says, is Obama's conviction "that we can find the center and work with these people." This seems to Krugman a deeply naive view of politics, though one that is pervasive in Washington. "There are really very, very few things, very few values issues on which both sides of our political divide agree," he says. "You may in the end get an agreement that involves both parties but is not bipartisan in any positive sense of the word."

The quote put me in mind of a telling moment during the conclusion of Obama's speech on the deficit two weeks ago, when the president alluded to the partisan warfare that had plagued his term.


Of course, there are those who simply say there's no way we can come together at all and agree on a solution to this challenge. They'll say the politics of this city are just too broken; the choices are just too hard; the parties are just too far apart.


And then with a wry smile and downcast eyes, Obama said "And after a few years on this job, I have some sympathy for this view."

It was a laugh line, but it was also an honest line -- and just happened to be in a speech that contained the boldest articulation of Democratic values that Obama has made during his term so far. The president could have been speaking directly to Krugman. He was, in part, acknowledging Krugman's point.

But who is really being naive here? Krugman's position is that Obama starts too far to the right and leaves himself little negotiation room -- that he reduces the politics of the possible. But you have to wonder whether Obama would have gotten any significant legislation accomplished if he had come out of the gate pushing for a much bigger stimulus, single-payer healthcare, and the nationalization of Citigroup.

Which scenario is more likely -- the current Republican party buckling to Obama's progressive vigor, or centrist Democrat senators fleeing for the hills, denying the White House 60 votes on any of its agenda items? I know where I'd lay my money down.

This is not to say that Obama couldn't have demonstrated more leadership. It's a fair criticism to argue that he too often allows his opponents to seize the initiative, and he hasn't been forceful enough in articulating his own vision. That's disappointing, but it's not betrayal -- it's not evidence that Obama is some kind of conservative mole, destroying what remains of liberal America from within. And it should not be confused with the notion that had he been more explicitly radical he would have achieved more -- that's simply not guaranteed at all.

The two Democratic presidents who built the vast majority of the liberal welfare state we know today, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, operated under dramatically different political dynamics than does Obama. Their majorities were far bigger, the partisan divide wasn't set in concrete, and -- especially important -- the Senate was not a place that required a super-majority for every procedural step.

It's also worth noting that Lyndon Johnson's civil rights accomplishments were in large part responsible for the partisan reorganization of the United States that plagues us today -- the demise of the liberal northern Republican and the migration of southern Democratic conservatives to the GOP. Obama's tragedy may be that he is by nature a conciliator and a compromiser in an era that brooks no accommodation. But true disillusionment would require confidence that a different leader could have achieved much more. I think the opposite is more likely true -- a different leader could have dug us into an even deeper hole.

Buffoons

It is amazing how many buffoons there are in politics these days. Just when we thought Palin took the all-time prize, along came Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour and now Donald Trump. (We've been afflicted with other clowns but I'll limit myself to 3 at the moment).

Governor Barbour just announced he will not run for the Republican nomination for President. Too bad. Barbour is a lot of fun and essentially harmless because he never had a chance anyway. He would have been good for harmless laughs, but now he's gone.

Palin is still out there but you don't hear much about her these days. It remains to be seen what happens with her. I don't see her as ever getting the Republican nod and if she did I don't see her as ever getting elected, but maybe I'm naive.

The current King Buffoon is Donald Trump. He worries me a bit because Americans might be stupid enough to elect this man. What's most interesting is that here is a man who can say demonstrably stupid things and he gets away with it. President Obama was born in Hawaii. Everybody knows that, but evidently 70% of Republicans DON"T know that. To get publicity Trump has to play the birther drum, and he gets away with it. I read this morning an insinuation that he thinks Obama is pushing up gas prices as if the President controlled the price of gas in this country. Dumb Republicans will probably eat it up.

I despise Donald Trump. I thought Palin retired the trophy as my most despised person, but The Donald has stolen away her crown.

The Trouble with Independents

I suspect that most "independents" are docile lambs who are swayed by the political propaganda of the day. I say take a stand. You're either a Democrat or a Republican. Never the twain shall meet.

The Trouble With Independents
What if these voters are just a clueless horde?
Michael Kazin
April 26

No group in American politics gets more respect than independent voters. Pundits and reporters probe what these allegedly moderate citizens think about this issue and that candidate, major party strategists seek the golden mean of messaging that will attract independents to their camp and/or alienate them from the opposing one. Presidential nominees and aides struggle to come up with phrases and settings that will soothe or excite them. But what if millions of independents are really just a confused and clueless horde, whose interest in politics veers between the episodic and the non-existent?

That is certainly the impression one gets from dipping into the finer details of a mid-April survey of 1,000 likely, registered voters conducted by Democracy Corps, the outfit run by Stan Greenberg and James Carville. Beyond the usual questions about Obama’s job approval and that of House Republicans, this poll performed the valuable service of reading out each party’s talking points about the current budget debate and then asking respondents which ones they found convincing.

The results are mildly hilarious. By a margin of over 20 points, voters agree with these GOP lines: “Both Democrats and Republicans have run up deficits, but now they are out of control under President Obama and threatening our economy”; Paul Ryan’s plan “changes the reckless path of over-spending and borrowing”; and, “Over-regulation and high taxes punish companies for success.” At the same time, by slightly higher percentages, they also agree with the Democrats that Ryan’s budget would “eliminate guaranteed Medicare and Medicaid coverage”; “force seniors to negotiate with private insurance companies, which are free to raise rates and deny coverage”; and “decrease taxes for CEOs and big corporations, giving millionaires another huge tax break.”

Since avowed Republicans and Democrats line up consistently behind whichever arguments come from their side, it is the independents who are responsible for the contradictory results: Almost 50 percent agreed first with the GOP positions, and then, with those of the other party. As the pollsters observed, “[I]ndependents … move in response to the messages and attacks tested in this survey.”

To a sympathetic eye, this result might connote a pleasant openness to contrasting opinions, perhaps a desire to give each group of partisans the benefit of the doubt. But I think it demonstrates a basic thoughtlessness. At a time of economic peril, when one party wants to protect the essential structure of our limited welfare state and the other party seeks to destroy it, most independents, according to this poll, appear to be seduced by the last thing they have heard. Scariest of all, come 2012, they just might be the ones to decide the future course of the republic.



Back in the 1920s, Walter Lippmann and John Dewey engaged in a fertile discussion, part of which took place in the pages of The New Republic, about whether ordinary citizens could be trusted to make sound decisions about which policies to favor and which politicians could be trusted to carry them out. Lippmann thought the public was easily manipulated by clever propagandists and ideologues; a complex industrial society required public-spirited experts to run the show. Dewey acknowledged the need for expertise, but he also called for well-informed progressives to involve the citizenry in learning about and participating in the democratic process. The people, Dewey wrote in The Public and Its Problems (1927), in his earnestly awkward way, should “have the ability to judge of the bearing of the knowledge supplied by others upon common concerns.” To advocate this kind of public pedagogy was, at the time, more daring that it sounds today. In the early twentieth century, only a minority of Americans finished high school, and just a tiny elite went to college.

