The Semi-Frozen Flounder of Reality

I'm pretty sure that you're not going to learn much new from Jonah Goldberg's indictment of l'affaire Obamacare, but you're going to laugh so hard that you may pop a ligament in your back.

Obamacare at the Cusp

I can see the following outcomes from the current crisis in the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare:

1. The exchange starts working, the brouhaha over the baldfaced "if you like your policy you can keep it" lie dies down, and ACA settles into a system that, with a few tweaks, actually works.  (This doesn't mean that it's better than the legacy system; it merely means that it becomes the new normal.)  I'll put the odds of this occurring at about 45%.
2. The outrage builds and ACA collapses quickly and cleanly, with the legacy system remaining in place.  30% probability.
3. ACA collapses slowly and messily, taking the legacy system with it, and we wind up with a single payer system.  15% probability.
4. ACA collapses, takes the legacy system with it, and something new emerges from the rubble.  10% probability.

I support the idea that we don't wheel the gurney out of the ER and dump you in the hospital parking lot if you can't pay, so the most obvious solution to getting near-universal insurance enrollment is excluded.  After that, you can use a single-payer system (Medicaid and Medicare), but that will only work for the genuinely poor and won't cover the young invincibles who've had bad luck.  For them, you can either put a mandate in place (which is what ACA did), or you can do something only slightly more humane than dumping them in the parking lot, namely make medical debts undischargeable through bankruptcy.

Long story short, I think there's nothing wrong in principle with the ACA tripod of mandates, guaranteed issue/community rating, and subsidies.  As for the details, ACA has clearly screwed the pooch.

The pain in the individual insurance market is just the beginning, as Megan McArdle has pointed out:

A lot of folks with employer-sponsored insurance are also going to see their insurance changed, though not quite as quickly. And not “The benefits will get so much more awesome!” but “The Cadillac tax kicked in and we had to drop most of our plans except for the ones with high deductibles.” A friend who sits on the benefits committees of two organizations says that their experts predict that pretty much all plans will end up being of the “consumer-driven” (read: high-deductible) model once the so-called Cadillac tax kicks in.

Let's not kid ourselves:  The ultimate point of this little exercise was to change the incentives in health care enough to put downward pressure on prices, so anybody who thinks this was going to happen without significant pain is an idiot.  The question is whether we're going to get the maximum amount of efficiency for the minimum amount of pain out of this system.  I think the answer to that is going to be a resounding 'no".

Would a single payer system have a lower pain-to-efficiency ratio?  Yes.  But that's not saying much, and the total amount of efficiency generated would still be quite low.  The idea of US single-payer health care scares the shit out of me;  there are too many interest groups and too many providers bellying-up to the public trough to make single-payer anything other than a disaster that simultaneously damages public health while destroying medical innovation, one of the US's core competencies.

Would the legacy system have a lower pain-to-efficiency ratio than ACA?  I honestly don't know.  Certainly not for the poor.  We also have a lot of evidence that the legacy system sucks at controlling costs.  Ultimately, I think that ACA would wind up being a modest improvement, it's so complex that there's no telling what unintended consequence will ooze out of the woodwork next.

And it's possible to do this simply, fairly, and honestly--three adverbs that will never be applied to ACA.  Here are the main principles:

1. You can't dump most of the cost on the individually insured alone, and you have to be honest with the majority who get their insurance from their employers.  The simplest thing to do is to eliminate group insurance and throw everybody into the individual market.  They won't get as good a deal as they do from a group, but they'll be significantly less screwed than the people in the individual market are right now under ACA.  Let the employers put the money they spend on insurance into a health savings account--that ought to keep the tax incentives about the same.
2. Keep the mandate.  Keep the subsidies.  But just pay them out of the general fund, with a reasonable income tax increase to cover them.  All this revenue sleight-of-hand is ridiculous.
3. Keep the exchanges, but get the government out of the business of specifying acceptable insurance plans.  They're not smart enough, or adaptable enough, to understand the market and how it will change in the future.
4. Stop transferring wealth from the young, who have low incomes and low net worths, to the not-quite-old-enough-to-retire, who have high incomes and high net worths.  For that matter, stop transferring wealth to retirees that have a large enough net worth to fend for themselves.  I'm fine with community rating, as long as you rate in age cohorts.  This is the single most immoral thing in ACA.
5. Whatever you wind up doing, fold Medicaid and Medicare into it.  Yes, lots of poor people are ignorant and lots of old people are stupid--that's just a fact of life.  If you want to produce a menu of government-approved plans for people who are being 100% subsidized, fine.  If you want to set things up so that they can't use their subsidies for anything other than premiums, also fine.  But this maintenance of five huge health programs (Medicare, Medicaid, individual insurance, group insurance, and price increases caused by the poor defaulting on their medical debts) is just stupid.
6. Never, ever, ever, allow the government to set prices for medical reimbursement.

You could tweak ACA to do all of this, but the opportunity for new and exotic rent-seeking is much higher doing these kinds of tweaks.  It'd be easier to repeal and replace if Obama's fragile ego would allow it.  But it won't.

As usual, the result will be even messier than what we have now.  Eventually, the incredibly stupid parts of the law will atrophy and we'll hopefully be left with a system something like what I outlined above.  Of course, there will be fifteen completely intolerable sacred cows left over, lovingly maintained by the groups that milk them.  So what else is new?

How American Political Parties Dissolve

As I write this, the US government has been shut down for two weeks, and we are 4 days away from the "X date" where the Treasury Department runs out of workarounds on the debt ceiling and has to stop paying somebody.  (Odds are that this will not lead to a default on bonds, per the link above, but things are going to be dicey.)  I can't decide whether to call the set of House and Senate Republicans driving the standoff the "Obamacare defunders" over their (now fading) insistence on defunding ACA, or just the "Tea Party"; the two groups may be congruent.  I think I'll settle on the Tea Party, with the proviso that there may be a few Tea Party folks who haven't completely bought into this level of brinksmanship.

There are a lot of theories for why we've gotten into a situation where there appears to be no ZOPA over such a fundamental set of government functions.  Some of the most popular:

• Republican leadership authority has eroded.
• This kind of brinksmanship is virtually cost-free for Tea Party representatives in safe districts.
• This is merely a principled stand against something that's worth risking a financial and/or constitutional crisis.
• This is an excellent way to demonstrate the irrelevance of the federal government to the average voter, sort of a natural follow-on to the Obama Administration crying wolf over the sequester.
• This is necessary to re-energize the Republican Party.

All of these reasons have some truth in them, but all of these are iffy propositions.  They're all based on extremely dubious judgment calls.  Politicians are notoriously risk-averse and it's hard to believe very many of them are willing to bet their careers on any of them.  What's going on?

The Tea Party has been heedless of the damage they're doing to the Republican brand.  I think that's because they're no longer concerned with that brand in its current form.  The Tea Party has been essentially conducting an ideological purge, drawing a clear demarcation between "us" and "them".  Any person espousing slightest deviation from Tea Party orthodoxy is labelled "them" and is dismissed.  What remains is a clear minority, but it's a minority with a frightening level of unity.

This seems crazy, but there's one situation where it might be astute:  If the Tea Party believes that the moment has come when it can seize control of the Republican Party, then the gamble might be worth it.  The goal of the shutdown and debt ceiling standoff is then to eject Boehner from the speakership and to eliminate the power of the business conservatives and social moderates in the party.  The Tea Party is effectively seceding from the GOP, but it's hoping to carry off enough support to be able to keep the name and the party infrastructure while changing the ideology.

The US has scant experience with the wholesale dissolution of political parties, but what history tells us is instructive:

• In the early 1800's, the Federalist and Democratic Republican (aka the Jeffersonian Republican) parties had grown so close together in their positions that several internal schisms arose.  The "corrupt bargain" election of John Quincy Adams in 1824 and the follow-on election of Andrew Jackson in in 1828 shattered the one-party system, leading to the formation of the Democratic party, which supported Jackson's muscular view of executive power, while the Whigs formed around the idea that, well, they didn't like Jackson.  In this case, the Democrats were reacting to the increasing sophistication of the northern financial and industrial system and wanted it stopped.  In short, they had a strong animating principle.  The Whigs formed in an attempt to preserve the emerging institutions, but their only true animating principle was opposition to the reactionary forces mobilized by the Democrats.  The Democrats won, temporarily; they got to keep half of the party name in the divorce.


• The Whigs finally got an animating principle:  abolition.  By 1840, it was clear that the US was headed for a massive territorial expansion and, absent significant opposition, the new territories were likely to allow slavery.  The Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 shattered the Whigs, with the militant abolitionists forming the Republican Party.  We all know how that ended.

