Monday, October 31, 2011

Even Paul Krugman thinks Max Boot sounds like Paul Krugman

I've poked fun at conservative defense writer Max Boot lately because of Boot's recent assertions that cutting defense spending would end up cutting American jobs in a soft economy. I noted that Boot sounded like liberal columnist Paul Krugman, and suggested that "mainstream conservative Republicans—whatever their fiscal rhetoric—have long favored the soft socialism of big defense spending."

Krugman sounds the same theme this morning, not mentioning Boot specifically, but otherwise making the same point. He calls this crowd "weaponized Keynesians," a term borrowed from Barney Frank.
First things first: Military spending does create jobs when the economy is depressed. Indeed, much of the evidence that Keynesian economics works comes from tracking the effects of past military buildups. Some liberals dislike this conclusion, but economics isn’t a morality play: spending on things you don’t like is still spending, and more spending would create more jobs.

Beyond that, there’s a point made long ago by the Polish economist Michael Kalecki: to admit that the government can create jobs is to reduce the perceived importance of business confidence.

Appeals to confidence have always been a key debating point for opponents of taxes and regulation; Wall Street’s whining about President Obama is part of a long tradition in which wealthy businessmen and their flacks argue that any hint of populism on the part of politicians will upset people like them, and that this is bad for the economy. Once you concede that the government can act directly to create jobs, however, that whining loses much of its persuasive power — so Keynesian economics must be rejected, except in those cases where it’s being used to defend lucrative contracts.
Right. I don't mind that Boot and his fellow hawks are making an economic argument for defense spending. I just wish they'd apply that same logic to the rest of government.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Shut up and be happy, you ungrateful Occupy Wall Street protesters!

A conservative friend posted this to Facebook a couple of days ago, and it's been gnawing at me a bit:


The suggestion here being that the Occupy Wall Street crowd is selfish and ridiculous to be protesting.

This is both right and wrong. We should all be grateful in a cosmic sense for what we do have, of course. But "being a starving baby with ribs showing" shouldn't be the only grounds for complaint. (If it is, the Tea Party might want to pipe down as well.)

If you believe that your betters are tilting the playing field not through luck, not through accident, not merely through hard work, but through the greasing of palms and the escaping of the same rules that apply to you—then I think it's fine and appropriate to speak up.

This is a similar logic to those who suggest (say) American women shouldn't complain about disparities in the United States because, hey, Afghanistan! Burkhas! It's a logic that allows the people at the top to deflect the complaints (merited or not) of people in the middle and even people near the bottom—in in deflecting, serves those people at the top quite well.

It's also a logic at odds with the American Founding that conservatives like to claim as their unique heritage: The Founders might've been taxed without representation, but they were doing pretty well under the British, by and large. My conservative friend replies to this point that the Founders were concerned with "representation and consent of the governed. It wasn't simple materialism."

Well, exactly.

There are many Occupy Wall Street critics who have convinced themselves that the protests are, at foundation, envy by the poor of the rich. Perhaps there's some of that at work. But the most common complaint, as I understand it, is about governance. The fact that government is supposed to be accountable to people, but seems to be more responsive to moneyed interests—in ways that disadvantage many of us.

No: Things don't suck as much here as they might in other parts of the world. They might not suck as much as they did 100 or 200 years ago for many people. But it's not irrational to look at one's own time and place and ask if we could or should be doing better—and it's not selfish to push for that improvement if you can identify it.

Friday, October 28, 2011

The flat tax is bad

So says I in this week's Scripps Howard column with Ben Boychuk:
The flat tax is Republican-led class warfare. It makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, for no better purpose than making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

We have progressive taxation -- in which people with higher incomes pay a higher tax rate than those at the lower end of the scale -- for a reason: People on the low end are less able to pay. Flat taxes invert that logic, giving the rich a huge tax break and often burdening the poor.

The Tax Policy Center says a low-income family making $31,000 a year would lose its $5,147 tax return under Perry's plan, for example.

(Herman Cain's plan is worse. Nearly everybody making under $50,000 would see a huge tax increase.)

Perry's plan was unveiled the same day as a new Congressional Budget Office report showing economic inequality is widening in this country.

From 1979 to 2007, people in the richest 1 percent grew their after-tax income by 275 percent. The three-fifths of people in the middle class saw less than 40 percent income growth during the same period -- and the bottom fifth grew incomes just 18 percent.

The gap is getting bigger. Even before the recession, the middle class was being left behind. Perry's plan would exacerbate the problem -- and likely balloon the deficit even further.