Nearly a century later, governance has only become more complex and consequential. Yet most American adults have attended at least a year or two of college, and the Internet offers limitless ways to inform oneself about government programs and the politicians who embrace or reject them. Of course, misinformation abounds as well, but probably no more than it did in the 1920s, when four million Americans joined the KKK and many others believed the Klan’s charge that Catholics and Jews formed an “alien bloc” that, if unchecked, would topple the democratic order. So, in theory, Dewey’s vision, in updated form, might be easier to realize in 2011. After all, loyal Democrats and Republicans still compose at least two-thirds of the electorate. Both groups tend to follow politics and engage in partisan debates, and they understand there are marked, even irreconcilable, differences between liberals and conservatives.

But then, there are independents, many of whom, according to the Democracy Corps poll on some of the most pressing matters facing the country, seem to be more myopic than moderate. Either they believe, in their ignorance, that slashing the budget and cutting taxes can be accomplished without touching any entitlement program they favor. Or they care little about politics and so are willing to consent to whatever messages get thrown their way, however contradictory they may be. As former Rep. Richard Gephardt once put it, only half-jokingly, “We have surveys that prove that a good portion of the American public neither consumes nor wishes to consume politics.”

Independents vote in lower numbers than do party loyalists, but, in close elections, they nearly always cast the deciding ballots. As in other recent polls, the one conducted by Democracy Corps shows President Obama in a neck-and-neck race with Mitt Romney; it finds the same result for a hypothetical contest between a generic Republican and a generic Democrat running for Congress. This means that, unless the political dynamics change fundamentally over the next 18 months, independents will be critical again in 2012.

Of course, the dynamics could change, giving one party or the other a landslide victory. But I wouldn’t count on it. Indeed, the Democracy Corps poll reveals that our next holders of state power might end up being chosen by a minority that seems to stands for very little—or, perhaps, for nothing at all.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Democrats & Repubs Live in 2 Different Worlds

by Bob Burnett


The Death of Bipartisanship
Posted: 04/22/11 09:19 AM ET

At the beginning of the 112th Congress, a Bay Area Congresswoman was invited to a Washington gathering of new Representatives, mostly Republicans. When she mentioned that, in previous eras, the two Parties had often worked together, a freshman Republican barked, "We were sent here to shrink the government, not collaborate with you." President Obama seeks bipartisanship, but most Republicans aren't interested in pursuing the common good.

As Congress plods through its business, Democrats and Republicans are miles apart on issue after issue. On jobs and the economy, Democrats want more government intervention, while Republicans believe the Feds should get out of the way of the "free market." On the Deficit, Democrats advocate taxes on the rich and selective cuts to programs; Republicans abhor taxes and demand massive cuts to entitlements. On health care, Democrats want the Affordable Healthcare plan to become a single-payer system; Republicans want "Obamacare" to be repealed. Democrats take global climate change seriously and advocate a drastic change in energy use and production; Republicans deny the problem and argue America should extract oil and gas wherever we can. It's difficult to find any area of agreement or political middle ground.

As the US faces a series of daunting problems, political dialogue grows increasingly adversarial. President Obama seeks compromise, but Republicans seem ideologically intractable, unable or unwilling to change their stance.

There are four possible explanations for the adamantine Republican posture. The first is political. Republican legislators have been indoctrinated to believe that if they do not toe the conservative party line, radical "Tea Party" activists will campaign against them in the next election. As a consequence, many Republican politicians are afraid to compromise less they lose office.

Cultural differences provide a second explanation for Republican political rigidity. Since the 2000 election, the United States has become more polarized and the differences between Blue and Red areas have increased. Even in a Blue state, such as California, gerrymandering has created Congressional districts that are deeply Red. Across the US, public sentiment differs dramatically in Blue and Red districts. Here are on the Left Coast, one seldom hears serious discussion of whether or not Barack Obama was born in the United States and we do not believe that Muslims, in general, hate America.

In Red areas, voters take the "birther" controversy seriously and fear Muslims. Blue and Red districts have widely different information silos. Blues listen to Rachel Maddow and Reds hang on every word Rush Limbaugh utters. As a consequence of these cultural differences there are two radically different perceptions of "reality." Republicans don't appreciate a Democratic policy position because they never hear it discussed seriously; the conventional "wisdom" in Red districts is dramatically different from that in Blue districts. There is a huge communication failure.

Perhaps Republican dogmatism stems from their negative worldview. UC Professor George Lakoff's classic Moral Politics postulates that Democrats see the world in positive terms -- the "nurturant parent" model -- and value collaboration and empathy. In contrast Republicans adhere to the "strict father" worldview, where life is dangerous and citizens must take a defensive stance and organize hierarchically. It could be that Republicans don't compromise because they view it as a sign of weakness; they regard Democrats as wimps and fools who don't understand how perilous the US situation is.

Differing values provides a final explanation. In recent years Democrats and Republicans have developed conflicting perspectives on core American values. On April 13, President Obama gave a succinct summary of historic American values: "we are all connected," "each one of us deserves some basic measure of security," "We believe, in the words of our first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, that through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves," [we value] "fairness...shared responsibility and shared sacrifice," and "this sense of responsibility -- to each other and to our country -- this isn't a partisan felling... It's patriotism."

In contrast, many Republicans no longer believe democracy is based upon empathy; they no longer accept the axiom, "we are all connected." As a consequence, Republicans do not share the Founders' vision of the basic American social compact. In their "patriotism" each of us stands alone.

Moreover, these differences between Democratic and Republican values suggest that political polarization has had significant psychological consequences. In his bestseller, Mindsight UCLA psychiatrist Daniel Siegel notes that happy people are empathic and share characteristics "such as gratitude, compassion, open-mindedness, and curiosity." Dr. Siegel contrasts these folks with unhappy non-empathetic people in states of distress "characterized as either rigidity or chaos... stuck in depression or paralyzed by fear." Dogmatic rigidity is an indicator of poor mental health, a state that leads to poor life decisions and ultimately disintegration.

The values that Barack Obama defends are those both of the Founders of the United States and healthy people in general. In contrast, Republicans' values -- "you're on your own," "the market will provide," "compromise is for wimps" -- are profoundly dysfunctional and signal the death of bipartisanship.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

David Grann - The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (3)

I finish this collection of true stories by David Grann. He writes in the vein of Malcolm Gladwell only his stories are longer and more detailed. The title story is eerie. It concerns the world of people devoted to Arthur Conan Doyle and that most famous fictional detective named Sherlock Holmes. There are people in this world who so into Holmes that they have trouble separating reality from the fictitious Sherlock Holmes. The author brings up an interesting question. Which fictional character seems most "alive?" I agree that the winner is Sherlock Holmes.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Patients, Not Consumers

I agree!

