Archive for category PPC
Daily Glimpse January 4, 2013
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC on January 4th, 2013
Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height
- No Enemies to the Left – Al Jazeera Edition
Jonathan Sabin at Commentary: Most Americans still think of Al Jazeera as the network that was Osama bin Laden’s outlet to the world in the years after 9/11. Since then, it has earned a reputation in some quarters as the best source of news about the Arab and Muslim world, especially during the Arab Spring […]
- Plus ca Change – Central African Republic Edition
The current round of unrest in the Central African Republic brings back memories of an earlier round of unrest there from the Diplomad: About our Embassy in Bangui. Months before the coup attempt, some bean counters had decided to terminate the US marine guard detail there and at several other smaller embassies. The Pentagon, likewise, […]
- A Vested Interest in Palimpsest
One word’s tour through cultural history: Like most autodidacts, I’m a spotty reader, subject to vagrant whims, led by meandering interests. “Palimpsest” is one of many personal guides for me. It can lead to the study of memory, to historical ideas about architecture, to geology, to art history. Stay with it long enough and you […]
- CO2 Emissions Today Are Lowest Today’s College Students’ Lifetimes
Mark Perry points the finger at natural gas drilling. So why do the NY environmentalists hate the planet?
- Evolution of Metrorail animation, now with Rush Plus
Greater Greater Washington has an animated gif showing the evolution of Metro Rail since 1976. The map is so iconic that virtually every one of the entries in the site’s contest to replace it only came up with variations on its theme.
- The Endangered Mall Rat: An American Crisis?
More dead malls on the way, according to Walter Russell Mead: It was only a matter of time before malls starting sharing the pain of the brick and mortar retail outlets they house. The real estate market has been slow to adjust to this new reality, and the amount of commercial real estate built for retail has continued […]
- The Value of Political Connections
Quantified: The authors focus on lobbyists who used to be congressional staffers. In particular, they look at the revenue generated by these lobbyists before and after the senators or representatives for whom they once worked leave office. They find that, on average, when a senator leaves office, lobbyists who used to work for that senator […]
- Sotomayor’s Blow to Religious Liberty
What’s at stake: Sotomayor’s decision illustrates just how difficult that task may turn out to be. Even if the owners of Hobby Lobby eventually prevail in court and their rights are upheld, a vengeful Obama administration determined to make an example of anyone who crosses them could have already destroyed their business. By sinking them […]
- The Proper Debate: How Best to Grow the Economy
A somewhat contrarian view on the upcoming debt ceiling debate: Instead of political grandstanding around a redundant, made-up number, we should spend that valuable time debating how best to achieve robust growth given our current economic condition. The proper debate would be lively. Contemporary Keynesians advocate top-down, “intelligent design” economics — i.e., trusting government officials, […]
- EPA Costs US Economy $353 Billion per Year
Richard Parker Windsor was unavailable for comment: Transparency is the lifeblood of democracy. Washington needs more of it, especially in the all-too-opaque world of regulation. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, is the most expensive federal regulatory agency. Its annual budget is fairly modest in Beltway terms, at a little less than $11 billion, but that’s […]
- Gas Drilling Is Called Safe in New York
“We’re a $133 billion government. Do you know what we’re capable of?” “Do you?” “Er, well, no, because they won’t tell us.” The state’s Health Department found in an analysis it prepared early last year that the much-debated drilling technology known as hydrofracking could be conducted safely in New York, according to a copy obtained […]
- Iran Spy Network 30,000 Strong
This doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better: The spy service operates in all areas where Iran has interests, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Central Asia, Africa, Austria, Azerbaijan, Croatia, France, Georgia, Germany, Turkey, Britain, and the Americas, including the United States. Iranian activities in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela have raised alarm […]
- California Shooting Location Map
Via Chart Porn:
Daily Glimpse January 3, 2013
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC on January 3rd, 2013
Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height
- The Ghost Of World War One
That cultural paralysis produced by WWI was really the ground opening up underneath the West’s feet: And then… And then the story failed. Those we trusted, those in a position to know, sent waves of young men to be slaughtered for not much purpose at all. They sent them to stack ten deep in death […]
- Boehner: No More One-On-One Negotiations with Obama
Wow, talk about changing pitchers one batter too late: The negotiations approach has obviously become a trap. For one thing, Boehner has proven to be not very good at it. The president “negotiates” in bad faith and uses deadline pressure to slip bad bills through before legislators and the voters have any chance to read […]
- Health Care Law May Mean Less Hiring in 2013
Fewer jobs, higher taxes, what’s not to like? Many businesses plan to bring on more part-time workers next year, trim the hours of full-time employees or curtail hiring because of the new health care law, human resource firms say. Their actions could further dampen job growth, which already is threatened by possible federal budget cutbacks […]
- What Are the Most Dangerous Countries for Banks?