The Tea Party thinks they've found their animating principle:  60% of Americans now believe that the federal government has too much power. They hope to forge a new coalition around the intent to reduce the size and power of the feds.

This is a goal that I support.  Note that it is, despite the negative connotations of the word, a "reactionary" goal:  "Government has gotten too big, and we want the trend reversed."  To that extent, the Tea Party's formation looks much like the formation of the Jacksonian Democrats in the late 1820's.  But there was more than one reactionary thread at work in the 1820's.  When the Democrats formed, the top-line issue was about rolling back financial and industrial power.  But the coalition worked because a strong anti-abolition sentiment flowed through the rural and southern factions.  And that issue ultimately overwhelmed the Democratic Party, leading to 1861.

The Tea Party also has other reactionary threads running through it.  Its members are socially conservative, isolationist, and anti-immigration.  They don't like the current US culture.  The subtext here is more diffuse than was the anti-abolition subtext of the Jacksonian Democrats.  The closest you can come to a one-line description would be, "We don't want to live in a sick, militantly secular culture."  But note that, unlike the 1820's and abolition, nobody's threatening to ban religion in the US.  The cultural forces are more complex than that, and the level of support for and against them has a whole bunch of people staking out positions somewhere in the middle.  (I'm one of them.)

If the Tea Party were truly just a small government party, they might easily attract enough factions from the rump of the Republican Party, independents, and conservative Democrats to form a viable party, and the current Republican Party would wither away, in fact if not name.  But the subtext is problematic for them, and their methods make it even more problematic.  It's unlikely that there are enough people willing to save the village by destroying it for their play to work.

So let's summarize the possible outcomes:

• Tea Party takes over the Republican Party, then attracts enough small-government fellow travelers to make a working near-majority.  (Unlikely, per above.)
• Tea Party fails to wrest control of the GOP, but winds up destroying it.  A new center-right party forms from the rubble.
• The GOP establishment acts to crush the Tea Party in short order, leveraging the shutdown debacle to do so.  The Tea Party members capitulate and accept their role as simply a part of the GOP coalition and work to nominate an electable 2016 candidate.  (Note that if this succeeds, Paul Ryan is going to get the lion's share of the credit, and goes to the head of the class for 2016.)
• Tea Party succeeds in gaining control of the GOP, but dramatically shrinks its influence.  They lose two or three more elections and wither away, then the more moderate elements of the GOP re-establish the status quo ante.

I'm terribly afraid that this last scenario is the most likely, and it's terrible news for the country.  By the time the old conservative coalition recovers from this disruption, we will have had 16 years of a Democratic executive.  Any hope of reining in the government will have gone out the window (if it hasn't already), and we'll be well on our way to the debt crisis that could easily tear the country apart.

A final, cautionary, historical note:  The emergence of the Jacksonian Democrats isn't a definitive event.  Things limp along for 30 years, waiting for the animating oppositional principle (abolition) to become clear.  When it does, the result is the biggest calamity the US has ever faced.  Small government is a fine animating principle, but I have no idea what the principle is that eventually emerges to oppose it.  If history is a guide, we're not going to like the result.

...Or Maybe Romney Lost Because His Campaign Was Incompetent

This post on the goat rodeo that was Project ORCA might explain a lot.

By 2PM, I had completely given up. I finally got ahold of someone at around 1PM and I never heard back. From what I understand, the entire system crashed at around 4PM. I'm not sure if that's true, but it wouldn't surprise me. I decided to wait for my wife to get home from work to vote, which meant going very late (around 6:15PM). Here's the kicker, I never got a call to go out and vote. So, who the hell knows if that end of it was working either.

So, the end result was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc. We lost by fairly small margins in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. If this had worked could it have closed the gap? I sure hope not for my sanity's sake.

The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that.

Read the whole thing--this bite only gives you the vaguest flavor of what happened.

Modern presidential campaigns require many of the skills needed by an actual White House staff.  They require vision and strategy.  But the also require superb tactical execution and, newest and perhaps most important, a firm grasp on complex, automated systems design, testing, rollout, and execution.  Based on this description, the Romney campaign utterly failed the test.

I'd be much, much happier with a Romney presidency.  But this is the sort of thing that telegraphs that might have been really screwed up.

A key tenet of the Democratic catechism is that Democrats are smarter than Republicans, and therefore should have more power in governing.  The Project ORCA post-mortem doesn't sound like it's going to do anything to dissuade anybody from thinking that the Democrats are right.

Mitt Romney Lost Because of Abortion

The despondency, fear, and loathing in the GOP has begun, with a wide range of explanations for Romney's loss in what should have been a slam-dunk year against Obama.  So far, I've seen:

• The GOP will never win until they have the courage to nominate a conservative.
• The GOP will never win until they nominate a competent moderate and don't drag him down in the primaries.
• The GOP will never win until it fixes its core values to appeal to hispanics and women.
• The Obama campaign had an amazing secret sauce to get out the vote, and the GOP will be fine next time because they'll have the same secret sauce.
• We're no longer a center-right country, and conservatives need to concentrate on seizing the cultural levers of power.
• We're no longer a center-right country, so conservatives need to build themselves a parallel society next to the one that's ultimately going to fail.  (If you've got an hour and half to burn, listening to Bill Whittle grope his way toward something coherent on this topic is kind interesting.  I suspect that when he's done with this it won't sound quite as looney as it did in spots.)
• We're no longer a center-right country, and we're all gonna die.

Some of these are laughable.  Some of them are pretty close to the truth.  Some are... worth deeper consideration.  But I think the most plausible is that the Obama campaign not only had a secret sauce for getting out the vote, but they had a real issue on which to ladle the secret sauce.

The Obama campaign, with a little bit of mind-boggling stupidity from the Republicans, managed to scare women out of their minds, convincing them that Romney was unacceptable.  And they did it over abortion.

I have a wife, two daughters, and a son.  One of my daughters and my son are apolitical--they are, in effect, the dreaded low-information voters, but they don't vote.

My wife also didn't vote, but she's far from a low-information voter.  She's just decided that voting only encourages the bastards, and they're all equally bad.  Plus, we live in Texas.  Why bother, when you know what the result is?

My oldest daughter (she's 31) is well-informed and a regular voter.  She has the handicap of having a BFA from a California art college, so she's been exposed to the absolute worst that liberal academia could possibly throw at her.  However, she's also my daughter, so she's emerged as a relatively centrist, probably slightly left-of-center, voter.

She considered voting for Romney and liked a lot of his economic ideas.  But she ultimately decided that she couldn't vote for him because she was sure that he was going to destroy the reproductive rights infrastructure in the US.  All arguments to the contrary were lost on her.  Romney and the Republicans were just too dangerous even to consider voting for them.  According to her, all of her friends thought the same way.  My wife thought the same way; if she'd voted, she would have voted against Romney for this sole issue.

Now, this is admittedly the smallest sample possible.  And my daughter admittedly is part of the Austin artsy-musician-y community, which is pretty liberal.  But I have a hunch that Obama won the election because of people like her.

The abortion issue poisons all attempts the GOP will make to regain a working electoral majority.  Unmarried women won't vote for them.  Married women who remember the 60's won't vote for them.  Only married women who are happily building families will vote for them.  Since this is a shrinking demographic, the anti-abortion activists in the GOP will manage to lose election after election for their candidates.

I am pro-abortion.  I hate the term "pro-choice" because using it prevents a frank confrontation with the ugly truth about abortion:  It's a way to kill something that would otherwise turn into a human being.  When it comes to things like this, the individual has no "choice"; society gets to make laws that bind its citizens to certain courses of action.  I don't support a burglar's right to choose whether to rip me off; I'm anti-burglary.  I don't support a violent felon's right to choose whether to beat the crap out of me;  I'm anti-battery.  But I'm pro-abortion.

Why?

Before I can explain why, I have to make things worse.  See, I actually believe that a fertilized egg is alive and for all intents and purposes human.  Will all such fertilized eggs implant and start pregnancies?  No.  But hormonal contraception will guarantee that pretty close to 100% of any zygotes that would implant, don't, and die.  Will all pregnancies result in a live birth?  No; about one third of all pregnancies end in spontaneous miscarriage.  But abortion again guarantees that almost 100% of all viable pregnancies against which it is performed will end without a live birth.  (And the small fraction that don't--well, we'll get to that.)