April 20, 2011, 6:31 pm

Patients Are Not Consumers
BY PAUL KRUGMAN

I keep encountering discussions of health economics in which patients are referred to as “consumers”, after which the usual mantra of freedom of choice is invoked on behalf of voucherizing Medicare, or whatever.

We used to know better than this.

Medical care is an area in which crucial decisions — life and death decisions — must be made; yet making those decisions intelligently requires a vast amount of specialized knowledge; and often those decisions must also be made under conditions in which the patient is incapacitated, under severe stress, or needs action immediately, with no time for discussion, let alone comparison shopping.

That’s why we have medical ethics. That’s why doctors have traditionally both been viewed as something special and been expected to behave according to higher standards than the average professional. There’s a reason we have TV series about heroic doctors, while we don’t have TV series about heroic middle managers or heroic economists.

The idea that all this can be reduced to money — that doctors are just people selling services to consumers of health care — is, well, sickening. And the prevalence of this kind of language is a sign that something has gone very wrong not just with this discussion, but with our society’s values.

Correcting Some Misconceptions About The Information Age

See especially Darnton's comments on libraries.

April 17, 2011

5 Myths About the 'Information Age'
from The Chronicle of Higher Education
By Robert Darnton

Confusion about the nature of the so-called information age has led to a state of collective false consciousness. It's no one's fault but everyone's problem, because in trying to get our bearings in cyberspace, we often get things wrong, and the misconceptions spread so rapidly that they go unchallenged. Taken together, they constitute a font of proverbial nonwisdom. Five stand out:

1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain—"Super Thursday," last October 1—800 new works were published. The latest figures for the United States cover only 2009, and they do not distinguish between new books and new editions of old books. But the total number, 288,355, suggests a healthy market, and the growth in 2010 and 2011 is likely to be much greater. Moreover, these figures, furnished by Bowker, do not include the explosion in the output of "nontraditional" books—a further 764,448 titles produced by self-publishing authors and "micro-niche" print-on-demand enterprises. And the book business is booming in developing countries like China and Brazil. However it is measured, the population of books is increasing, not decreasing, and certainly not dying.

2. "We have entered the information age." This announcement is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages. But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time. No one would deny that the modes of communication are changing rapidly, perhaps as rapidly as in Gutenberg's day, but it is misleading to construe that change as unprecedented.

3. "All information is now available online." The absurdity of this claim is obvious to anyone who has ever done research in archives. Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less digitized. Most judicial decisions and legislation, both state and federal, have never appeared on the Web. The vast output of regulations and reports by public bodies remains largely inaccessible to the citizens it affects. Google estimates that 129,864,880 different books exist in the world, and it claims to have digitized 15 million of them—or about 12 percent. How will it close the gap while production continues to expand at a rate of a million new works a year? And how will information in nonprint formats make it online en masse? Half of all films made before 1940 have vanished. What percentage of current audiovisual ma­terial will survive, even in just a fleeting appearance on the Web? Despite the efforts to preserve the millions of messages exchanged by means of blogs, e-mail, and handheld devices, most of the daily flow of information disappears. Digital texts degrade far more easily than words printed on paper. Brewster Kahle, creator of the Internet Archive, calculated in 1997 that the average life of a URL was 44 days. Not only does most information not appear online, but most of the information that once did appear has probably been lost.

4. "Libraries are obsolete." Everywhere in the country librarians report that they have never had so many patrons. At Harvard, our reading rooms are full. The 85 branch libraries of the New York Public Library system are crammed with people. The libraries supply books, videos, and other materi­al as always, but they also are fulfilling new functions: access to information for small businesses, help with homework and afterschool activities for children, and employment information for job seekers (the disappearance of want ads in printed newspapers makes the library's online services crucial for the unemployed). Librarians are responding to the needs of their patrons in many new ways, notably by guiding them through the wilderness of cyberspace to relevant and reliable digital material. Libraries never were warehouses of books. While continuing to provide books in the future, they will function as nerve centers for communicating digitized information at the neighborhood level as well as on college campuses.

5. "The future is digital." True enough, but misleading. In 10, 20, or 50 years, the information environment will be overwhelmingly digital, but the prevalence of electronic communication does not mean that printed material will cease to be important. Research in the relatively new discipline of book history has demonstrated that new modes of communication do not displace old ones, at least not in the short run. Manuscript publishing actually expanded after Gutenberg and continued to thrive for the next three centuries. Radio did not destroy the newspaper; television did not kill radio; and the Internet did not make TV extinct. In each case, the information environment became richer and more complex. That is what we are experiencing in this crucial phase of transition to a dominantly digital ecology.

I mention these misconceptions because I think they stand in the way of understanding shifts in the information environment. They make the changes appear too dramatic. They present things ahistorically and in sharp contrasts—before and after, either/or, black and white. A more nuanced view would reject the common notion that old books and e-books occupy opposite and antagonistic extremes on a technological spectrum. Old books and e-books should be thought of as allies, not enemies. To illustrate this argument, I would like to make some brief observations about the book trade, reading, and writing.

Last year the sale of e-books (digitized texts designed for hand-held readers) doubled, accounting for 10 percent of sales in the trade-book market. This year they are expected to reach 15 or even 20 percent. But there are indications that the sale of printed books has increased at the same time. The enthusiasm for e-books may have stimulated reading in general, and the market as a whole seems to be expanding. New book machines, which operate like ATM's, have reinforced this tendency. A customer enters a bookstore and orders a digitized text from a computer. The text is downloaded in the book machine, printed, and delivered as a paper­back within four minutes. This version of print-on-demand shows how the old-fashioned printed codex can gain new life with the adaption of electronic technology.

Many of us worry about a decline in deep, reflective, cover-to-cover reading. We deplore the shift to blogs, snippets, and tweets. In the case of research, we might concede that word searches have advantages, but we refuse to believe that they can lead to the kind of understanding that comes with the continuous study of an entire book. Is it true, however, that deep reading has declined, or even that it always prevailed? Studies by Kevin Sharpe, Lisa Jardine, and Anthony Grafton have proven that humanists in the 16th and 17th centuries often read discontinuously, searching for passages that could be used in the cut and thrust of rhetorical battles at court, or for nuggets of wisdom that could be copied into commonplace books and consulted out of context.

In studies of culture among the common people, Richard Hoggart and Michel de Certeau have emphasized the positive aspect of reading intermittently and in small doses. Ordinary readers, as they understand them, appropriate books (including chapbooks and Harlequin romances) in their own ways, investing them with meaning that makes sense by their own lights. Far from being passive, such readers, according to de Certeau, act as "poachers," snatching significance from whatever comes to hand.