Investors looking to move money abroad remember that higher growth also usually means higher risks: “As we’ve seen the U.S. economy not do as strongly as we would have hoped in the last few years, we’ve seen a lot of our clients looking for new opportunities in emerging frontier markets,” says Angela Mancini, vice president […]
- For Camille Paglia, the Spiritual Quest Defines All Great Art
I wonder what Jacques Barzun would have thought of this. I like to think that in principle he would have approved, regardless of the execution or point of view of the writer. The art world is in spiritual crisis—it has not had a new idea in years. So argues the cultural critic and feminist provocateur […]
- States Letting Tax Increases Expire
As Obama raises taxes, and Colorado considers doing the same, other states are letting their temporary measures expire: In 2009 residents approved a two-year surcharge on income tax rates for those earning more than $125,000 a year. The legislature declined to extend it in 2012, producing an estimated $133 million tax cut despite pressure by […]
- Poiticizing Pension Investment
The New York City Teacher’s Retirement System is going to invest $1 billion in Hurricane Sandy reconstruction: Both are critically needed missions. It is understandable, the retirement system’s impulse to want to put some of its resources to work to help Sandy’s victims, who are neighbors in distress and some of whom might be system […]
- Keystone-Flavored TABOR?
A Pennsylvania state senator is looking to our very own TABOR as a model: For the second year in a row, Folmer introduced the Taxpayer Protection Act, which would create a budgetary cap linked to population growth and inflation. “If you want to get taxes under control, you have to get spending under control,” Folmer said. […]
- Some Contributions to the Gun Control Debate
Mitch Berg on Diane Sawyer, Rocket Scientist: So let’s set our levels right here; because a couple of college students, and media dilettante Diane Sawyer, couldn’t quick-draw faster than a cop carrying out a CQB drill, concealed carry is worthless? No – if you’ve taken any handgun training at all, you know that quick-draw shooting is very, […]
Daily Glimpse January 2, 2013
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC on January 2nd, 2013
Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height
- Popular Sovereignty on the Ropes
Clare Spark on what the term means, why it’s critical to the American project, why it’s endangered, and what we can do to start restoring it: Rooseveltian internationalists, leaders of the American Studies movement, were fond of trouncing the Founders and Herman Melville’s character Captain Ahab as messianic and rabidly imperialistic. Thus “American exceptionalism” has […]
- Mapping the Republic of Letters
Social networking, as it existed among the 18th-Century intelligentsia: “Mapping the Republic of Letters” is a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and international project in the digital humanities, centered at Stanford University. Since 2008, we have been creating visualizations to analyze “big data” relating to the world of early-modern scholars. We focus primarily on their correspondence, travel, and […]
- Why We Fight
James Delingpole on why he’s so hard on the climate warmists: On a personal level, it’s a problem for us climate sceptics because it means we find ourselves continually being vilified – and denied airspace or funding or preferment – on the basis not of what we actually believe and say but on a grotesque […]
- The Littlest Generals
Brothers in tiny Mexican town push for changes to nation’s strict gun-control laws: “Had we not been able to defend ourselves that afternoon with our own weapons, I don’t know that we’d be standing here today,” said Alex LeBaron, a state legislator who is leading a campaign to allow residents to arm themselves. “Without our […]
- Obama’s Tax Bill Comes Due
As usual, Arthur Brooks nails it: After paying a lifetime of taxes on wages and salaries, business and farm profits and capital gains, Americans who save their money rather than spend it get the reward of giving 40% to Uncle Sam. As a political matter, the GOP also gave a big break to Democratic Senators […]
- The Artistic Legacy of the Great War
Why did World War I produce a unique cultural paralysis? Everywhere, the Great War precipitated a cultural paralysis the like of which had not been known since medieval times. The causes of this precipitate ice age are elusive. Its consequences endure. A pattern of cultural response and expectation in wartime was set for the next […]
- Paul Krugman: Asimov’s Foundation novels grounded my economics