"But I don't care about that," Perry says. He should.

In the new book "The Darwin Economy," economist Robert H. Frank points to research that high levels of income inequality are correlated to slow economic growth. "Larger shares (of income) for poor and middle-income groups were associated with higher growth rates," Frank writes.

Flat taxes burden the poor, make income inequality worse, and in so doing put a stranglehold on an already-strangled economy. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
Ben, in his portion of the column, points out that Perry's plan would let people opt to stay under the current tax structure. Fair point. The likely result of that is top earners would choose the flat tax and lower earners would stick with the current tax structure—meaning the Perry plan is to make the rich richer, and let the poor spin their wheels. That's not quite as awful as the picture I paint, but it seems kind of pointless—particularly in an era of ballooning deficits. Nobody's made a serious suggestion that I'm aware of that the problem with the economy is that rich people don't have enough money; I'm skeptical that such a plan would actually deliver good results for the rest of us.

Rich Lowry: The poor have only themselves to blame

I wondered where National Review editor Rich Lowry was going with this. He spends the bulk of his column conceding that, yes, the American Dream is "raggedy around the edges," that if you're born poor in America, you're all too likely to stay poor, that "picking the right parents" seems to make more of a difference here than it does in (say) Finland for your future economic prospects.

So, God bless Lowry for providing some conservative reality-based pushback to Paul Ryan's fantasy of an economically mobile society.

But Lowry arrives at the end of his column—just two paragraphs to go!—and concludes that despite all this, one shouldn't blame America's economic structure—really, the poor have only themselves to blame:
This stagnation is less a statement about the structure of America’s economy than about its culture. As Ronald Haskins, also of the Brookings Institution, wrote in an essay for National Affairs, “economic mobility is constrained above all by personal choices and behaviors.” He argues that society’s leaders “should herald the ‘success sequence’: finish schooling, get a job, get married, have babies.” If Americans finished high school, worked full-time at a job that matched their skills, and married at the rate they did in the 1970s, the poverty rate would be cut by 70 percent.

These old-fashioned bourgeois virtues, and particularly marriage, rarely figure in the public debate. Everyone is more comfortable talking about taxes or the banks, as the America Dream frays.
Let's unpack this a bit, using Finland—Lowry's comparison—as our guide a bit.

First of all, marriage, since that's the item that got my attention. While it's true that the marriage rate in the United States had declined in recent decades, it's also vastly truer that the marriage rate in the United States is much higher than in Finland: 7.5 marriages for every 1,000 people in the population in 2005, compared to Finland's rate of around 5 marriages per 1,000 people in the same year. The decline in marriage rates has happened in just about every developed country around the world (except Sweden, where the rate wasn't that high to begin with) but the United States remains one of the most marrying countries of them all. To a great extent, "old-fashioned bourgeois virtues" have held on tightly here—only it doesn't seem to make much of a difference in our economic mobility rates.

Maybe it's just the poor who aren't married? Nope. A 2004 study from the MDRC suggests that "through their early 30s, economically disadvantaged adults actually are more likely to marry than advantaged adults." The poor are attempting, at least, to embrace old-fashioned bourgeois virtues—but it's also true that those marriages more often end in divorce. That does give rise to a chicken-and-egg question, I suppose: Are the poor economically disadvantaged because they can't build stable marriages? Or can they not build stable marriages because they're economically disadvantaged? I don't know the answer to that question, but I have a hunch. But the overall point is this: The United States is a marrying country, and our poor are a marrying people. The evidence seems weighted against Lowry's point.

I'm going to skip the baby-making part, except to note that having a kid hasn't done anything to improve my economic prospects. Kids eat!

Let's focus on education, instead: It's true that the high school graduation rate in the United States is shamefully low—72 percent, compared to Finland's 92 percent. (It's worth noting that Finland also has a much higher rate of college graduates: 48.5 percent compared to America's 36.5 percent.) I'm skeptical Lowry and his fellow conservatives would recommend adopting the Finnish education system—it's European!—but I could be wrong.

For those who do graduate high school, how easy is it to find a "full-time job that matches their skills?" It's much more difficult these days than it was in the 1970s to find such a job that will pull you out of poverty. We already know that between the 1970s and now, the American economy shifted pretty radically, shedding manufacturing jobs and pushing more people to the service industry. Generally speaking, that's meant a shift to not-as-well-paying jobs: In September, a manufacturing-sector job in the United States paid $980.98 per week; a private-sector service job paid $756.96—provided you weren't in retail, which paid $496.12 per week. These are average wages, not median wages—which would provide a better picture of what a typical worker in those sectors make. Generally speaking, though, the type of full-time job that matches the skills of a high school graduate has shifted away from well-paying to not-as-well paying. That's assuming the jobs exist; the high unemployment rate suggests that's not always the case.