Writing looks as bad as reading to those who see nothing but decline in the advent of the Internet. As one lament puts it: Books used to be written for the general reader; now they are written by the general reader. The Internet certainly has stimulated self-publishing, but why should that be deplored? Many writers with important things to say had not been able to break into print, and anyone who finds little value in their work can ignore it.

The online version of the vanity press may contribute to the information overload, but professional publishers will provide relief from that problem by continuing to do what they always have done—selecting, editing, designing, and marketing the best works. They will have to adapt their skills to the Internet, but they are already doing so, and they can take advantage of the new possibilities offered by the new technology.

To use an an example from my own experience, I recently wrote a printed book with an electronic supplement, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Harvard University Press). It describes how street songs mobilized public opinion in a largely illiterate society. Every day, Parisians improvised new words to old tunes, and the songs flew through the air with such force that they precipi­tated a political crisis in 1749. But how did their melodies inflect their meaning? After locating the musical annotations of a dozen songs, I asked a cabaret artist, Hélène Delavault, to record them for the electronic supplement. The reader can therefore study the text of the songs in the book while listening to them online. The e-ingredient of an old-fashioned codex makes it possible to explore a new dimension of the past by capturing its sounds.

One could cite other examples of how the new technology is reinforcing old modes of communication rather than undermining them. I don't mean to minimize the difficulties faced by authors, publishers, and readers, but I believe that some historically informed reflection could dispel the misconceptions that prevent us from making the most of "the information age"—if we must call it that.

Robert Darnton is a professor and university librarian at Harvard University. This essay is based on a talk he gave last month at the Council of Independent Colleges' Symposium on the Future of the Humanities, in Washington.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

David Frum

David Frum is the only conservative that I respect. He steps out of ideology and into reality. He sees now that the welfare state is necessary for stability and that it is morally right.

Two Cheers for the Welfare State
April 16th, 2011 at 4:28 pm David Frum | 40 Comments |Share | Print

This is the final installment in David Frum’s series on Yuval Levin’s “Beyond the Welfare State.” Click here to read the entire series.




In the interval since I started this response to Yuval Levin’s important piece in National Affairs, the Ryan budget plan has been approved by the House of Representatives on a near-total party line vote. Ideas like those endorsed by Yuval Levin are now the formal position of the Republican party. My guess is that the party’s presidential nominee will attempt to tip-toe away from that position in 2012, but who knows? Anyway, it will not matter. President Obama’s billion-dollar campaign will ensure that Republicans are thoroughly identified with it.

So Yuval Levin’s proposition is the proposition that Republicans will take to the country. Perhaps that is as it should be. Since the economic and electoral disasters of 2006-2009, Republicans have veered in a sharply libertarian direction. Why not put that new direction to the test of democracy? Perhaps Paul Ryan is right, and Americans (or anyway: voting Americans) have abruptly changed their minds during this economic crisis about their expectations from government.

I’ll admit: I’ve also changed my mind during this crisis, but in the opposite direction.

There’s an interesting rotation of ideologies here between Yuval Levin and me. Yuval Levin is one of the brightest rising stars in the intellectual tradition of Irving Kristol. Kristol famously championed a conservative welfare state, and especially programs of social insurance for the elderly.

I, on the other hand, got my political start urging a doubling-down on the economic libertarianism of the Reagan years. On the eve of the last Republican congressional triumph, 1994, I published a book urging ideas very similar to those now being urged by Yuval Levin and Paul Ryan and many others.

I won’t try here to explain why the conservative mainstream has turned so sharply to the right, although I have my theories.

As for my own turn away, that I can explain:

The radical free-market economics I embraced in the late 1970s offered a trade:

Yes, there would be less social provision. In return, Americans would receive an economy that was simultaneously more dynamic and also more stable.

There would be less inflation (because the Federal Reserve would have one job: price stability).

There would be fewer and milder recessions (because the Federal Reserve would no longer have to extinguish the inflation it did not create).

The financial sector could finance faster growth with less risk (because risks would be cushioned by diversification rather than prohibited by regulation).

Economic growth would accelerate (because the reduced tax burden would induce entrepreneurial innovation).

Faster growth would raise incomes for all (because a rising tide lifts all boats).

More opportunity in the private economy would abundantly offset the curbing of welfare benefits (because the best social program is always a job).

More opportunity would end the caste-like isolation of the poorest of the poor by drawing them out of the underclass into paid employment (because all human beings respond more or less rationally to positive incentives).

This was the trade, and it was engineered jointly by Republicans and Democrats: in fact some of the most important elements of the trade were adopted during the Clinton years.

Some of the terms of that trade were honored. From 1983 through 2008, the US enjoyed a quarter-century of economic expansion, punctuated by only two relatively mild recessions. In the late 1980s, the country was hit by the savings & loan crisis, the worst financial crisis to that point since the 1930s – and although the S&L crisis did deliver a blow, the country rapidly recovered and came up smiling. New industries were born, new jobs created on an epic scale, incomes did improve, and the urban poor were drawn into the working economy.

But of course, other terms of the trade were not honored.

Especially after 2000, incomes did not much improve for middle-class Americans. The promise of macroeconomic stability proved a mirage: America and the world were hit in 2008 by the sharpest and widest financial crisis since the 1930s. Conservatives do not like to hear it, but the crisis originated in the malfunctioning of an under-regulated financial sector, not in government overspending or government over-generosity to less affluent homebuyers. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were bad actors, yes, but they could not have capsized the world economy by themselves. It took Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, AIG, and — maybe above all — Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s to do that.

In the aftermath of the catastrophe, the free-market assumption and expectation that an unemployed person could always find work somewhere has been massively falsified: at the trough of this recession, there were almost 6 jobseekers in the US for every unfilled job. Nothing like such a disparity had been seen since the 1930s. The young faced the worst job odds. But some of the most dismal outcomes were endured by workers in their 50s, laid off from middle-class jobs likely never to see middle-class employment again.

GK Chesterton once wrote that we should never tear down a fence until we knew why it had been built. In the calamity after 2008, we rediscovered why the fences of the old social insurance state had been built.

Speaking only personally, I cannot take seriously the idea that the worst thing that has happened in the past three years is that government got bigger. Or that money was borrowed. Or that the number of people on food stamps and unemployment insurance and Medicaid increased. The worst thing was that tens of millions of Americans – and not only Americans – were plunged into unemployment, foreclosure, poverty. If food stamps and unemployment insurance, and Medicaid mitigated those disasters, then two cheers for food stamps, unemployment insurance, and Medicaid.