This time, it’s social scientism: Let me be clear, however: in pointing out the familiarity of the various societies we see in Foundation, I’m not being critical. On the contrary, this familiarity, the way Asimov’s invented societies recapitulate historical models, goes right along with his underlying conceit: the possibility of a rigorous, mathematical social science […]
- The Folly of Scientism
Scientists continue to overreach in their estimation of themselves: Is scientism defensible? Is it really true that natural science provides a satisfying and reasonably complete account of everything we see, experience, and seek to understand — of every phenomenon in the universe? And is it true that science is more capable, even singularly capable, of […]
Mitt Romney as Adlai Stevenson
Posted by Joshua Sharf in 2012 Presidential Race, History, National Politics, PPC on December 24th, 2012
These comments by Mitt Romney’s son Tagg have gotten a lot of attention in the last couple of days:
In an interview with the Boston Globe examining what went wrong with the Romney campaign, his eldest son Tagg explains that his father had been a reluctant candidate from the start.
After failing to win the 2008 Republican nomination, Romney told his family he would not run again and had to be persuaded to enter the 2012 White House race by his wife Ann and son Tagg.
“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire… to run,” Tagg Romney said. “If he could have found someone else to take his place… he would have been ecstatic to step aside.”
By coincidence, I happened to be reading Joseph Epstein’s profile of Adlai Stevenson in his new book, Essays in Biography. To the extent that these revelations can be taken at face value, the resemblance to Stevenson’s approach to power is remarkable.
Let’s start by acknowledging some differences between Stevenson and Romney. While both were bright, Romney is probably more intellectual than Stevenson was (Stevenson played the part of the intellectual better, but the only book on his nightstand when he died was the social register), and Stevenson was probably a better governor. He could have had the 2nd term in Illinois if he had wanted it instead of the presidential nomination, whereas it’s not clear at all that Romney would have had a 2nd term if he had run, rather than prepare for his 2008 run.
But both Romney and Stevenson appear to have had a healthy, philosopher-king style distrust of power, enough that it evidently made them each uneasy about having it themselves. That’s not necessarily the reason they lost, but in Stevenson’s case, his public prevarications seem to have projected enough weakness that the public went the other way. At least Romney had the sense to keep any doubts private. And while he made the strategic error of not answering the personal attacks sooner, nobody really thinks that’s because he was trying to take a dive.
Stevenson, like Romney, also seems to have lacked a coherent governing philosophy. In Epstein’s telling:
The style, it is said, is the message. But in the case of Adlai Stevenson, the style seemed sometimes to persist in the absence of any clear message whatsoever. He preached sanity; he preached reason; his very person seemed to exert a pull toward decency in public affairs. Yet there is little evidence in any of his speeches or writing that he had a very precise idea of how American society was, or ought to be, organized. His understanding of the American political process was less than perfect, as can be seen from his predilection for the bipartisan approach to so many of the issues of his time. One might almost say that Stevenson tried to set up shop as a modern, disinterested Pericles, but that he failed to realize that the America of the 1950s was a long way from the Golden Age of Athens.
Ultimately, Stevenson was better at not saying much; his rhetoric influenced both Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s sale of the Great Society; whomever the Republicans nominate in 2016 will likely owe little to Romney’s campaign talks.
I don’t want to overdraw the comparison. Romney only ran in one general election; in some ways, his 2012 race contains elements both of Stevenson’s initial 1952 run and his rematch with Eisenhower in 1956, but in other ways, was completely different. Having never been the party’s nominee in 2008, Romney couldn’t lead the party in-between elections. The Republicans as a whole are coming to understand what Stevenson learned in 1952 – that a Presidential campaign is a terrible place to define issues and educate the public; individual personalities simply play too large a part in any single-office election.
But the biggest difference is how Romney will react after his loss, compared to how Stevenson reacted after his. Stevenson desperately wanted the nomination in 1960, only couldn’t bring himself to say so until it was too late. He wanted it, but he wanted to be asked, rather than having to ask. Romney really does seem done with politics, except for the inevitable post mortems.