A common "pro-choice" argument is that a blastula, or an embryo, or an early-to-mid-term fetus isn't human because it's not viable ex vivo.  That's certainly true, but a baby isn't viable ex vivo either, without its mother's care.  Yet (almost) all cultures consider babies to be human.  Another argument is that a fetus is something less than human because it lacks many uniquely human features and faculties.  But a baby lacks many of those faculties as well.  And a baby resembles an adult human about as much as a blastula resembles a baby.  Don't think so?  Try touching a baby's arms together above its head.  Babies are born as partially-grown heads with a minimum life-support system.  They don't look or act much like people.  We're awfully fond of them, for powerful evolutionary reasons, but the only thing they have in common with adult humans is a genotype.

So, given all of the above, how can I possibly be pro-abortion?

I'm pro-abortion because we as a society get to decide when the taking of human life is justifiable and when it's murder.  We can kill people in wars and celebrate the people who do so.  We can kill people in defense of ourselves or our families and society holds us blameless.  We execute humans that have done things so heinous that we as a society consider ourselves better off without their continued existence.  We almost always regret the taking of human life, even when justified, but we do it anyway, in some circumstances.

I consider early-term abortion to be justifiable homicide.

Sounds really bad, doesn't it?  And yet, I think I can support my argument, and further show that it's merely an attempt to put something that about half the people in the country support onto a semi-ethical foundation.

For fifty years now, ever since the technology became available, women have been able to control their fertility.  The ability to do this might not have resulted in breaking down the gender-specific roles we had in our culture.  We might, as a society, have decided that women should have remained homemakers in single-income families, even if those families had control over the number of children they had, including the ability to have none at all.  Indeed, there were plenty of arguments in the 70's and 80's to that very effect.  But those arguments failed.  We provided women largely equal opportunity in almost all aspects of modern life.  It dramatically improved our economic output, but it also made the two-earner family a requirement, because the economy adapted to the new economic power afforded to women.  We can't go back to a gender-segregated set of societal roles.  If we did, our economy would collapse.

An unwanted child is therefore now an economic disaster.  Not only does it affect the woman, who can't work effectively for a long period, it also affects her entire family.  A family living hand-to-mouth on two incomes can cease to be viable as the result of an extra child.  Loss of viability could mean dissolution of the family, inability to raise the existing children properly, homelessness, hopelessness, and who knows what other misery.


So the equality of women has led, irreversibly, to families with a lot less slack in their finances, and that in turn has led to the requirement that women be able to control their fertility.  That's largely achieved through contraception but when that fails, early-term abortion is a necessity.

Of course, women could just stop having sex, both in an out of wedlock, until they wanted children.  But again, we've crossed that bridge as a society and burned it behind us.  And let's be honest:  that was never really an option, was it?  Even before contraception, women had sex, sometimes with disastrous consequences.  But it's what human beings do.  Depriving half of the country to engage in an activity that makes almost everybody happier is a horrible idea.

But what of the unwanted child itself?  The "pro-life" (a term as deceptive as its opposite) argument is that the child's right to life trumps any amount of economic hardship for the family into which it is born.  That's a valid topic for debate, but I suggest that everybody who espouses that belief should spend some time with the chronically poor.  And there's nothing that will make a family chronically poor faster than having unwanted, unaffordable children.

Economically non-viable families produce socially non-viable children at an alarming rate.  Sure, lots of kids escape chronic poverty, but lots don't.  And those unlucky kids don't just grow up poor.  They grow up... stunted.  Stifled.  Hopeless.  And we're not just talking about the unwanted child here; that child's siblings suffer the same hardships, even though they're completely innocent of the action that dropped their family below the line.

Almost everybody, even the most ardently pro-life, believe that abortion is justifiable to save the life of the mother.  This makes sense:  if the mother dies, the fetus dies with her.  Better to sacrifice one life than two.  But why doesn't that argument apply to the family as a whole?  Where's the moral distinction?

More than anything else, that's why I believe that early-term abortion is justifiable homicide.  But let's not kid ourselves:  this is a bad thing, even if it's sometimes a necessary thing.

I don't think I'm going to change any minds among the pro-life faction here.  But let's return to the political now.  If for no other reason than that economy can't manage without it, abortion is going to continue.  The pro-life faction needs to understand this.  They're not going to win.

Even worse, though, the pro-lifers recently came close enough to succeeding that the other side, the political side that can't live without the cover of their "pro-choice" half-truth, had to consider the possibility that they might win.  This inevitably forces the pro-choicers to fight for every last inch of political ground.  No issue that even whiffs of "reproductive rights" can be ceded.  They'll mobilize every last resource to fight for the most repellent of practices, because they know that every time they lose a battle, the owners of the "pro-life" half-truth will advance, ready to conquer the next issue.  Neither side can back down.

And yet, I'll bet that an overwhelming majority of Americans would agree with the following:

• Partial-birth abortions are an obscenity.  Unless the life of the mother is threatened, there should never be an excuse for this practice.  
• If the baby from a medically necessary abortion is born alive, it needs to be treated as a baby.  That may mean that the mother has the right to make the agonizing choice to withhold medical care and watch her child struggle and die, or it may mean that we as a society are on the hook for endless care of a premature baby, if that's the mother's choice.  But we can't cross that line; if the child is born alive, it's born alive.
• Short of medical necessity, there is no excuse for an abortion later than the end of the first trimester.  If the mother is an idiot and doesn't know she's pregnant, too bad.  She can put the baby up for adoption after she's carried it to term.  If we're going to tolerate abortion at all, we have to treat it as acceptable only as a failure of contraception, and that demands that the mother take some responsibility for understanding what's going on with her body and making a prompt decision.
• Pregnant minor children are their parents' responsibility.  The parent decides what happens, just like with any other medical procedure.  If the parents decide that their daughter should carry a pregnancy to term, so be it.  After all, the baby will be their responsibility.  Withholding notification from parents is insane.

This looks like the best--possibly the only--compromise that's possible on this issue.  It's an important issue, even if it poisons every piece of political discourse that it touches.  Fundamentally, this is about what acts a society considers to be murder, and I can't think of a more important public policy topic.

But the social conservatives need to understand that abortion isn't going away.  The social and economic pressures to continue it are overwhelming.  Societies have the morals that they can afford, and our society can't afford the cost, both in economic and human terms, of unwanted children.  Until they understand this, and work out a firewall compromise like the one I've outlined above, they're going to continue to lose elections.  They got too close to succeeding in rolling back a set of laws whose existence most women depend upon, and they're never going to be given another chance to do so.

If they hold on to this, they will be politically annihilated, over and over again, until they stop.  And the net result will be a continued fraying of economic prosperity, liberty, and consensus culture.

Please Assume the "Brace" Position for Our Ride Over the Fiscal Cliff

In early September, I made another prediction on which I'd like to double down:

...Maybe the Republicans will suddenly decide to put the best interests of the nation ahead of political power games.  But the problem is that they honestly, truly believe that the endpoint of a successful second term for Obama results in national ruination.  Compared to that, a double-dip recession seems a small price to pay.  Furthermore, repeal of the middle-class tax cuts will mitigate the deficit caused by the recession, which will make the deficit hawks happy.  Bottom line:  the GOP is gonna play scorched-earth if Obama wins.

I don't think this is a good idea.  A double dip will put us way too close to a debt crisis for comfort.  But I'm not sure that the House GOP thinks that a debt crisis can be avoided any more.  Maybe they make the calculation that the deficit reductions from nuking the Bush tax cuts in toto are enough to stave off the debt crisis and give them the political whip hand.

Let's look at this a bit more closely:

1. Short of an encyclical by His Holiness, Father Grover, pontiff of the Church of No Tax Increases Ever, most House Republicans are on pretty firm ground refusing to vote for any replacement to the expired Bush tax cuts, while still getting to execute a huge tax increase that will ultimately remove a big chunk of the deficit.
2. Obama may offer to extend the Bush tax cuts again, but that has a certain Lucy-with-the-football-esque quality to it.  Better to get the pain out of the way early in Obama's second term so he gets blamed for the shambles, rather than getting pinned up against the next mid-term or presidential election.
3. There is no upside to the Republicans for a grand bargain unless it's a clear win for them.  That would involve, at the very least, genuine tax reform and a deal to soft-land the transfer payments crisis at some viable percentage of total outlays (60% would be my guess).  I think Obama's too arrogant to take that deal.  (Minor prediction:  We'll hear at least one of the phrases, "Elections have consequences" or "I won" from the President some time in the next 3 months.)
4. There is nothing but political upside for the GOP to doing nothing.  Things going to hell in a handbasket three months after Obama's reelection has a cause-and-effect association that will impress even the lowest of low information voters for a long time.  ("Long time" >= 4 years.)

In short, the only thing that saves us is if Obama is willing to take a big, yummy bite of Mr. Boehner's Famous Crap Sandwich.  ("Ya want dingleberries on that, Mr. President?" he asks with a big,--oh, what's that modifier?--grin.)  I'd love to believe that Obama has the character to understand his position and do the right thing, but I think we're way too close to his blind spot for him to exhibit the necessary self-awareness.