Making babies won't change that dynamic.

Maybe it doesn't make sense to blame taxes and bankers for that shift, but the issue is definitely one of economics—not just or even mostly, as Lowry tries to suggest, about poor people having bad habits. The numbers indicate that the poor are trying; the opportunities aren't there. Whose fault is that?

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Surprise me

Forgive me a brief, personal interlude, but something I've noticed about myself: I enjoy reading conservative writers like David Frum, Conor Friedersdorf, Rod Dreher, and Nicole Gelinas because, frequently, they stray off the reservation. I thought I just appreciated un-orthodoxy, but now I suspect that I enjoy reading them (too) because they sometimes agree with and confirm my own personal biases.

I'm trying to think of any writers I enjoy who might be described as A) liberal and B) unorthodox. No names come to mind. And that worries me about my own writing here, to be frank: I try to be on guard against hackery and tribalism, but it's damned hard to avoid those temptations when writing about politics.

Contrarianism for its own sake is just as lazy as any other unthinking ideological conformity, of course. But who can I read who will surprise me? How can I train myself to surprise myself on occasion?

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Regulatory uncertainty: Still not the problem

Kevin Drum sums up a new report: "I'm not sure how many ways it's possible to debunk a single meme, but in this case it's a helluva lot. It turns out that (a) Obama has issued fewer regulations than Bush, (b) adjusted for inflation, they cost less than the average over the past 30 years, (c) this doesn't take into account the benefits of any of his regs anyway, and (d) only about 0.3% of mass layoffs during the Great Recession were related to new regulatory issues."

Read the whole thing.

Philadelphia: Does George Bochetto really pay more than half his income in taxes?

Stu Bykofsky, always the contrarian, uses his perch in the Philadelphia Daily News today to let the "Top 1 Percent" respond to the Occupy Wall Street protests. I found this excerpt to be particularly confounding:
How do the members of the "1 percent" feel? I asked three - Renee Amoore, Tom Knox and George Bochetto - each a local, unapologetic, self-made millionaire. They believe they already pay their "fair share" in federal taxes.

"I don't only pay the 35 percent," says Center City lawyer Bochetto, who was raised in an orphanage. "I also pay Social Security tax, state and city income tax, property tax. More than half of my income goes to the government. That's my fair share."

Due respect to Bochetto and his rise to riches from the orphanage. Good for him! But does he really pay more than half his income to the government? If so, he needs to hire a new accountant—immediately.

Why do I say that? Because the effective tax rate for the top 1 percent of earners—and this combines and includes federal, state, and local taxes—was 30.9 percent in 2008. Here's a chart from Citizens for Tax Justice:


Granted, this is a national overview that's several years old. And granted, Philadelphia can be a little tougher on the pocketbook than a lot of places. But is it so much tougher that Bochetto loses and additional 20 percentage points off his income? Really, really doubtful—especially since the Social Security taxes actually take a bigger bite out of the incomes of low-wage earners than they do millionaires like Bochetto.

We can argue about appropriate tax rates and the responsibility of the rich to help provide services and opportunities for the rest of us. But that argument should be grounded in reality instead of unchallenged hyperbole. Bykofsky didn't help anybody by quoting Bochetto uncritically today.

Did the Bush tax cuts increase or reduce revenue?

During my segment on the Morning in America show with Steve Hayward today, I tossed out the idea that—contrary to Laffer Curve expectations—the Bush tax cuts didn't actually increase revenue to government. That apparently resulted in some controversy after I left the air, with callers saying that I'm dead wrong on the topic.

The easiest response here is to note that before the Bush tax cuts were enacted in 2001 and 2003, the federal government had a surplus of money to fund its operations and pay down the country's debt. After the tax cuts were enacted, we started borrowing money on a full-time basis.

That's not proof on its own, of course, because we tacked on some new spending obligations during the Bush Era—most notably the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, increased national security spending aside from those wars, and the expansion of Medicare benefits to cover prescription drugs.

So, hey, let's look at the revenues:


Bruce Bartlett writes: "According to a recent C.B.O. report, (The Bush tax cuts) reduced revenue by at least $2.9 trillion below what it otherwise would have been between 2001 and 2011. Slower-than-expected growth reduced revenue by another $3.5 trillion.