Newtown and A Conflict of Visions
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC on December 16th, 2012
I first read Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions about 25 years ago, at the urging of a friend of mine. Sowell’s book is devoted to explaining the underlying assumptions that divide modern conservatives and modern liberals, in particular, the notion of human perfectibility. Liberals, since Jefferson, have tended to believe that human beings and human society are infinitely perfectible, if only sufficient and correct resources are brought to bear perfecting them. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend towards the Burkean tradition of accepting that the crooked timber of humanity is likely to remain so, and we must plan accordingly.
Interesting then, that in the particular case of gun control, the left, rather than looking to improve human nature, instead chooses to focus on the hardware itself. It’s an unusual position for them to take, although I suppose it’s at least consistent with the contemporary Left’s trust of state power over the judgment of their fellow citizens. But it’s also, I think, consistent with their attempts to perfect society, if not the individual. In this case, they’d like to make society safer by taking away dangerous weapons from everyone. Presumably, they envision a softer, gentler world, with a lower overall blood pressure, so to speak.
Personally, I think that’s a delusion that, far from making us safer, will make us far less safe. After all, an attacker doesn’t need a gun to threaten me. He can have a knife, or if he’s sufficiently muscular, his bare hands. I’m never going to turn a gun on innocents; for me, it’s purely a sorely-needed equalizer in my own absolute right to self-defense.
Now one might be tempted to argue that the converse is true of conservatives – that in this case, they’re choosing to believe in education over technology. But that would be wrong. Conservatives are merely recognizing that no matter what technology is available, some people will be inspired by mental illness or just plain evil to put them to destructive use, and that the best thing we can do is to equip ourselves with the best defense available. It should go without saying that when that defense involves potentially deadly force, there’s a moral responsibility to train ourselves to use it effectively and only in circumstances where it’s necessary.
To the degree that we have talked about mental illness, it’s been to get people off the street, get them whatever treatment may be available, and to keep them from getting their hands on weapons they can’t possibly be expected to use safely. And while society may make the facilities for treatment or confinement available, ultimately it will remain the job of families and communities to identify at-risk individuals.
We are being completely consistent with a philosophy that takes the world as it is, rather than as we wish it would be.
Who Really Cares?
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC on December 14th, 2012
For Human Rights Day (yes, there is such a thing), the UN’s Regional Information Center, located in the global Mordor of bureaucracy, Brussels, put out the following chart, explaining to residents of Europe how they can get involved in “public life.” For anyone who thinks that the goal of the current administration is to make us more like Europe, it ought to be at least a little dispiriting:
The differences between the American and European concepts of citizenship couldn’t be clearer. To Americans, participation in public life isn’t just about the government or politics, it’s also about community organizations, fraternal groups, religious institutions, and so forth. To the extent that we have the right to participate in politics, that participation is neither granted by or even really circumscribed by the Constitution. That document exists to limit government and define its powers; our right to participate in government is really the right to be a part of government, and it comes from God. Of course, neither the EU nor the UN could ever say such a thing.
In his book about charitable giving and the characteristics of charitable givers, Who Really Cares?, Arthur Brooks devotes an entire chapter to the notion of “continental drift,” in the subject. Private giving, to private foundations dedicated to the public good, is minuscule in Europe compared to the United States. Along with that has come a withering of civil society, as most of those functions have been taken over by the state, and the state has increasingly become devoted to income redistribution. (Brooks shows that those who believe that a primary function of government is income redistribution are among those least likely to contribute time or money to charities. This is true whether or not such redistribution actually takes place.)
As the government becomes the only venue for channeling help to fellow citizens, politics becomes the only means of differentiating where that help goes, what forms it takes, what conditions attach to it, and what incentives it creates. Or at least it would, if Europe had a healthy political system. (As Mark Steyn has pointed out endlessly, the parties that European voters choose between are left-of-right-of-center, and right-of-left-of-center, and the big decisions have already been made and locked in.) But it’s also likely true that a country without a healthy civil society can’t have a healthy political system for long, either.