Oddly enough, tax reform could be Obama's salvation.  You can hide a huge tax increase under the guise of "reform" and nobody will be able to figure it out.  But it'll come at a price, one that will look oddly Romneyesque when the dust settles.  My proposal:

• Across-the-board rate reduction of 5% in exchange for capped deductions and a reversion to the 20% capital gains rate at incomes above $500K.  Similar corporate tax reform.  The package should bring in $1 trillion over 10 years.
• An additional $2 trillion out of Medicare and Social Security over 10 years.  The best solution would be to means-test both programs.  I don't think Obama can go for premium support after all the stupid things he said during the campaign, but he's gonna have to throw the GOP a bone that convinces them that he's not going to get the savings with price controls.
• A targeted set of reforms to ACA:  a reduction in IPAB's power and smoothing over the small business penalty for hiring the 50th employee would go a long way.
• From there, we're down to needing about an extra $1 trillion in cuts over 10 years.  This is within the zone of possible agreement between Obama and the GOP.

It's doable, but I have to say that the GOP has a massive strategic advantage going into this.

The Forecast: Moderate Gloom With Scattered Paranoia

Well, that was a bummer.

Over the past couple of months, I'd come to admire Mr. Romney immensely.  He ran an absolutely abysmal campaign up until October 1, and then suddenly got everything together.  He would have made a superb steward of the US executive branch.  Oh, well.

Now:  Did I call it, or what?

A boring presidential election is a ratings disaster.  It can't be allowed to happen.  So a Romney comeback is a financial imperative.

Furthermore, a Romney comeback is a damn good story.  Think of the drama as the Romney campaign reenergizes itself, retools its message, and claws its way back to within a whisker's breadth of its opponent.  It's the perfect third act.

It's also just the thing to show Obama at his pluckiest.  The beleaguered President, beset by a sea of troubles, slowly gains the upper hand over his rival against all odds, only to become complacent and have things almost slip away.  But at the last moment, he too rights his campaign, just in time to squeak out a win.

All is right with the world.  The media get the outcome they want, and their network executives get to take home their bonuses.

And now, for the paranoia:  If it weren't for Obama tanking the first debate, there would have been no drama to the race.  Obama would have coasted to at least a six point victory, and nobody would have watched the news for the crucial last month of the campaign.

So, if you were a media executive with access to the highest levels of the Obama campaign, and you could convince the President that the election was in the bag no matter what, do you think you could convince him to go limp for the first debate?

Nah.  Surely not. 

Right?

Intrade, Sunday Afternoon

Note that Obama, after rising substantially over the last couple of weeks, is now starting to tail off again:

Still not looking good, but you'd expect to be seeing things rising close to 100% if there were a real consensus yet.  A negative first derivative is a good thing.

UPDATE 11/07/12:  I'm retroactively nominating this post for this year's First Annual Radical Moderation Whistling in the Dark Award, for the most willful denial of reality written down this year.

Party Identification, Revisited

Nate Sliver is now contending, with fairly strong evidence, that the only way that Romney can win is if there is statistical bias.  By this he means a systematic sampling error, rather than some kind of partisan bias.

Today we also have an NBC/WSJ/Marist poll from Ohio showing Obama with a 51 to 45 lead.  (Full PDF here.)

All of this got me to thinking about the brouhaha back in September about party identification.

Back then, there were a whole bunch of Republican proxies raising questions about Democrats being oversampled in the polls (all rapidly southbound for Romney at the time).  The argument was that pollsters appeared to be filtering likely voters based on a party identification model that looked weird, given the GOP's strength in 2010 vs. 2008.

It was a bad argument, because party identification isn't used to filter likely voters.  However, party identification is a commonly asked question in presidential preference polls.  One would expect party ID to be somewhat correlated with presidential preference, but not completely.  As a general rule, party ID should be a lot less volatile than presidential preference.

This is where things get kinda strange.  Take, for example, the Marist poll above.  It found party ID to be 38% Democratic, 29% Republican, and 32% independent.  When you compare that to exit polling in Ohio in 2008 and 2010, here's what you get:

Party ID	2008 Exit Ohio	2010 Exit Ohio	11/03/12 Marist Ohio
Democrat	39	36	38
Republican	31	36	29
Independent	30	28	32

Obama won handily in 2008 and the Democrats made significant gains in the House and Senate, so a +8 spread for the Democrats sounded reasonable.  And, in 2010, note that the zero spread between the two parties indicated a sharp shift to the Republicans, as the election results confirmed.

But look at the Marist results for November 3 likely voters: you wind up with a spread of Democrats +9, even greater than that of 2008.  Now, I'm willing to believe that the GOP isn't as strong in Ohio as it was in 2010 but, given the state of the country and Romney's rapid (and dramatic!) rise following the debates, the GOP is almost certainly not doing worse than it did in 2008.  Something's wrong.

Now, I am not saying that the pollsters have done biased filtering for likely voters.  These people live and die on their professional reputations, and they're simply not going to risk going into the tank by applying any illegitimate filter criterion, let alone one with such a strong coefficient.

But there is something profoundly wrong with these numbers.  They don't make sense.  Why?

The only answer I can come up with is that there is indeed some sort of systematic sampling error at work.  Maybe it's a problem with the cell phone model.  Maybe it's just that the people who will actually answer a survey these days are very, very odd.  Maybe it's something more subtle.  But the party ID numbers don't pass the smell test, and that means the sampling is weird.

Given that I think that Nate Silver is correct, this is very good news for Romney.  Or at least not bad news.  Or... news.  My conclusions have a high standard error.

Benghazi

This is one of those issues where I find myself walking a narrow path between cynicism and naivete.  My inner cynic knows that all administrations lie about national security in general and war in particular, so I'm not surprised that the Obama Administration is spewing contradictory stories to sow confusion like an octopus squirts ink.

But my inner naif keeps telling me that the American people deserve a straightforward accounting before they vote.  (Well, before a lot of them vote.  Some of us have already pulled the trigger.)

So let's see if we can organize the giant mudslide of data into something vaguely coherent.

This much we seem to know:

1. A 16-man security team, after having its tour extended for four months, was pulled out of Libya on August 14.
2. There were at least two requests for enhanced security that went from State's regional security manager to his superiors.  Both were either ignored or denied.
3. The US consulate was attacked twice prior to the 9/11/12 attack, although one of the attacks was conducted by recently fired Libyan guards.  The British ambassador had also been attacked and the Brits had withdrawn their mission.
4. There was no spontaneous riot at the consulate.  The attackers moved directly on the consulate with small arms and at least RPGs.  By the time of the battle at the annex, they had a mortar crew in place.  We do not know if the attack was spontaneous in response to the rioting elsewhere, a pre-planned attack that was moved up to capitalize on the riots, or a planned attack that may have incited the riots elsewhere for greater impact.
5. There was a drone overhead throughout most of the attack.  The annex was feeding situation reports in real time back to at least the CIA.
6. Panetta says he was aware of the attack shortly after it began, but the intelligence was too poor to mount a rescue.
7. The President says that he directed has National Security team to "make sure we are securing our personnel and doing what we need to".
8. Fox News reports that the CIA annex asked for permission to go to the aid of the consulate and were told to stand down.  David Ignatius's reporting indicates that this command may have only lasted a half hour while the CIA checked with friendly militias.  These two reports are somewhat in conflict.
9. The same Fox News report indicates that after the battle for the annex began, repeated requests for military support were made to the CIA.  These requests was denied.  The CIA denies this.  The same report indicates that one of the men in the protective detail had painted targets from the roof of the annex with a ground laser designator.
10. On 9/12/12, Obama did indeed use the words "acts of terror" but if he was referring to the Benghazi attack, jeez, talk about burying the lede.  Read the transcript for yourself.
11. The official Presidential Daily Brief version of the attack still referred to protests over the film the day before Susan Rice went on the Sunday shows, so she may have been acting on the best official assessment she had.  Per this report, the CIA reassessed at just about the time Rice was floating the "protesting the film" story to anybody who'd put her on camera.
12. Jay Carney stated that the attack was in protest of the movie on 9/20/12, long after the PDB had been updated.  Obama's UN speech of 9/25/12 never mentioned terrorism but referred to the protests and the movie repeatedly.
13. Carter Ham's replacement as commander of AFRICOM was announced on 10/18/12.  Per Jennifer Griffin, this action had been planned for some time, contrary to speculation that he was relieved while attempting to send in a rescue.