"Spending was $5.6 trillion higher than the C.B.O. anticipated for a total fiscal turnaround of $12 trillion. That is how a $6 trillion projected surplus turned into a cumulative deficit of $6 trillion."

But don't just take the CBO's word for it. Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economics professor, once called advocates of the lower taxes/higher revenue theory "charlatans and cranks": "I used the phrase 'charlatans and cranks' in the first edition of my principles textbook to describe some of the economic advisers to Ronald Reagan, who told him that broad-based income tax cuts would have such large supply-side effects that the tax cuts would raise tax revenue. I did not find such a claim credible, based on the available evidence. I never have, and I still don't."

Mankiw, of course, was one of George W. Bush's top economic advisers from 2003 to 2005. He wrote the paragraph above in 2007. And he was an advocate of the tax cuts—not because they raised revenues (he didn't believe they did) but because he believed they helped spur demand in the face of a challenging economy at the time. So: Not even Bush's own economic advisers who favored tax cuts believed they raised revenues. If that's the case, why should the rest of us?

On a related note: after I left the air Steve apparently chastised me a bit for not providing a top tax rate that's appropriate in a market economy like ours. Fair enough, I guess, but I think it's something of a mug's game to pick a number and stick to it. Different tax rates will be appropriate at different times, depending on the economy, the needs of government—being at war, for example, is more expensive than not being at war—and so forth. I'm not interested in confiscatory levels of taxation—unlike some liberals, I don't hearken back to the Eisenhower-era 90-percent marginal rate on top earners—but I also think we're a long way from there. Perhaps the answer "it depends" isn't rigorous enough, but it also has the advantage of being true.

Welcome "Morning in America" listeners!

Thanks to all of you who listened to me with Steve Hayward this morning. I co-write the RedBlueAmerica column with my conservative friend Ben Boychuk. We also co-produce a regular podcast—our latest episode is a discussion of the "Occupy Wall Street" phenomenon with City Journal's Nicole Gelinas. Give it a listen!

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

More guns, more death

Whenever a gun massacre happens—at Virginia Tech, say, or someplace else—we usually get a revival of the mostly neutered gun debate in this country. Some liberals decry lax gun laws, some conservatives suggest that if only everybody was armed you'd somehow see less gun violence.

A new study from the Violence Policy Center suggests the conservative analysis is wrong:
States with higher gun ownership rates and weak gun laws have the highest rates of gun death according to a new analysis by the Violence Policy Center (VPC) of just-released 2008 national data (the most recent available) from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

The analysis reveals that the five states with the highest per capita gun death rates were Alaska, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Wyoming. Each of these states had a per capita gun death rate far exceeding the national per capita gun death rate of 10.38 per 100,000 for 2008. Each state has lax gun laws and higher gun ownership rates. By contrast, states with strong gun laws and low rates of gun ownership had far lower rates of firearm-related death.

And here's the graphic overview:


This makes sense, of course, because the only purpose that guns have—when used—is to inflict injury and death. More guns naturally means guns will be used more, which naturally means more people will die. This isn't complicated.

This is particularly notable because, as Frank Bruni discusses in the New York Times today, there's a move among Republicans in Congress to force states with tight concealed-carry laws to recognize and allow concealed-carry permits from states with laxer regulations. (Thanks to the vagaries of Pennsylvania law, we in Philadelphia sometimes find ourselves awash in Florida-permitted guns ... with permit-holders often being people who have never been to Florida.) It's basically a law that would permit Wyoming to export its death rate to Massachusetts.

Second Amendment advocates, I suppose, will talk about Constitutional rights and the costs of freedom. But we should recognize those costs. Guns are not benign instruments.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Andrew Stiles is wrong: The problem with the economy is lack of demand.

At NRO, Andrew Stiles tries to prove the "regulatory uncertainty" canard is actually true:
A new Gallup survey asked small-business owners an open-ended question about what they viewed to be “the most important problem” facing the small-business community. It’s not “lack of demand,” as Democrats like to argue. In fact, 22 percent of respondents listed “complying with government regulations” as their top concern.
Here's the graphic that Stiles uses as supporting evidence:


Notice anything about items 2 and 3 on that list? "Consumer confidence" and "lack of consumer" demand" are parsed out as two different items, but the effect is the same: Consumers who aren't confident are consumers who aren't buying stuff—thus, they're not demanding the products that businesses provide. Add those two up, and 27 percent of small-business owners see some variation of the demand side as being the biggest problem with the economy.