I’ve seen this in my own work on the JCRC. While it’s true that most of the Jewish organizations who sit on it are temperamentally leftish, if not outright leftist, to begin with, it’s also true that many are less willing to criticize a system on which they have come to depend for a substantial part of their operating expenses. They have decided that it’s easier and cheaper to hire a lobbyist rattle a tin cup in front of a state legislative or Congressional committee than to hire a PR person and make the case to the community at large of the value of their services. So along with Big Labor and Big Business becoming arms of the federal government, Big Philanthropy is headed in that direction, as well.
Hickenlooper on Guns, Then and Now
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC on December 14th, 2012
In the wake of the Aurora Theater Shootings, CNN’s Candy Crowley interviewed Gov. John Hickenlooper, and tried mightily – and unsuccessfully – to get him to declare in favor of increased gun control. Hickenlooper didn’t necessarily commit. But one would be hard-pressed to see the interview, and read the transcript, and not come away with the impression that the Governor wasn’t interested in imposing new restrictions on Colorado gun owners:
Crowley: Do you see any law anywhere that could stop a man with no record in a society that protects the 2nd Amendment that might have prevented this?
Hickenlooper: You know, we are certainly looking at that and trying to say, “How do you prevent this?” You know, the Virginia Tech shootings, I look at – been looking at the shootings all across the country. And I try to say, how do we preserve our freedoms – right? – and all those things that define this country, and yet try to prevent something like this happening. Let me tell you, there’s no easy answer.
Crowley: What I hear from you is you would be open to people who wanted to suggest a gun law or something that might prevent this sort of thing, but at the moment you can’t imagine what that would be.
Hickenlooper: Yeah, I’m happy to look at anything, but this person, if there were no assault weapons available, if there were no this or no that, this guy’s going to find something right? He’s going to know how to create a bomb, he’s going to – I mean, who knows where his mind would have gone. Clearly a very intelligent individual, however twisted. You know, I know that’s the problem. This is really a human issue, in some profound way, that this level of disturbed individual, that we can’t recognize it.
What a difference a few months – and an election – make. The Denver Post reports that Hickenlooper is now singing a different tune:
In a significant shift from his statements earlier this year, Gov. John Hickenlooper now says “the time is right” for Colorado lawmakers to consider further gun restrictions.
The Democratic governor made his comments in an interview with The Associated Pressthat comes less than half a year after the mass shooting in an Aurora movie theater that killed 12 and injured at least 58. His latest words also follow a shooting in an Oregon mall Tuesday that left three dead, including the gunman, who shot himself.
“I wanted to have at least a couple of months off after the shooting in Aurora to let people process and grieve and get a little space, but … I think, now … the time is right,” Hickenlooper said in the Wednesday interview.
Hickenlooper didn’t, at the time, say anything like, “Now isn’t the time to be considering this, in the heat of the moment.” He spoke in terms of protecting freedoms and rights, the difficulty of crafting a bill that wouldn’t impinge on those, and the fact that Holmes would have used other items at his disposal to wreak havoc, if guns hadn’t been available.
But that was then. The state House of Representatives was in Republican hands, and there was little-to-no chance of passing any sort of gun control legislation.
Now, with the House set to be firmly in Democrat control, Hickenlooper has changed his mind. This position may more closely resembles his actual views on the matter. Alternately, whether this may be merely the first of a series of instances where a more hard-line liberal legislature will force him to make difficult choices he has thus far been able to avoid.
Realistic Republican Expectations on Immigration
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Immigration, PPC on December 12th, 2012
In the wake of Mitt Romney’s defeat, and poor showing among Hispanics, Republicans and conservatives in general are reassessing their position on immigration. At least part of this is driven by vote calculations. Some proponents of reform have been pushing entirely unrealistic numbers in terms of the Hispanic vote for Republicans, such as winning half the Hispanic vote. Such hopes are fool’s gold, and I fear that expectations of sudden electoral riches may end up driving Republicans to make a bad bargain, both for themselves and the country.
Democrats won’t let the Republicans off the hook that easily. The party of institutionalized racism and identity politics certainly isn’t going to simply give up on what’s been a winning hand for them for decades now. There’s also reason to believe that only a fairly small part of the Hispanic vote, above Romney’s 29%, is available to Republicans, anyway. A recent forum at the Wilson Center on the Latino Vote had a lot to offer on the subject, but a few points stood out to confirm this assessment.