Which does not mean that I have become suddenly indifferent to the growth of government. Not at all. Paul Ryan is absolutely right that the present trend is unsustainable and must be corrected. The free marketeers of the 1980s were right that taxes on enterprise must be restrained to leave room for private-sector-led expansion. Over-generous social insurance has all kinds of negative consequences. Private saving must be encouraged. Work must pay better than idleness. The job of designing the right kind of social insurance state is hugely important and hugely difficult, and the conservative sensibility – with its respect for markets and less sentimental view of human nature – is the right sensibility for that job.

Yet that same conservative sensibility is also properly distrustful of the fantasy that society can be remade according to a preconceived plan. We have to start from where we are, and we have to take people as we find them. Ronald Reagan liked to quote a line of Tom Paine’s, “We have it in our power to make the world new again.” George Will – although a great Reagan admirer – correctly complained at the time, “No, we don’t.”

I strongly suspect that today’s Ayn Rand moment will end in frustration or worse for Republicans. The future beyond the welfare state imagined by Yuval Levin will not arrive. At that point, Republicans will face a choice. (I’d argue we face that choice now, whether we recognize it or not.) We can fulminate against unchangeable realities, alienate ourselves from a country that will not accede to the changes we demand. That way lies bitterness and irrelevance. Or we can go back to work on the core questions facing all center right parties in the advanced economies since World War II: how do we champion entrepreneurship and individualism within the context of a social insurance state?

Those are words I would not have written 15 years ago. I write them now, conscious that I am very far from the first person to write them. Irving Kristol made the point most memorably at the very onset of the conservative ascendancy:

The idea of a welfare state is perfectly consistent with a conservative political philosophy – as Bismarck knew, a hundred years ago. In our urbanized, industrialized, highly mobile society, people need governmental action of some kind… they need such assistance; they demand it; they will get it.

Conservatism’s task is to shape that social insurance state, not repeal it.

Yuval Levin knew this truth when I did not. I’ll preserve it here in safe keeping for him and all his friends until they are ready to remember it again.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

What is There to Talk About?

This says it all. Bingo! The two political parties have two fundamenally different ways of looking at the world and what this country is all about. There is nothing to talk about. I have absolutely no use for Republicans. I wish we could remove all of them to Alaska. Good riddance!

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by Paul Krugman

April 16, 2011, 9:08 am
Civility is the Last Refuge of Scoundrels
At the beginning of last week, the commentariat was in raptures over the Serious, Courageous, Game-Changing Ryan plan. But now that the plan has been exposed as the cruel nonsense it is, what we’re hearing a lot about is the need for more civility in the discourse. President Obama did a bad thing by calling cruel nonsense cruel nonsense; he hurt Republican feelings, and how can we have a deal when the GOP is feeling insulted? What we need is personal outreach; let’s do lunch!

The easy, and perfectly fair, shot is to talk about the hypocrisy here; where were all the demands for civility when Republicans were denouncing Obama as a socialist, accusing him of creating death panels, etc..? Why is it OK for Republicans to accuse Obama of stealing from Medicare, but not OK for Obama to declare, with complete truthfulness, that those same Republicans are trying to dismantle the whole program?

Beyond that, are we dealing with children here? Is one of our two major political parties run by people so immature that they will refuse to do what the country needs because the president hasn’t been nice to them?

But the main point is, what are we supposed to have a civil discussion about? The truth is that the two parties have both utterly different goals and utterly different views about how the world works.

It’s not nice to say this (but the truth is rarely nice): whatever they may say, Republicans are not concerned, above all, about the deficit. In fact, it’s not clear that they care about the deficit at all; they’re trying to use deficit concerns to push through their goal of dismantling the Great Society and if possible the New Deal; they have stated explicitly that they want to reduce taxes on high incomes to pre-New-Deal levels. And it’s an article of faith on their part that low taxes have magical effects on the economy.

Obama believes that the major social insurance programs are a good thing, and has extended them with health reform. Some of the best-known research by his chief economist is his work debunking claims that tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves. See here and here (both pdfs).

So what is there to talk about?

Ayn Rand's "Objectivism"

In a review of the new movie "Atlas Shrugged," based on the novel of the same name by Ayn Rand, Michael Shermer summarizes Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. Rep. Paul Ryan is a disciple of Ayn Rand.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

In Objectivism, (1) reality exists independent of human thought, (2) reason is the only viable method for understanding it, (3) people should seek personal happiness and exist for their own sake and no one should sacrifice himself for or be sacrificed by others, and (4) laissez-faire capitalism is the best political-economic system to enable the first three conditions to flourish. This combination, said Rand, allows people to "deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit."
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This is the philsophy which is at the heart of the the Republican Party of today.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

With David Sedaris

Last night I went to an author talk with David Sedaris. Sedaris is a humorist and New York Times bestseller, including Barrel Fever, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, his latest.

I have never read Sedaris and have no familiarity with him. However, I was told that he is funny, and I know his books are popular, so I thought this would be a literary event worth attending. However, I was disappointed.

Sedaris read from Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk. He also read other stories, which I assume are unpublished, and read from his diary. When he does a book signing, he asks everyone to tell him a joke. Some of the entries from his diary are jokes people have told him on his tours. He ended by taking audience questions.

Sedaris was mostly boring and uninspiring. His humor is trite and conventional. I understand why people consider him humorous and entertaining, but every punch line sounds like something I have heard before. He uses formulaic setups to get a laugh rather than tell jokes that are themselves funny because of the content of what is said.

The best part of his talk was about how his father has given him such little support that it has pushed him to become successful. That was the only part of his talk that provided any substantial insight into life.

I went into the evening yesterday knowing little of David Sedaris. After leaving, I felt even less interested in him.

Obama Makes His Stand

Here is a terrific statement of the liberal vision for America.

Obama Makes His Stand
Jonathan Cohn
Senior Editor
April 13, 2011

Obama's speech today was about policy and politics. But it was also about principles, as Obama made clear early in his remarks:

From our first days as a nation, we have put our faith in free markets and free enterprise as the engine of America’s wealth and prosperity. More than citizens of any other country, we are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government.

But there has always been another thread running throughout our history – a belief that we are all connected; and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation. ... Part of this American belief that we are all connected also expresses itself in a conviction that each one of us deserves some basic measure of security. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard times or bad luck, a crippling illness or a layoff, may strike any one of us. “There but for the grace of God go I,” we say to ourselves, and so we contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security, which guarantee us health care and a measure of basic income after a lifetime of hard work; unemployment insurance, which protects us against unexpected job loss; and Medicaid, which provides care for millions of seniors in nursing homes, poor children, and those with disabilities. We are a better country because of these commitments. I’ll go further – we would not be a great country without those commitments.

If there is an essence of the liberal vision for America, that passage captures it. It's the idea that a modern, enlightened society promises economic security to all, notwithstanding illness, accident of birth, or age. The liberal vision is not an imperative to establish equality, as its detractors sometimes claim. But it is expectation that government will guarantee sustenance, peace of mind, and simple dignity--that the pursuit of these goals will bolster, rather than impede, freedom.