This much we either suspect or can infer:

1. It's possible that the White House was unaware of the requests for extra security but, given the IED attack, the attack that destroyed one of the walls around the consulate, and the June attack on the British ambassador, it seems incredible (aka "unbelievable") that the White House didn't know that there was a problem.  They clearly didn't act.
2. It's possible that the CIA stovepiped the situational reports and didn't share them with the Pentagon, but it's inconceivable that they withheld them from the White House.  Given Panetta's comments, it's almost certain that DoD was looped in pretty early.
3. Several bloggers, most notably Blackfive,  commented that nobody paints a target with a GLD unless there's an air asset in the area, because the GLD is visible in night vision goggles and gives away your position.  This seems to contradict statements that the drones were unarmed and/or that no other armed air assets were in the area.  If that's true, then somebody told them to hold fire, which could only have come from the White House, the Pentagon, or General Ham, the AFRICOM commander.
4. While it's possible that Susan Rice didn't get the word, either deliberately or inadvertently, the White House must have known that there was more to this than a riot that got out of hand.  And there's no way that they kept Jay Carney in the dark on this without some ulterior motive.

There are some important outstanding questions:

1. Why were the security requests ignored?  Was there a diplomatic rationale?  Was there a political rationale (i.e. because extra security weakened the narrative of an acceptably orderly aftermath of the Arab Spring, or that organized Islamist militants were in decline)?
2. What was the nature of the attack in Benghazi? Was it pre-planned or extemporaneous to capitalize on the protests about the move?
3. Why did the Obama Administration muddy the waters so much after the attack?  Was it incompetence, political strategy, or something else?

And, finally, we can make some judgements:

1. The President has allowed a massive management failure to occur on his watch.  There is some sort of serious dysfunction between State, CIA, and DoD, both in escalating threat assessments to the President and in managing an emerging military situation.
2. The most charitable thing that can be said about the messaging in the aftermath of the attack is that the White House was hopelessly confused.  More likely, it knew it had a political liability on its hands and it muddied the waters as much as possible, while deliberately burying the truth in a bunch of untruths that could plausibly be interpreted as the "fog of war".
3. The President has been ignorant or at least incurious about how well his foreign policy narrative jibes with reality.  That disconnect has cost American lives and severely diminished American soft power.

Is this a disqualifying event for a second Obama term?  Not all by itself.  But it is a rather stunning sequence of situational misjudgement, risk-averse crisis management, and craven obfuscation.

Horses and Bayonets

Obama had a nice zinger in the foreign policy debate:

You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.

Nice, but stupid. And dangerous. Here's why:

It's lovely having ships that are vastly more capable than those of the past. And there's no doubt that a modern aircraft carrier can dominate the skies over a nice, hefty chunk of territory. And there's also equally no doubt that a modern missile sub can pretty much destroy half a continent. But power isn't the only criterion you're interested in. There are three other important factors.

First, Obama seems to think that ships don't get destroyed in wartime. An aircraft carrier is the biggest, fattest target ever to float, and a lot of creativity has gone into figuring out how to destroy it. That's why aircraft carriers sail in the middle of giant task forces, whose sole purpose is to protect the carrier. But the odds of losing a carrier in a full-up war are non-trivial. For that reason, you need redundancy, both in task force ships and in task forces themselves.

Second, highly capable ships are extremely expensive. Sometimes it's better to build cheaper, less capable ships, which can be moved around more flexibly.

Third, the most likely naval foe of the next 50 years is China. If they confront us, they're likely to do it everywhere, all at once. That means that we could face pressure from East Africa all the way to the US west coast. A carrier task force can control a chunk of sky and ocean maybe 750 miles in radius, but it sure can't control half the world simultaneously. Moving carriers around is slow and dangerous. You need enough task forces to meet the plausible threats.

It's simple to draw down the size of your navy by dropping out a carrier task force or two. But doing so allows your most likely enemy to put you in a serious hole with a couple of lucky hits, and then overwhelm your capabilities by causing trouble in a lot of places at once.

Obama seems to think that the navy is there to be impressive. He doesn't quite understand that it's only impressive if your adversaries think that it can fight a real war.

What Romney Should Have Said About Libya

My esteem for Hillary Clinton's integrity went up several notches when she fell on her sword for the Obama Administration over the run-up to the Benghazi consulate attack.  Conventional wisdom seems to be that this pulled the teeth of any criticism of Obama on the security situation.  And indeed, Romney gave Obama a pass on this in the second debate and focused on the, er, "communication problems" he had with calling a terrorist attack a terrorist attack.

This led to Romney's lowest point in the debate, with the prez summoning much outrage and then getting an assist from the Candy Crowley.  Coming right at the end of the debate, it was a heavy hit against Romney.

What he should have said was this:

I was a business management consultant for much of my life in the private sector, so I know what a well-run organization looks like.  The leader of an effective organization fosters a culture where subordinates are trusted run their departments, but where serious problems are identified and communicated promptly up to the leadership.

The United States government is like any other organization, and President Obama is currently its leader.  The warnings coming from Benghazi were clearly a serious problem.  If they weren't communicated up to the White House national security staff, and then on to the President, then that is certainly evidence of a dysfunctional organization.  There's only one person responsible for dysfunction in an organization, and that is its leader.

It's not surprising that President Obama doesn't know how to foster a healthy organizational culture; after all, his career in politics has given him no experience in doing so.  But that doesn't change the fact that when an emergency arose, his organization failed to respond correctly to it.  We need a leader with management skills suited to running a serious government.  I am that leader; President Obama is not.

Take that, l'esprit d'escalier!

Architecture and Implementation, Strategy and Tactics

Before I retired, I was a software architect.  It's a strange job.  Software architects typically don't code (at least in big companies); instead, they sit the intersection between marketing, engineering, and project management, and attempt to describe how a product should fit into overall corporate strategy, and how it should be constructed so that it's easy to build, easy to maintain, easy to use in conjunction with other products, and easy to extend.  A good architect can explain to the engineers why they're building something, while only sketching out the roughest outline of how to build it.  Good products can happen without architects; indeed, the most innovative--and disruptive--products usually happen without architects.  But a lot more bad products happen without architects.   When you're engaged in a major evolution of a huge, complex product line, good architecture provides a road map for implementation, which can save millions of dollars in misguided development.

Architecture is to implementation what strategy is to tactics.  A good strategist has a gift for knowing what it is that a government--or a campaign--really needs to accomplish, and can suggest the broad outline for how to achieve that goal.  It's then up to the tacticians and the troops actually to accomplish it.

The Romney tax plan is an architecture.  Romney steadfastly refuses to come up with specifics for the tax expenditure cuts because he knows that an architect that dabbles in implementation over-constrains the final outcome, which usually prevents the best implementations from emerging.  (Mind you, the "best implementation" of a piece of legislation is almost an oxymoron, but that's often because the problem is already massively over-constrained by the various legislators' pet peeves and favors they owe their supporters.)

It is completely legitimate to ask, "Can this architecture be implemented?"  We have a variety of studies that have argued that the answer to that question is "no" and another set arguing "yes".  My impression is that the TPC study, the most famous of the "no" variety, has managed to generate a bad answer by exactly the kind of over-constraint that Romney has sought to avoid.  I'm pretty sure that Romney's architecture is valid, although maybe with a 15% tax cut instead of 20%, and maybe with some investment tax expenditures on the table.  Romney's not going to say that, for the same reason that he's not going to propose any of the details about cuts.

The tax plan may be good architecture, but I'm not sure it's good strategy.  It's opened his campaign up to charges of vagueness that have real traction.  It's further opened it up to charges that he's being disingenuous.  This looks like a fundamental tradeoff--Romney wants to get elected, but he wants to get elected to do something, so he has to preserve his ability to act in the event he gets to be President.

But let's look at another example of strategy:  the Obama-Biden approach to the debates.  I think that the Obama campaign's over-arching strategic assumption going into the debates was that all they needed to do was make Romney and Ryan look stupid.  This was a fundamental mistake because neither Romney nor Ryan are stupid.  The fact that Obama and his team thought that they were is a colossal misjudgement, one that many voters quite rightly may decide disqualifies them for office.

Even worse, after being presented with evidence to the contrary in the first debate, the campaign doubled down on the "they're stupid" strategy and had Biden attempt to bully Ryan into submission.  But, while Biden landed a couple of solid hits to Ryan, Biden's contempt for Ryan, whether manufactured or real, came through so plainly that the content of the debate, which might have given Biden a slight edge, became irrelevant.  Again, the Obama campaign made a fundamental strategic mistake, compounded by poor execution by Biden.