Which is, ahem, more than say the same for "regulatory uncertainty."

Stiles is guilty of doing some cherry-picking, too, because later on in the same poll, business owners are asked what they need to see in 2012 in order for their business to thrive. Here's that graphic:



Check it out: The number of business owners who see regulations as the big problem suddenly drops by 10 percent when they have to name the thing that would make their business better.  Sales increases is No. 1. "Job creation" is No. 2—and I don't think it's a stretch to suspect that what business owners here want is for more of their customers to have jobs so they'll start buying stuff again.  Add in "improved economy" in at fourth place, and suddenly you have 37 percent of business owners suggesting that demand is what stands between them and success ... and just 12 percent citing government regulations.

Which makes intuitive sense. Businesses don't like dealing with paperwork and regulations, of course; no one does. But more business owners know that it's not the government that's holding them back right now. It's lack of demand. And we know why there's a lack of demand. Solve that, and we begin to move forward again.

At the pizza joint.


Taken at Lazaros Pizza House

On gay marriage: Civil liberties are not a zero-sum game

I respect Rod Dreher's work on most things, even though I disagree with much of it, because he's thoughtful and eloquent and tries to think outside his own biases. Except when it comes to matters of sexuality: Then turns a bit shrill. So it is today, when he posts the story of a U.K. "housing manager" who received a demotion for criticizing gay marriage—on his own time. Says Dreher: "Move along, nothing to see here. It didn’t really happen, and if it did, this man, History’s Greatest Monster, must have deserved it for his thoughtcrime."

This is part of the argument made by Dreher—and anti-marriage conservatives more generally—that allowing gay marriage will necessarily entail a restriction on the rights of Christians to hate gay marriage. There's just one problem with the evidence they marshal in support of the argument: It's almost always from Europe, and Europe has a very different tradition with regards to civil liberties than the United States.

For example: I’m from Kansas, home to the notorious Fred Phelps family—the folks who display a kind of homophobia far beyond what’s on display in Dreher's example. And a number of family members have been employed over the years as state or county civil servants—despite the fact that the family is held in very low esteem by the community at large. The state doesn't have the right to boot them for privately held opinions—even those that are publicly expressed—that don't interfere with the performance of their duties. What's more, we're the same country where the ACLU defends the rights of racists to march in public.

This isn't to say Dreher's nightmare scenario can't happen here: We must always be vigilant in defense of our rights. But it's much, much, much less likely to happen—and it's unlikeliness makes Dreher's concerns seem desperate instead of considered. The great thing about the First Amendment is that it protects people with wildly differing—even diametrically opposed—outlooks on life. In the United States, at least, civil liberties aren't a zero-sum game. In my ideal future, homophobic old housing managers will be able to keep their opinions and their jobs in the same society in which gays, lesbians, and transgender people are free to exercise their rights to marry each other. The day can't come too soon.

Mitt Romney, public health, and illegal immigrants

Kevin Drum takes stock of the "controversy" surrounding RomneyCare and the fact that illegal immigrants can get some medical care on the tab of Massachusetts taxpayers:
Somebody in a rival campaign presumably thinks this is a useful campaign issue because the slavering masses of the tea party base won't be appeased until illegal immigrants are literally writhing in the streets while doctors walk by and pointedly ignore them. Allowing them access to even last-ditch health services is unacceptable, even if the pointy-heads insist that we're saving money in the long run because it keeps them out of emergency rooms.
At the risk of sounding collectivist, one of the reasons we have public health efforts is because health is so often collective. That illegal immigrant writhing in the street—and this imagery might be unfortunate—might have a communicable disease, and refusing to offer care to that person might end up communicating that disease to you. Giving them a free dose of penicillin might stop the infection in its tracks ... unless, of course, we decide that the immigrant shouldn't get that dose because, goshdarnit, America!

We provide public health services to the public—including illegal immigrants—not just out of some misguided bleeding-heart do-gooderism, but because it also protects the rest of us from epidemic and death. Think of it this way, immigration hawks: It's like building an electrified border fence around your physical well-being.

Jonah Goldberg: Capitalism loves you, baby

Jonah Goldberg this morning delights in his own prescience in writing this 2008 column about how the children of capitalism are spoiled and ungrateful:
In large measure our wealth isn’t the product of capitalism, it is capitalism.