In the era of Roosevelt and Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, Democrats talked openly and proudly of this mission. But in the last few years, at least, Democrats have seemed less comfortable with such rhetoric, or at least comfortable with their loftier ideals than Republicans have been with theirs. This contrast has been vivid in fights over the economy, climate change, and health care, with Democrats making sensible, nuanced arguments about growth rates and Republicans making hyperbolic, simplistic claims about "socialism."

Not on Wednesday. The president can seem like a compulsive mediator,desperately seeking opportunities to forge common understanding among adversaries. It's an admirable quality and, frequently, an aggravating one. But in the budget speech Obama drew a clear contrast between his vision of America and that of the Republicans. Even as Obama called for bipartisan cooperation and cited, as a model for budget balancing, the work of his bipartisan deficit commission, he described the proposal from House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan in stark, but accurate, terms:

The fact is, their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America. As Ronald Reagan’s own budget director said, there’s nothing “serious” or “courageous” about this plan. There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. There’s nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill. And this is not a vision of the America I know.
The alternative, Obama explained, looks like the budget outline the White House released with his speech. It would leave Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security in place, tinkering with their finances but stopping well short of wholesale changes, let alone the demolition Republicans have in mind. It seeks to reduce health care spending, but with the same essential approach of the Affordable Care Act--that is, promoting efficiency even as it lowers spending. (I'll have more specific things to say about that later.) It would add revenue, as well, in part by President Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy expire. The expected result of these and initiatives, including some kind of "failsafe" provision for automatic spending cuts, would be steady deficit reduction in a manner that seems both more humane and more realistic than the Republican vision.

Obama's proposal carries political risk, and not simply because plenty of voters don't think of America as one country, indivisible. Any effort to raise revenue, no matter how narrowly focused, inevitably stirs anti-tax sentiment. Sure enough, the Republican National Committee website is already calling Obama the "Confiscator in Chief." But new taxes are also essential to good government, because you can't have a welfare state (even a small one) if you don't have money to pay for it. And Obama said as much, saying "I refuse" to renew tax breaks for the wealthy yet again:

They want to give people like me a two hundred thousand dollar tax cut, that's paid for by asking thirty three seniors each to pay six thousand dollars more in health costs. That's not right. And it's not going to happen as long as I'm president. ...
Some will argue we shouldn’t even consider raising taxes, even if only on the wealthiest Americans. It’s just an article of faith for them. I say that at a time when the tax burden on the wealthy is at its lowest level in half a century, the most fortunate among us can afford to pay a little more. I don’t need another tax cut. Warren Buffett doesn’t need another tax cut. Not if we have to pay for it by making seniors pay more for Medicare. Or by cutting kids from Head Start. Or by taking away college scholarships that I wouldn’t be here without. That some of you wouldn’t be here without. And I believe that most wealthy Americans would agree with me. They want to give back to the country that’s done so much for them. Washington just hasn’t asked them to.

To be sure, Obama could ask for even more. From a policy perspective, the one, big disappointment of Obama's proposal is what it doesn't do: He still does not endorse higher taxes on the middle class, whether by allowing all of the Bush tax cuts to expire (as opposed to those only on high incomes) or imposing new taxes on carbon that would promote global warming even as they raised revenue. Partly as a consequence, Obama's budget calls for approximately two dollars in spending cuts for each new dollar in revenue--an imbalance that mirrors provisions of the president's bipartisan commission led by Erskin Bowles and Alan Simpson.

That would likely mean some combination of insufficient deficit reduction and harsher cuts to government programs, as many of us feared. And while it's possible the political environment might not support still higher taxes--that, in effect, the administration has accurately judged the political market's willingness to bear new new revenue--the larger danger of this proposal is that it becomes the opening bid in a negotiation that ends with some far less appealing compromise.

As Bob Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, warns:

To be sure, the President’s plan represents an important step forward in the debate. But it should be recognized that this plan is a rather conservative one, significantly to the right of the [Bipartisan Policy Center] Rivlin-Domenici plan. While we worry about some particular elements of the President’s plan, we worry much more that the deficit-reduction process that’s now starting could produce an outcome that is well to the right of the already centrist-to-moderately-conservative Obama proposal, by reducing its modest revenue increases and cutting more deeply into effective programs that are vital to millions of Americans.
Then again, not all negotiations play out so linearly. Senior White House officials argue that embracing a credible bipartisan plan strengthens their political leverage with Republicans more than touting a less popular, but more liberal, proposal would. And plenty of smart political observers think Obama's main job today was less specific anyway--that it was simply to draw a single, clear line separating Ryan and everybody else.

This much seems certain: For all of the attention the speech has generated within the political class, relatively few Americans will ever hear or read the actual text. Its significance lies primarily in how it frames the debate, and negotiations, going forward. Obama has laid out a credible plan for reducing deficits and, more important, he has described a vision of America he wants to defend. For today, at least, that seems like enough.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell

This was a pleasurable book. Some of the stories are more interesting than others. I think that Gladwell is insightful and makes worthy points. Sometimes he may be stretching too far or suggesting something that is not there. But he at least gives a different perspective and makes you wonder about the world.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Dylan in China

Bob Dylan in China
His disappointing, hypocritical concert.
Azar Nafisi/April 11, 2011
In memory of Farah Ebrahimi.

Times are indeed a-changing: Bob Dylan, who became an American icon by “speaking truth to power,” just gave a concert in China, one of the most repressive countries in the world. While there, Dylan not only failed to express solidarity with the Chinese dissidents in jail; according to The Washington Post, he also agreed to perform only “approved content.”

The scenario becomes even more ironic when you consider that, while Bob Dylan sang “Love Sick” in mainland China, outgoing U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman, a potential Republican nominee for president, spoke in his farewell address about the detention of the dissident artist Ai Weiwei, Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo, and others. He added, “The United States will never stop supporting human rights because we believe in the fundamental struggle for human dignity and justice wherever it may occur.” The problem is not that Dylan should not sing his love songs in China; rather, the problem is that Dylan was just fine morphing into Barry Manilow in Beijing, when he was his old self just three days prior in Taiwan, signing “Desolation Row” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

Artists are only human. They have many sides to them, they can be fickle, and they are mortal. What endures is not the singer but the song. Yet I still hang on to the old-fashioned belief of my youth, when we listened to Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Joan Baez, convinced that artists were effective because they were the consciences of their societies—because their commitment was not to any political ideology, sect, or party, but to truth. Truth that is dangerous no matter what times we live in, because it is always a call to action. Once we know it, we can no longer justify our silence.