I'll make a prediction:  Obama's performance in the next debate will be much more aggressive, but his strategy won't change.  The idea that his opponents are stupid and/or unworthy is so deeply ingrained in his personality that it's incomprehensible to him that a simple demonstration of contempt won't be enough to carry the day.  The next debate will be a draw, but the audience's greatest takeaway will be what Obama thinks of Romney, rather than what he thinks of his own policies.

The failed debate strategy might be forgiven if it weren't part of a pattern of consistent strategic miscalculation that pervades Obama's entire term:

• The diplomatic "reset" strategy only succeeded in convincing both our friends and our enemies that the US would be reluctant to act in the face of any aggression.
• Obama decided to expend all of his domestic political capital on a health care law that nobody can understand.
• Obama decided that there would be no consequences to booting Iraq Status of Forces Agreement.
• Surging troops into Afghanistan while simultaneously setting a rigid timetable for their withdrawal has allowed the Taliban to adopt a hit-and-run strategy as they run the clock out.
• Finally, Obama has adopted a strategy of encouraging legislative gridlock and blaming the Republicans for it, based on the assumption that he can get anything through Congress once he's been reelected.   We'll see whether this one worked in about a month.

Obama's strategic deficiencies might be partly forgiven--as Clinton's were--if he were a good political tactician, deferring to his staff for the strategy while concentrating on the tasks of executing on legislation and selling it to the American public.  But he's not very good at that, either.

We elect presidents for their ability to think strategically.  Evidence of consistently poor strategy should always be a disqualifier for office.

On Rediscovering Partisan Rage

I have to admit that this cycle's presidential campaign has filled me with something close to despair.  It's not the divisiveness--divisiveness is a key ingredient for healthy debate.  It's not the gratuitous nastiness, although that's certainly extremely unpleasant.  Ultimately, it's the tired, mindless, I-must-never-deviate-from-the-talking-points back-and-forth between pundits from either camp A or camp B that has caused me pretty much to stop watching cable news, or TV news in general.  And the internet is hardly better.  There are a huge number of sites that I avoid simply because I know in advance exactly what they're going to say, and that any headline that looks like it might contain new content will always prove to have an utterly specious argument.

I voted against McCain in '08 and I don't regret it.  But I've never been very happy with Obama.  He is, fundamentally, a big-government, anti-business politician who doesn't understand the proper ratio of collective action to redistribution.  And, I have to say:  I don't like him.  He's arrogant, condescending, inflexible, and dismissive to the point of intolerance of any idea or person that challenges him.  It makes him a lousy negotiator and a lousy leader.  No doubt my judgement is the result of a deep-seated racism that I didn't know I harbored secretly.

For all of these reasons, and because, if I'm forced to take sides, I'm a moderate conservative, I was pretty excited about Romney to begin with.  I became noticeably less excited after interminable debates with the Six Dwarves forced him to morph into the worst possible version of himself.  I then gradually subsided into apathetic torpor as he ran a surprisingly ham-handed campaign.  Still, because I am forced to take sides, I had more-or-less decided to vote against Obama, while holding out a faint hope that Romney would do something to make me a bit more enthusiastic.

I have to admit that I had a sort of daydream where Romney came out in the first debate and simply annihilated Obama.  But it was a daydream similar to the one where I find a group of dedicated scientists and engineers working on an uncharted tropical island to build a starship to contact the alien civilization they'd secretly discovered in the Alpha Centauri system five years ago.  Very cool, but kinda long odds.

Then Romney came out in the first debate and simply annihilated Obama.

I've always liked the architecture of Romney's tax plan.  Its goal is to provide preferential treatment to small and medium-sized businesses, which will benefit from lower marginal rates disproportionately, because they don't have a huge number of deductions that they can take, nor do they have a lot of capital gains.  Couple that with the possible simplification of the tax code (it never really works out, does it?) and Romney's commitment to keep everything revenue neutral, and it looked like a winner to me.

The Tax Policy Center analysis worried me a bit, but it only looks bad because Brown and Looney rule out fiddling with capital gains or dividend tax expenditures and statically score the plan.  I'm convinced that there's wiggle-room in Romney's position to do the fairly small adjustments that would be needed to maintain revenue neutrality while keeping progressivity the same as the current code.  There are a lot of different ways to do this, as I discussed here.

The Obama people have been parading the "5 trillion dollar tax cut to benefit the rich" meme around on the stump for months.  It's the most egregious of strawmen, since it ignores half of Romney's plan (which Romney has described consistently for some time now).  But what the hell?  It's the campaign.  Eventually the truth will out on stuff like this.

And sure enough, Romney slapped Obama down multiple times on this in the debate.  This ultimately devolved into an "Is not! Is so!" argument.  But at the end of the debate, Romney had told Obama to his (slightly averted) face that Obama's description of the plan was a strawman and had clearly described the constraints of the plan's architecture (revenue neutrality, no revenue loss from the rich, offset lower marginal rates with reduced tax expenditures) and the rationale for doing this (stimulate small business).  He answered every single one of Obama's objections.

Now, it's a perfectly reasonable argument to accuse Romney of making a plan up that he has no intention of implementing, and I fully expected Obama to do that.  What I didn't expect, because it had been so thoroughly rebutted in the debate, to such devastating effect, was Obama to go back to the "5 trillion dollar tax cut for the rich."  Yet, in his Madison, WI rally yesterday, we have this:

Now, some of you may have heard, last night we had our first debate. (Applause.) And I just flew in from Denver, and I was telling folks there, when I got on the stage, I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney. (Laughter.) But I know it couldn’t have been Mitt Romney -- because the real Mitt Romney has been running around the country for the last year promising $5 trillion in tax cuts that favor the wealthy. And yet, the fellow on the stage last night -- who looked like Mitt Romney -- (laughter) -- said he did not know anything about that. It was all news to him.

I'm trying real hard not to be naive here.  But the news cycle yesterday was dominated by one idea and one idea only, clearly fed right out of the Obama campaign's talking points:  Obama lost the debate because Romney is a liar.  It is such a mindless defense of Obama's abysmal performance, and it has been perpetuated so glibly, that I have experienced something that I try very hard to avoid in thinking about in politics.

I have become enraged.

Before this, I had to respect the Obama campaign for driving--and largely winning--the argument, because the Romney campaign simply couldn't get their thumbs out to defend themselves.  But when Romney successfully defends most of his platform ten feet away from the President, I insist that the President answer with something better than, "La la la la la, not listening!"

This man, our President, is either intellectually vacuous or morally bankrupt.  The possession of either trait disqualifies him as a suitable candidate for the office of President of the United States.

There's the Drama

Romney had a very good night tonight.  Per polling data, he came out on top by more than 2-to-1.

But it wasn't that good a night.  If you believe the talking heads--even the pro-Obama ones--Romney's performance was a game-changer.  That may be, but it's awfully convenient that Romney is now in dramatically better shape.

Golly, I wonder what this will do for ratings?

Redefining Redistribution

The various recent sound bites from Obama on "redistribution" have been rebutted in an odd way through various Democratic talking points.

In the rebutting of the 1998 Loyola speech, Democrats have noted that the Republicans' release of the sound bite is deceptively edited, and that immediately after Obama discusses his belief in redistribution, he talks about market-based solutions.  (Clip, transcript, and gratuitous commentary here.) 

But it's pretty clear from the clip that Obama is talking about markete-based solutions to further redistributive ends. 

The next avenue of rebuttal has been more along the lines of, "Redistribution is just what government does."  An example of this is Deval Patrick's argument on Meet the Press yesterday:

We-- it seems to me the first question ought to be what is it we want government to do and not do.  And then what’s the sensible way and fair way to pay for that.  I really believe in this no-- notion just as the president does of common cause and common destiny that we all have a stake in educating our kids.  We all have a stake in ensuring that this country is well defended.  We all have a stake in investing in the infrastructure that creates a platform for economic growth and-- and opportunity and indeed we all have a stake in the American dream.

Notice that entitlements don't get mentioned explicitly anywhere in Patrick's argument.  And that's where things get kinda sneaky.

For argument's sake, let's define two terms to describe the totality of what government does with its revenues:

• Collective action involves the transfer of tax monies to activities that benefit the public in general, rather than specific individuals.  Defense, law enforcement, infrastructure, education, and research subsidies would all fall into this category.
• Redistribution involves the transfer of tax monies to individuals for purposes of increasing their wealth beyond what they can make as free agents in various markets.  Social security, Medicare, various welfare programs, EITC, GI Bill programs, and various kinds of individual loan guarantees all fall into this category.

Now, I've obviously defined the terms to make my argument--feel free to call them "X" and "Y" if that'll make you more comfortable.  But it's misleading at best to define "redistribution" as "the transfer of tax monies to any end that the government sees fit."