And yet we hate it. Leaving religion out of it, no idea has given more to humanity. The average working-class person today is richer, in real terms, than the average prince or potentate of 300 years ago. His food is better, his life longer, his health better, his menu of entertainments vastly more diverse, his toilette infinitely more civilized. And yet we constantly hear how cruel capitalism is while this collectivism or that is more loving because, unlike capitalism, collectivism is about the group, not the individual.

These complaints grow loudest at times like this: when the loom of capitalism momentarily stutters in spinning its gold. Suddenly, the people ask: What have you done for me lately? Politicians croon about how we need to give in to Causes Larger than Ourselves and peck about like hungry chickens for a New Way to replace dying capitalism.
Although I agree with Goldberg, generally, that market capitalism has generally been the best force for raising the living standards of the maximum number of people. But I think it's terribly weird that he would advance the idea—as he seems to here—that capitalism is an end unto itself. It's not: It's a means to an end; an imperfect means—and one can acknowledge that and still be a capitalist!—but likely the least-worst means.

Goldberg today places the column in the context of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and it's here that you start to see that he creates a bit of a straw man in dealing with critics of the free markets. While it's true that there are Marxists, socialists, and anarchists among the protesters, the movement has broad support beyond the fringe not because it opposes capitalism, but because it's asking an important question: Why has capitalism stopped working for us, the broad mass of Americans?

The answer the protesters have come up with is this: The wealthiest Americans and wealthiest American institutions have bent government to their will, so that while the rest of us are left to live with "austerity" and "creative destruction," the banks and banker bonuses are protected from their catastrophic mistakes with taxpayer dollars. The alternative? Letting them lay waste to the economy if they fail, making things even worse for the rest of us. As conservative commentators like Nicole Gelinas and Timothy Carney have noted, that's not free-market capitalism, properly understood—and, in fact, serves to undermine the discipline that markets usually impose when the possibility of failure is real. Corporatism is tearing at the foundations of capitalism, in other words.

It is not "spoiled" to point out when capitalism is coming unmoored from its foundations, or when it is failing to deliver the maximum good to the best number of people. (It's also not irrational to compare one's lot with one's contemporaries, instead of being grateful that conditions are better than they were 300 years ago.) The Occupy Wall Street folks are far from perfect, but they're giving voice to an important critique of the status quo that even serious advocates of the free market can agree upon.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Bag O' Books: 'Moonlight Mile' by Dennis Lehane


Three thoughts about the novel 'Moonlight Mile' by Dennis Lehane:

• This is Lehane's most recent novel, but the first I've ever read. I'm not so ignorant of culture, though, that I don't know that his books have been adapted into acclaimed movies like "Mystic River" and "Gone Baby Gone," or that Lehane himself was a writer on "The Wire." Since I haven't read those earlier works, all I can say is that I can see how Lehane ended up so loved by Hollywood. His writing is cinematic—lean, funnier than I expected, full of violence. Plenty of internal monologues by the narrator—longtime Lehane hero Patrick Kinzie—that, in your head, you can easily hear as voiceover narration by Robert Downey Jr. It's easy, breezy fun.

• That said, this novel got me thinking about the distinction between genre fiction and literary fiction. "Moonlight Mile" seems a fairly straightforward pulp noir novel to me, yet Lehane seems to have crossed into the seemingly higher-brow literary fiction arena. (The distinction is artificial, but I wonder the same thing about music sometimes. Why is some music considered "pop" and ready for the Top 40 audience and other music, of great listenability, directed more to indie audiences? Sometimes it's quantifiable and sometimes it's not.) As best I can tell, Lehane gets the the more-coveted "literary fiction" label, at least to some extent, because lots of smart people like reading his stuff. Maybe genre distinctions are more about the audience and reader self-identification than about what a writer actually produces.

• Final thought: Lehane lards this novel with so many contemporary references— the band Pela, the TV show "Arrested Development," jokes about P. Diddy—that it's impossible to place this novel in any year besides, roughly, 2010. On one hand, Kinzie's constant name-checking helps us figure out who he is: He's not just a Chandleresque tough guy—he's an aging Gen X hipster with great taste in popular culture. But at times it almost seems to overwhelm the crime story (which has ... plausibility problems) and turn it into an episode of "Community." "Moonlight Mile" is a fun read, but it's also—despite the violence—light as a feather.

Drop out of school, become a billionaire

Michael Ellsberg argues in the New York Times that we should emphasize entrepreneurship over education:
I TYPED these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook — invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.