Some may say in defense of Dylan in China that age mellows us. I agree age does or should do this, and that it can also make us more self-consciously aware and critical of ourselves. It is also true that too much fame and power, too much wealth, can change our attitudes toward the principles we once believed in. But, for some, age, fame, power, and wealth can be means to becoming more humane and to helping others find their voice. Take Joan Baez, for example, who, in maturity, has changed and grown wiser, but not lost her passion, her commitment to justice and kindness.

Thinking of Joan Baez, one feels grateful and hopeful that certain things in life will not be changing with the times. Yet Bob Dylan, who always had a cynicism and aloofness that Baez did not, seems to have lost something with age. In China, he seems to have struck out against his own songs, his creations. The result? A disappointing and hypocritical show—one that makes me yearn for the Dylan we once knew.

Obama is Missing in Action

Op-Ed Columnist
The President Is Missing
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: April 10, 2011

I realize that with hostile Republicans controlling the House, there’s not much Mr. Obama can get done in the way of concrete policy. Arguably, all he has left is the bully pulpit. But he isn’t even using that — or, rather, he’s using it to reinforce his enemies’ narrative.

His remarks after last week’s budget deal were a case in point.

Maybe that terrible deal, in which Republicans ended up getting more than their opening bid, was the best he could achieve — although it looks from here as if the president’s idea of how to bargain is to start by negotiating with himself, making pre-emptive concessions, then pursue a second round of negotiation with the G.O.P., leading to further concessions.

And bear in mind that this was just the first of several chances for Republicans to hold the budget hostage and threaten a government shutdown; by caving in so completely on the first round, Mr. Obama set a baseline for even bigger concessions over the next few months.

But let’s give the president the benefit of the doubt, and suppose that $38 billion in spending cuts — and a much larger cut relative to his own budget proposals — was the best deal available. Even so, did Mr. Obama have to celebrate his defeat? Did he have to praise Congress for enacting “the largest annual spending cut in our history,” as if shortsighted budget cuts in the face of high unemployment — cuts that will slow growth and increase unemployment — are actually a good idea?

Among other things, the latest budget deal more than wipes out any positive economic effects of the big prize Mr. Obama supposedly won from last December’s deal, a temporary extension of his 2009 tax cuts for working Americans. And the price of that deal, let’s remember, was a two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts, at an immediate cost of $363 billion, and a potential cost that’s much larger — because it’s now looking increasingly likely that those irresponsible tax cuts will be made permanent.

More broadly, Mr. Obama is conspicuously failing to mount any kind of challenge to the philosophy now dominating Washington discussion — a philosophy that says the poor must accept big cuts in Medicaid and food stamps; the middle class must accept big cuts in Medicare (actually a dismantling of the whole program); and corporations and the rich must accept big cuts in the taxes they have to pay. Shared sacrifice!

I’m not exaggerating. The House budget proposal that was unveiled last week — and was praised as “bold” and “serious” by all of Washington’s Very Serious People — includes savage cuts in Medicaid and other programs that help the neediest, which would among other things deprive 34 million Americans of health insurance. It includes a plan to privatize and defund Medicare that would leave many if not most seniors unable to afford health care. And it includes a plan to sharply cut taxes on corporations and to bring the tax rate on high earners down to its lowest level since 1931.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center puts the revenue loss from these tax cuts at $2.9 trillion over the next decade. House Republicans claim that the tax cuts can be made “revenue neutral” by “broadening the tax base” — that is, by closing loopholes and ending exemptions. But you’d need to close a lot of loopholes to close a $3 trillion gap; for example, even completely eliminating one of the biggest exemptions, the mortgage interest deduction, wouldn’t come close. And G.O.P. leaders have not, of course, called for anything that drastic. I haven’t seen them name any significant exemptions they would end.

You might have expected the president’s team not just to reject this proposal, but to see it as a big fat political target. But while the G.O.P. proposal has drawn fire from a number of Democrats — including a harsh condemnation from Senator Max Baucus, a centrist who has often worked with Republicans — the White House response was a statement from the press secretary expressing mild disapproval.

What’s going on here? Despite the ferocious opposition he has faced since the day he took office, Mr. Obama is clearly still clinging to his vision of himself as a figure who can transcend America’s partisan differences. And his political strategists seem to believe that he can win re-election by positioning himself as being conciliatory and reasonable, by always being willing to compromise.

But if you ask me, I’d say that the nation wants — and more important, the nation needs — a president who believes in something, and is willing to take a stand. And that’s not what we’re seeing. 

A Society or a Collection of Individuals?

Gary HartScholar in Residence at the University of Colorado
FROM Gary Hart
Are We a Society?
Posted: 04/11/11 11:17 AM ET

When asked about the impact of her draconian policies on British society, then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is reported to have said, "There is no such thing as society."

The current U.S. budget confrontation raises the same issue: Is there such a thing as an American society? The Oxford dictionary defines society as: "the sum of human conditions and activity regarded as a whole functioning interdependently" and as "the customs and organization of an ordered community."

The current confrontation between parties and ideologies is over the role of government. But even more deeply it is a foundational disagreement over whether we are a society, a community, or whether we are a collection of individuals inhabiting the same geographical space.

If we are all "in this together," then we share more than just an interest in collective security. And if we have collective interests, the instrument by which we pursue and promote those interests is the national government, not Wall Street or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

As we learned in 1929 and 2008, markets can fail, usually through greed and lack of regulation. Although a rising tide lifts all boats, a falling tide lowers all boats, except for the gilded yachts.

The Goldwater-Reagan-Gingrich-Tea Party revolutions all called into question whether we are a society and therefore whether we act through our national government to pursue our common interests. Though virtually all mature democracies have basically resolved this question decades ago, the people of the United States seem unable to do so. Many Americans continue to believe we can have the public services a very large majority wants without paying very much for them. Thus the "waste, fraud, and abuse" of the Reagan years. Or a recurring vocal minority continues to argue that we should do away with those services altogether and devil-take-the-hindmost.

It would be an interesting, though destructive, experiment to see how many Americans would like the nation the Tea Party seeks to construct.

The current, and perpetually recurring, confrontation is only symbolically about "spending." Public programs flow from policies. Policies flow from partisan ideologies. Ideologies flow from political philosophies. So long as the question of whether we are a society, a national community as Franklin Roosevelt believed, remains contested, so will budget wars continue carried out by factions waving one banner or another mostly decrying the evils of government.

Thomas Jefferson wanted our government to do only those necessary things that individuals could not do for themselves. That is quite a large territory. It includes transportation systems, public safety and judicial systems, public education, and national security, among many other undertakings. The real confrontation is over the social safety net constructed between the age of Roosevelt and the age of Johnson. Overwhelmingly, the American people wish to maintain this safety net. They simply do not wish to bear its costs, nor do they wish to accept its demise, which would involve taking our grandparents back into our homes.