I'd be a bit surprised to find any Republicans that would object to the use of of tax monies for many purposes of collective action.  No doubt there'd be brisk debate about whether individual investments were cost-effective or not, but in general everybody agrees that collective action is a legitimate government activity.

Similarly, I don't think you'll find more than a tiny fraction of Republicans--even Mitt "47 percent" Romney--who disagree with government being responsible for some amount of redistribution.  But almost all Republicans and conservatives are alarmed by the growth of redistribution at the expense of collective action.

Let's go to a table on the White House's web site, "Table 3.1--Outlays by Superfunction and Function: 1940-2017" (Excel).  This lists the percentage of outlays for various government functions.  (Weasel words:  this is federal spending--things might look somewhat different if you included state and local spending, but I'll bet not much different.)  I rolled up the percentages of the the various superfunctions as follows:

• Collective action:  national defense, physical resources, net interest, other functions, and undistributed offsetting receipts
• Redistribution: human resources (which contains education, which I'd label as collective action if I were more diligent, but it's a tiny amount)

Here's the graph from 1940 to 2017:

I think this adequately explains conservative concern over redistribution.  Conservatives would love to be able to spend more on infrastructure and research and law enforcement and, yes, defense.  But it's simply not possible if the redistribution trend continues.

A good society should give the poor a hand up, and it's lovely to care for your sick and elderly, but ultimately societies have the morals that they can afford.  If we can't flatten out the redistribution trend, the government will ultimately collapse.  Then there will be no redistribution at all.

The Republicans Will Drive Us Off the Fiscal Cliff--Unless You Elect Romney

I've been trying to game out how the presidential election results affects the fiscal cliff results, and I think I've come to a perverse conclusion:  The only way to make the Republicans responsible is to elect Romney.

Now, I'm kinda leaning toward Romney anyway, but let me lay this out:

If Obama wins, he can't touch the Bush middle class tax cuts (which account for most of the lost revenue), but he'll try to make the ones on earners with more than $250K expire.  There are two strategies to get this result:

1. Negotiate a full-blown tax reform package that gives the GOP enough cover to raise rates a little bit on everybody and a lot on the wealthy.  I have absolutely no faith in Obama's ability to thread this needle--he and his staff are legislative incompetents.
2. Let the Bush tax cuts expire in toto and then offer a new bill that restores the middle class portions of the tax cuts.

Strategy #2 has been bandied about as a winner for the Democrats, and might be within Obama's competence to handle.  But I'm skeptical that this kind of hardball will bring the Republicans to heel.

Suppose the GOP refuses to give in.  Then we go over the taxation portion of the fiscal cliff, which will almost certainly send us into a double dip recession, just in time for the mid-term elections.  Obama and the Democrats will certainly try to blame the Republicans for this, but being president trumps being a bunch of idiot legislators.  The electorate will simply note that this happened--twice--on Obama's watch and punish him the only way available:  by electing more Republicans to Congress.  Then, in 2016, they'll elect Paul Ryan.  Hillary won't have a prayer.

The problem is that the public perceives even a divided government as being controlled by whichever side owns the executive.  So lots of disgust will be directed to Congress, but at the end of the day, the messaging that wins will be, "This happened on Obama's watch."

Now, maybe the Republicans will suddenly decide to put the best interests of the nation ahead of political power games.  But the problem is that they honestly, truly believe that the endpoint of a successful second term for Obama results in national ruination.  Compared to that, a double-dip recession seems a small price to pay.  Furthermore, repeal of the middle-class tax cuts will mitigate the deficit caused by the recession, which will make the deficit hawks happy.  Bottom line:  the GOP is gonna play scorched-earth if Obama wins.

On the other hand, consider a Romney win.  Congress is unlikely to be filibuster-proof, which means that the GOP has to negotiate a genuine tax reform package that is largely agreeable to the Democrats.  My guess is that this means that Romney gets his reduced rates, but the price for them is that we revert back to the 20% top capital gains rate from the pre-Bush era.  Then the GOP majority can use reconciliation rules to push through discretionary spending reductions, and we'll have an entirely proper battle royale over entitlement spending.

Note that this is an excellent outcome for almost everybody.  Capital gains only affect small business owners if they try to sell their business, which is comparatively rare.  On the other hand, the financial people, who by all accounts are the ones that are driving income inequality, will wind up paying more, since most of their income is predicated on capital gains.

I'd guess that Romney is going to prioritize growth and debt reduction about equally.  There's a path to achieving both of these goals with a divided government, and he's very good at managing these kinds of priorities.  The wildcard is ACA repeal/replacement/modification/what-have-you.  Romney could spend as much political capital as Obama on this, and the result will be that he doesn't get to do what he wants to do for real.  I think he's smart enough only to pay lip-service to health care, but he could get sucked into all kinds of nonsense there.

Either way, the only hope of avoiding a double-dip is to elect Romney.  The reasons for doing so may or may not be entirely palatable, but the GOP has enough power to make a second Obama term a living hell for everybody.

What Do Social Conservatives Want?

Apparently the Republicans don't quite understand that when they make inflammatory comments about things like abortion and its legality in cases of rape or incest, they're constructing shiny objects with which their opponents can take them off message for days at a time.  This is so stupid on its face that I'm tempted to think that I'm missing something.  But I have a better question:  Why do social conservatives care about this stuff?

Full disclosure:  I'm not a social conservative.  I'm pro-abortion.  (The term "pro-choice" seems horribly dishonest to me.)  I think that children ought to learn about evolution and earth science and cosmology.  I think that teaching kids how to stay unpregnant and disease-free during sex is a reasonable function for public schools, although I have no problem with parents opting their kids out of such classes.  I don't have a problem with sex and violence on TV or pornography or the general coarsening of our discourse.  If gay people want to get married, I don't care.  And I certainly think that gay couples need to have the same legal rights as straight couples, even if they aren't married.  I'm perfectly happy if immigrants import strange customs and funny ideas.  (I'd like them to import them--and themselves--legally, but I'm disinclined to support the ugliness and suffering that would be involved in rounding up everybody who's here illegally.)

On the other hand, I do understand that social coherency is important to national strength and economic robustness, and that the easiest way of maintaining social coherency is to maintain traditional values.  And none of the things I've listed above (with the exception of indoctrinating children with incorrect science) is conducive to the maintenance of said values.

So the answer to my title question is, at the most obvious level, pretty simple:  Social conservatives want to maintain traditional values. But the problem we're going to face is that maintenance of a value system implies a certain level of disgust and intolerance when that value system is violated.  Disgust has grown terribly unfashionable, and intolerance is now, for all intents and purposes, illegal. 

So let's peel back the next layer of the onion and look at the factors that mitigate disgust and intolerance, and therefore erode traditional values.  These are all going to boil down to two factors:  media and government coercion.

Of these, media is by far the biggest problem.  TV and internet show kids behaviors that aren't part of the traditional culture, and in so showing them inoculate the kids to the strangeness.  When behaviors aren't strange, they don't generate disgust.  With no disgust, the probability of kids adopting some of the behaviors goes way up.

Even worse, special interest groups have learned how to indoctrinate via the media.  Parents are helpless to prevent this kind of indoctrination, short of turning off the the TV and the internet (which is what they should do...).

Protection of civil rights is the camel's nose under the tent  that lets the government begin coercing behaviors.  The government can't do much about disgust, but they can force tolerance.  There's a fine line to be trod here, and the government tends not to be very subtle.  Here also, special interest groups know just how to tweak the government to get their hunks of cultural agenda institutionalized and codified, making them part of the culture willy-nilly.

Social conservatives quite correct view both the media and the government as huge threats to what they view as traditional culture.  They feel that they're getting stuff force-fed to their children, and they have no defense against it.  So the real answer to the question, "What do social conservatives want?" is that they want to be left alone.

But the "culture war" is inherently asymmetrical, with one side proactively trying to change a variety of stuff and the other side merely resisting that change.  The problem is that the social conservatives believe that playing defense isn't working.  So they've found a way to play offense, a way that's, well, offensive.

When you don't have a legal framework for resisting assaults on your values, your next best weapon is to attempt to discredit the people doing the assaulting.  This is why the Right is obsessed with the "liberal media" and with "big government".  It's why the Right spends so much time resisting abortion and gay rights.  It's why they work so hard to discredit multiculturalism.  They think that this is the only way to hold back the tide.  And it doesn't really matter how valid their arguments are; muddying the waters is a somewhat effective way to ensure that they things they're resisting remain excluded from mainstream thought.

The second tactic is to become reactionary.  Social conservatives maintain a benchmark for culture that would require eliminating existing rights and  cultural conventions.  It'll never happen, but it forces their opponents to play more defense and less offense.