American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but start-up entrepreneurs.
College isn't for everybody, sure, but this line of attack rings false to me. The men—all men—mentioned here didn't have traditional educations, to be sure, but their knowledge base was heavily augmented in non-traditional ways not necessarily available to most Americans. Steve Jobs continued auditing classes at Reed College after he dropped out, and he learned the fundamentals of electronics in his father's workshop. Bill Gates went to an "exclusive prep school" in high school, and obtained free computer time at a time when computers weren't ubiquitous. Same for Paul Allen. Stone went to one of the most academically challenging high schools in Massachusetts, while Zuckerberg went to Philips Exeter Academy on his way to Harvard.

Point being: All these men received educations that gave them a pretty good knowledge foundation for their future work. All of these men were born to comfortably middle class families, often with parents personally deepening their child's knowledge base. And because of those middle class families, each of the men had a comfortable safety net to fall back into if their entrepreneurship failed. It's easier to start a business if you understand the world a bit, and if the failure of that startup won't ruin you for life.

Ellsberg is right to argue for alternatives to the higher education machine. And as a proud liberal arts grad, I'll even agree that maybe we could use a few less liberal arts degree holders. But his "college dropout" meme ignores that nearly all the men he names arrived at college having already had extraordinary educations. Would we know of any of them without those educations? Education is the foundation of entrepreneurship, not a substitution.

Friday, October 21, 2011

The problem of humanitarian interventions

Something I've been wrestling with since I posted my opposition to the Uganda intervention is whether I could ever support an American military intervention on purely humanitarian grounds. I came of political age around the time of the Rwandan genocide, and I can say that it truly troubled my conscience at the time—and angered me greatly that the West stood by and watched while an entire region descended into hell. If my framework for supporting a military intervention wouldn't allow the United States to get involved, then two possibilities exist: The United States should never intervene on humanitarian grounds, or the framework doesn't work.

Spencer Ackerman today gets at the trouble inherent with humanitarian interventions conducted under a doctrine known as "Responsibility To Protect" on his blog today:
The uncomfortable truth is that a belief in human rights is a disruptive force in global affairs. It scrambles ideological boundaries and takes people down intellectual roads they did not anticipate travelling. It's why the Responsibility To Protect is a force for -- let's strip it of euphemism -- war. Not because, say, Ken Roth or Samantha Power are warmongers; that's absurd. But because the world, and America, has yet to come to terms with the obligations that human rights place on nations, particularly hegemonic ones.

To support the R2P seems like a recipe for endless war; to oppose it, a recipe for endless injustice and impunity. The responsible work of intellectuals and policymakers is to bridle it, to make it commensurate with American capabilities and American interests; to shape a world in which America is not the only nation burdened with enforcing it; and not to avoid the circumstances in which it conflicts with American capabilities and American interests.
Which is to say, once again, that there's no perfect framework for deciding to support or oppose an American military intervention. My framework is very much biased against military adventures of most sorts, which makes it also biased against humanitarian interventions. My problem: I still think the United States and the world should've done something a generation ago in Rwanda. Picking and choosing which holocausts to send troops to halt is tricky business. But it's also necessary.* The difference between Rwanda and Uganda may be mostly that the Rwandan genocide burned hotter, faster, and with much greater immediate loss of life. Is that enough of a distinction? It feels like it to me, but your mileage may vary.

* Necessary, presuming the United States retains its ability to project power virtually anywhere in the world. That's not a given, and if America retreats closer to home, then a lot of this calculation makes no difference. You can't go where you can't go.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

The 'regulatory uncertainty' canard

Ben and I discuss whether regulatory uncertainty is holding back the U.S. economy in this week's column. My take:
Let's be honest: "Regulatory uncertainty" is a euphemism for "regulations." Businesses -- and their mostly Republican allies -- don't want them.

We have regulations for a reason. The Dodd-Frank law passed because the financial industry proved it couldn't police itself and nearly destroyed the American economy. Richard Nixon created OSHA at a time when 14,000 employees were dying in the workplace every year; that number dropped 60 percent over the next 30 years. Left to their own devices, businesses often cut corners, resulting in financial and even physical harm to the rest of us.

Overregulation can stifle the economy. The Obama administration recognizes this -- and in August announced a reform effort to reduce regulatory burdens on business by $10 billion a year, mostly by streamlining required health, labor and tax paperwork. Obama even alienated environmentalist supporters this fall by delaying new EPA ozone standards to save jobs.

The problem isn't regulatory uncertainty. The Economic Policy Institute in September reported that weekly hours for still-employed workers are still down from their last high in August 2007.