In a perfect world we would have a great debate throughout the nation, not just in Washington, over the issue of whether we are a society, a national community, and, if so, what role we wish the national government to bear in maintaining that community. Alas, we do not live in a perfect world. So we let our elected officials struggle over budget cuts that are but symbols of our deeper dilemma and our unresolved definition of who we really are. Two hundred and twenty years should have been enough time to have resolved this question.

Bounce Back from Stress!

Want To Live To 100? Try To Bounce Back From Stress
by Dr. Mark Lachs

April 11, 2011





Gerontologist Mark Lachs says one of the keys to a long, healthy old age is the ability to keep moving forward after life's inevitable setbacks.

One question I get asked a lot is, "How old is your oldest patient?" Answer: 109.

The next question is usually something like: "What nursing home is he or she in?" Answer: She is living at home, with all her marbles, profoundly engaged in the world around her.

The last question: What is this lady's fountain of youth? A thousand calories a day and an hour of yoga?

No, Helen Reichert likes chocolate truffles. Her favorite beverage is Budweiser. And she once announced to me that she was thinking about smoking again. When I protested, she reminded me that she has outlived several other physicians and told me to mind my own business.

So what's going on here? Unusual longevity often has a genetic basis, and Reichert probably does have a gene that contributes to her unusual longevity. But she also exhibits a powerful trait geriatricians call adaptive competence.


If you're a boomer and you don't think your outlook on aging has any impact on the rest of your life, you might want to brighten your attitude a bit.


- Dr. Mark Lachs
I define it loosely as the ability to bounce back from stress. Many scientists view this solely as biological stress. But many of us who care for older patients see adaptive competence as psychologically critical as well.

You don't get to be 109 without life hurling a few curveballs at you, and Reichert has had more than her share: bereavement, gender discrimination, medical issues. And after each, she dusts herself off and moves on.

A few years back, she had a modest stroke that affected her language abilities. I don't think I've seen a patient of any age tackle rehabilitation and speech therapy the way she did.

During her last visit, she asked if I would consider taking on a new patient: Her 103-year-old brother, who goes to the office nearly every day. He is another adaptively competent centenarian.

We all know people like this of every age. And we all know the other guy: the pessimist for whom even small disruptions produce out-of-proportion suffering and, dare I say, whining.

Sociologists are studying these traits, and the theory holds up. My colleague Becca Levy, a professor of epidemiology and psychology at the Yale School of Public Health, has studied the longevity of people in their 50s as a function of their perceptions about aging.


Adrian Kinloch
Dr. Mark Lachs says adaptive competence is psychologically critical to longevity.
She asked if they agreed with statements like, "Things keep getting worse as I get older," and, "As you get older you are less useful." Even after she controlled for their medical conditions, subjects who agreed with ideas like these died on average 7 1/2 years sooner than their glass-half-full counterparts.

So if you're a boomer and you don't think your outlook on aging has any impact on the rest of your life, you might want to brighten your attitude a bit.

The other striking thing about Reichert is her self-deprecating sense of humor. A few years ago, her alma mater, Cornell University, wrote to her.

"You are our oldest living alum, and we're delighted to offer you a lifetime subscription to our magazine," the university said.

Helen scribbled five indignant words on their letter and mailed it back: "How incredibly generous of you!"

Sharing the Wealth

Share the Wealth
The moral implications of the budget debate.
The Editors of The New Republic

In Libya, Obama Finally Did the Right ThingA serious conversation about managing the federal budget is under way. And that’s a good thing. Federal spending is growing faster than federal revenue. Absent changes in the law, future generations of Americans will likely have to raise taxes to unprecedented levels, dramatically reduce the reach of government programs, risk the macroeconomic consequences of uncontrolled debt, or some combination of all three. At best, these options are unappealing. At worst, they are a threat to prosperity.

But the fiscal conversation is unfolding in an unfortunate manner. For one thing, many in Washington seem to have lost sight of the fact that the economic recovery remains fragile and unemployment remains high. It is possible to believe that the deficit must eventually be addressed, while also believing that our present circumstances actually require deficit spending. As Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote recently, “Just like it may pay for a business to borrow (‘run a deficit’) in order to increase long-run profitability, so too for government.”

Deficits should be temporary, of course. Once the economy fully recovers, the government really should focus on reducing debt. But that begs the question of how. Right now, the two poles of the debate are extremely conservative proposals, like the spending plan recently unveiled by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, and more centrist proposals, like the one endorsed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, co-chairmen of the president’s commission on deficit reduction. The result is a skewed discussion, where it seems to be a given that deficit reduction will take place primarily through spending cuts—and that those cuts, in areas ranging from housing assistance to food stamps, will frequently target the poorest Americans.

This is where liberals need to make a stand on principle. Balancing the budget is important; but so is creating a fair society in which all Americans have basic economic security. The fact is that much of the moral purpose of government spending is to redistribute income downward—to provide for the least successful and least fortunate members of society. It’s easy for that general principle to be lost in the detailed debates over which programs will be cut. But liberals shouldn’t run away from talking about this overarching commitment. On the contrary, it is something to be proud of.

What does this mean in practical terms? At the broadest level, it means debt reduction partially through higher taxes: allowing all of the Bush tax cuts to expire, while also adding new sources of revenue, ideally including some form of carbon tax (a measure which, in addition to helping to balance the government’s books, might have the added benefit of helping to save the planet). With Republicans in control of the House, these proposals may or may not be politically practical right now. And they aren’t necessarily popular. But liberals must continue to make the case for them, as both an economic and a moral matter.

Of course, there should be spending cuts as well. In fact, there should be plenty—and the bulk of them should come from health care. The skyrocketing costs of Medicare and Medicaid are the primary reasons the government’s fiscal picture is so bleak. Any strategy that does not slow the growth in these programs will fail. But the approach recently introduced by House Republicans, and embraced by many self-proclaimed fiscal hawks, is simply to slap limits on what the federal government spends on these programs—even if that means leaving seniors and low-income Americans without affordable medical care. That’s not controlling the cost of health care; that’s simply transferring the cost to people who can’t afford to bear it.

A smarter strategy would take a balanced approach, one that attempts to remedy the underlying inefficiencies making insurance so expensive. The Affordable Care Act introduces incremental versions of these reforms, like encouraging doctors to form integrated groups and creating an institute that will study which treatments work better than others. Going forward, the government could bolster these efforts and add some new ones, like a government-run insurance option for people under 65—a measure even the Bowles-Simpson commission acknowledges would help save money.

Why hasn’t anybody proposed these kinds of steps? Actually, some think tanks and economists, and even a few politicians, have. But it would be helpful if more Democrats spoke up on behalf of these ideas. The test of virtue in the fiscal debate is not simply whether politicians can balance the books. It’s whether they can balance the books in a way that provides for all Americans—including the least fortunate.