But in the long run this is going to be an abysmal failure.  The culture is what the culture is, and trying to roll it back is guaranteed to alienate moderate voters who by-and-large don't care that much but who think that denial of reality as a negotiating strategy is just plain stupid.    Social conservatives lose power with the center, and the best that they can hope to do is to maintain the status quo.  And each time that they alienate too much of the center, they lose a little more cultural ground.

I think that there's a way to win, and it will be massively less disruptive to political discourse.  Here it is:

Accept the status quo, and turn off your TV sets.

Think how much more powerful Romney's and Ryan's message would be if they merely said, "You all know where we stand on these issues, but we're willing to take them off the table, as long as our opponents don't push past the status quo."  Would the Far Right be angry about this?  Probably.  But there's an answer for them, too. "These aren't national issues, but they're terrific local ones.  Work with your neighbors to live the way you think is is right, and we'll keep the government off your back.  Then the only thing that can hurt you is the media, and they can only hurt you if you listen to them.  So keep your kids away from the TV and massively restrict their internet access."

We're not going back to a 1950's society, short of a massive technological collapse.  But social conservatives can get what they want, as long as they can limit government coercion to current levels.  Ironically, the best way to do that is to stop fighting and focus on the economy.  Pro-business fiscal conservatives will win every time with the independents as long as they don't freak them out with fantasy.  And, once power is won, it can be maintained as long as the basic bargain is kept:  Any additional changes will be resisted, but nobody will try to roll back the changes already made.

The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Moron

OK, OK, let's get the introductory stuff out of the way:  The original quote was attributed to Archilochus:  "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."  Isaiah Berlin used the aphorism to write a really really famous essay on Tolstoy's theory of history.  Very, very deep, I'm sure.

Haven't read it.

But I like the nice, shallow, viral form of the meme, which classifies people (for our purposes we'll define "people" as "people who like to think about policy and politics") into those that have an agile, eclectic method of thinking, considering each topic or issue for itself (foxes), and those that attempt to make sense of things by synthesizing all topics/issues into a form that can be made sense of via one overarching organizing principle (hedgehogs).

I'm a hedgehog.

The rap on hedgehogs is that they have a tendency to warp the facts to fit their hedgehogesque principle.  Sort of a variation on, "If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."  A fair criticism.  I try to avoid it through a sort of meta-hedgehogism:  Maybe I don't know what the underlying organizing principle is, so if I run across facts that don't make sense in its context, then maybe I need to re-examine my principle du jour.

Now, my best guess at the organizing principle so far is that the beauty of the universe is a result from a deep, pervading tendency for stuff of all types to self-organize as it attempts to interact with, and ultimately acquire, resources.  This is what accounts for the ratio of hydrogen to helium in the universe, and the formation of stars and planetary systems, and the origin and evolution of life, and human societies and economies.  It's what makes the world just so goddamn beautiful.

Dragging this into its political/economic form, I hold as an article of faith that lots of independent agents acting almost randomly will paradoxically produce goods and services vastly more efficiently than a few agents thinking deep thoughts and then telling everybody else what to do and how to organize it so it'll be really nifty.

I really, really, really like free markets.

Which brings me to the Republicans. 

When you're a hedgehog libertarian (are there any non-hedgehog libertarians?) and you're faced with a choice between a party that believes in the free market and one filled with policy wonks that "want to get things done", the choice is pretty obvious.  You'll forgive your party of choice its religious oddities.  You'll wish that it understood that the same free market they so extol works with the same underlying mechanism as the evolution that think is just a theory that hasn't been proven.  You'll reluctantly acknowledge that lots of folks use "the free market" as a convenient stalking horse for their own brand of rent-seeking.  You'll try to ignore the fact that some of your fellow travelers comprise a large group that can perhaps best be described as "The Toothless."  And you'll try not to alienate the guys on the other side because a lot of them are very clever and they're fun to sit next to at dinner parties.

You'll do all of these things and you'll vote for a Republican because it slightly heightens the probability that the market will be a little bit freer, which gives all of those millions of agents out there acting almost randomly a bit more chance to generate something of startling value and/or extraordinary beauty.

But they're making it so hard this year.

I'm not sure that Mitt Romney can pass a Turing Test, but he will undoubtedly lean toward a freer market--a freer everything--than Barack Obama will.  Yes, he comes equipped with legions of pilot fish that will wish to loot and plunder, and we'll have to watch them pretty closely to make sure they don't leave with the good silverware.  But the guy seems to be able to manage anything, except perhaps his own presidential campaign.

But...  contraception?  Really?  Sure, sure, religious freedom, less coercion by the feds, yup, all good.  So why can't you pivot and talk about the real issues?  Are you all public relations idiots?  How hard is it to yell "freedom!" over and over at the top of your lungs?  And why are there so many Republicans attracted to the shiny objects?

Then you have a Republican presidential candidate who decides to assail his main competitor--in public, mind you--by denigrating his--wait, let me get the quote right: "...business background of buying and selling companies at the investment firm Bain Capital, saying Sunday afternoon that the work was comparable to 'rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company.'"  Is this man out of his mind?  Does he want a free market, or does he just want to make sure that if he can't win, nobody else can either?

Or, how 'bout the other Republican presidential candidate, who is heavily into establishing sharp contrasts?  So he decides to say--again, this is out loud, in public--that we don't want "...someone who's just going to be a little different than the person in there. If you're going to be a little different, we might as well stay with what we have..."

Morons.  Not foxes.  Not hedgehogs.  Morons.

So the question is, do you take a gamble on the foxes, understanding that foxiness and self organization are not the best of friends, or do you stick with the morons, and hope that they really understand the One Big Thing that they know?

I'm still holding out for the One Big Thing, but I can see the tipping point from where I stand.

Romney, Romney, Romney

Ben Domenich argues against the emerging meme that it's all the conservatives fault that Romney is doing an excellent imitation of Opportunity on Purgatory Dune:

John Hinderaker encapsulates an assumption which has started to take hold among many of Mitt Romney’s backers: that the fault for what appears to be an increasingly likely 2012 election loss lies with conservatives for making this a real primary. Speaking of the see-saw of not-Romney candidates, he writes:

The same pattern has been repeated more than once during the current, discouraging presidential nominating process. If the GOP loses this year’s presidential contest, the party will have no one to blame but its own activists.

I'm hearing this meme repeated by many increasingly dejected Romney supporters around Washington, D.C. See, if people had just gotten in line when we told them to, the theory goes, things would be looking up. But this is revisionist history, and this is a meme that deserves to die.

It is ludicrous to claim that the fault lies among conservatives for Romney's precipitous drop among independents, which he’s endured over the past month (in some polls, it's been a negative swing of 20 points), the primary reason he now lags Obama in most measures. Consider: since Romney ground Newt Gingrich into pulp in Florida with his 65-1 ad ratio three weeks ago, there has been not one debate, not one major piece of scandal or breaking news, not even one major round of negative ads against Romney. There has only been a series of gaffes on Romney's part (most notably his line about not caring about the very poor) and a series of numbers which show mild economic improvement.

In reality, it’s those who demanded conservatives get in line ages in advance who made a fundamental mistake in how they approached this election. By demanding an ideological shift from a more populist, more fiscally conservative base they no longer direct or control, Romney’s most prominent backers failed to learn any of the right lessons from what led to the 2009-2010 cycles. They failed to realize that the base expected more from a candidate, from a leader, than the politics and policy of the past.

 As (an embarrassed) Romney supporter, I think this is simpler than that:

1. Romney embarked upon a strategy that bet that the establishment and libertarian wings of the Republican Party would let him ignore the social conservatives, saying as little as possible until he was nominated, at which time he could run as rightish centrist and capture the independents.
2. He lost.  The right wing nailed him down and forced him to go on the record.
3. He's genuinely embarrassed when he has to lie to pander for votes, and the embarrassment makes him look like a lying weasel.

I think it was a good bet.  I hoped it was a good bet, because I'd prefer to see a GOP re-formed (reformed?) around a center-right coalition with libertarians and disenchanted independents than a party unified behind a coalition of conscientious social conservatives and know-nothings.  The fact that Obama has used the contraception gambit to gleefully dangle the proverbial Shiny Object in front of the GOP with such marvelous effect indicates that the power is firmly entrenched way far right of center.  That has, of course, been the conventional wisdom, but I was hoping for a reversal, given that a plurality of the American electorate wants nothing to do with the extremes.

Silly me.

As for Romney, I hope he hoists the Jolly Roger.  I think he'd be impressive as hell if he ever told us all what he really thinks.

Silly me.