If businesses wanted to produce more widgets --but wanted to avoid the federal paperwork that goes with hiring more widget-making workers -- they'd increase the number of hours their existing employees are working. They aren't. That suggests that the problem is demand: Americans aren't buying stuff.

Why? They're digging themselves out of debt -- often in the form of mortgages that are now worth more than the houses those mortgages bought. Until that issue is adequately addressed, or until those mortgages are finally paid off over the next 30 years, America will continue to have a problem with demand.

"Regulatory uncertainty" offers a handy political club to use against Obama, though. The GOP, it seems, would rather win the presidential campaign with stale untruths rather than address our real problems.

Does intervening in Uganda meet the Mathis Test?

Ooh. Self-referential headlines are ugly, aren't they? But back when President Obama announced the United States would intervene in Libya's civil war, I set out a list of questions to help guide me through decisions on supporting or not supporting America's military interventions abroad. Now that Qaddafi is dead, it's a good time to apply those questions to America's latest intervention—the sending of 100 troops to Central Africa to aid the fight against the brutal Lord's Resistance Army.

Here are the questions, slightly revised:

A: Does the party against whom the United States is considering military action threaten U.S. security? No. The Lord's Resistance Army isn't attacking the United States or United States' interests. Now that the U.S. is getting involved, though, maybe that changes.

B: Is the party against whom the United States is considering action committing genocidal-levels of violence, such that even by the standards of war or civil war the conscience is shocked? Yes. The numbers are staggering. LRA's campaign of terror in Uganda has displaced 2 million people; the forces are said to have raped, mutilated, or abducted another 66,000 residents; and Michael Gerson's account is especially striking: "But (LRA leader Joseph) Kony’s crimes are vivid at close hand. When I was there in 2006, I talked to a boy forced by LRA rebels to execute his neighbors in order to break his ties with the past and to deaden his sympathy. I met another who was forced to bow in Kony’s presence — the rebel leader claims divinity — but who dared to look up in curiosity. The LRA soldiers took out one of the boy’s eyes in punishment." The conscience is shocked, and this violence is taking place on a widespread level to destabilize and horrify an entire region. It's important to note that humanitarian reasons—while significant—aren't as important as national security when weighing these questions. Answering "yes" here doesn't necessarily mean we should send the troops.

C: If the answer to (A) or (B) is "yes," are there non-military means that could effectively mitigate the threat? No. The Lord's Resistance Army is a non-state actor; sanctions wouldn't work in this case.

D: If the answer to (C) is "yes," do that. If the answer to (C) is "no," then: What is the desired end state of U.S. military action? A return to a previous status quo? Regime change? What? I'd have to say the death or capture of Joseph Kony. He claims divinity for himself; he runs the LRA as a cult of personality. Cut off the personality, and the cult is likely to be greatly diminished.

E: What is the worst-case scenario that could develop from U.S. military intervention? Is the scenario more or less threatening to U.S. security than the current threat? That LRA, which has ignored the U.S., becomes motivated to attack America and its interests because of the 100 U.S. troops that are helping track him down. From a security standpoint, the potential costs of blowback are more than the costs of doing nothing. But how likely is that blowback? We probably wouldn't know until the attack occurred.

F: Does the United States have the military and financial resources to bear the burdens of that worst-case scenario? Yes. At 100 troops, our footprint is light and the cost—as these things go—is unlikely to break the federal bank.

This series of questions doesn't produce a neat, mathematical "yes" or "no" answer. On the "for intervention" side, you have the serious of Kony's acts, the inability to address them through non-military means, and the relative cheapness of the operation from a U.S. perspective. On the "against intervention" side, though, you have the fact that Kony doesn't now threaten U.S. security—but that intervening raises the likelihood he will.

And that's, ultimately, why I come down against the U.S. deployment to Central Africa—though it's a closer call, in my mind, than the Libya intervention. The U.S. troops are supposedly going there on a training mission, to "advise" the African troops on how best to combat the LRA and pursue Kony; they only shoot if shot at. Being there makes it quite likely they'll be shot at, and shoot. At that point, we're at war, even if minor. To what good end?

The interesting thing about the deployment is that it is, apparently, an effort to help the countries of Central Africa help themselves, by training troops from those countries on how to pursue Kony and battle the LRA. That's going in the right direction. If there's a way to do that without putting armed U.S. troops in the field against this villain, I might well support that.

Final thought: This set of questions almost certainly leads to a U.S. foreign policy that is a good deal more risk-averse and less adventurous than we've had in the post-Cold War era. I'm OK with us. I want our leaders to clear a high bar before taking us to war.