Writer Roberto Suro dissected the Hispanic vote into some of its component parts. While some elements may be more socially conservative, he pointed out that the Puerto Rican vote in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut is among the most liberal in the country, voting upwards of 85% Democrat. I’d add that the next generation of Cuban voters, with only second- or third-hand knowledge of Castro’s depredations, is also proving to be more liberal in its voting.
As for the first point, Obama flack Dan Restrepo wasn’t shy at all about calling legalization, anything short of citizenship, “second-class status here in the United States.” If the deal is some sort of legalization without citizenship, expect to hear a lot of that phrase.
Suro also had this to say, on a somewhat more mundane level:
I have to respectfully disagree. If you look back over the last 10 years or so of failure in immigration policy-making – actually more than 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, depends on how far back you want to go – one of the developments, particularly since the mid-2000s, has been the emergence of a fairly vigorous immigrant-rights movement in this country, and a litigation power and a protest power that didn’t exist before.
All of you have talked here, as if you missed the key to all immigration legislation in the past, maybe it will be different this time, has been in the details. So, “a legalization,” this means nothing.
There are two things we know from past experience about the nature of these proposals.
One is that a legalization proposal is going to be a giant game of chutes and ladders, with all kinds of qualifications, a process for getting into it. There are going to be right to the last minute, bargaining over, “let’s set the start date here, or here,” and you’re tossing a million people one way or the other depending on a deal that’s made in one of those gilded rooms in the Capitol building, when it goes to conference, right? So we know that.
All that stuff will be litigated. It will be the process – the process of legalization itself, given the current framework, is designed to be long. So it is going to be litigated, and it is going to be a process that people are going to be going through for a long time.
And it will be full of potholes, full of questions about implementation, rights to counsel. I mean, we’re talking about taking a framework now, legally, that is intensely hostile to the legal rights of the foreign-born.
The other piece of the architecture of immigration policy that we can be pretty confident about is that as you build an umbrella under which certain people are sheltered, life outside that umbrella gets harsher. That means that whoever doesn’t get in, is going to face a much more wicked situation, in terms of much higher rates of deportation, fewer rights when you –
People are portraying this as, “Oh, by April we’ll pass this law, and then Latinos will forget about it.” It will be a living, breathing controversy in Latino communities for the next decade.
Suro’s point is that these battles and gaps are inherently unavoidable. There’s simply no way to take immigration off the table. And in all of that litigation, and all of those bureaucratic debates, expect the Democrats to pose as the champions of the Hispanics, dragging out resolution of each and every issue as long as there is electoral advantage to it.
None of this is to suggest that Republicans shouldn’t rethink where they stand on immigration. The current system is a mess on many levels, and needs to be reworked to better serve our national interests. If the election helps do that, it will be a net plus. And a smart policy can also help avoid cementing self-inflicted wounds. But the sooner Republicans understand that they’re not going to walk away with 50% of the Hispanic vote any time soon, if ever, the better-positioned they’ll be to craft a policy that makes sense for the country, as well as to avoid making concession to Democrats who will work the negotiations with elections in mind.
The Pivot – The Republicans’ Secret Weapon
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Defense, National Politics, PPC on December 10th, 2012
When sequestration was designed by the Obama administration, the idea was that the required spending cuts would be unpalatable to both sides – cuts to Democrat-favored patronage programs would be balanced by cuts to Republican-favored defense spending. Few of us who supported the debt ceiling deal realized how seriously the deck was stacked against Republicans, with tax increases scheduled to take effect, at the same time that entitlement spending remains untouched.
The game is to box the Republicans into permitting tax increases now, in return for promises of spending cuts, and promises to examine entitlements. I’m sure Obama will give entitlements all the attention he can, in-between the front and back nines.
The game is aided and abetted by a number of institutional and political factors. They have a President who seemingly believes that whatever the consequences of raising taxes on a fragile economy, and defense cuts in a world whose stability largely rests on US power, the political blame will largely fall on Republicans. Republicans have allowed themselves to be trapped by the Democrat publicity arm media into negotiating with themselves on national television. The President hints darkly about “not playing that game” of using the debt ceiling for leverage, but in the absence of a proper budget process, Congress institutionally has no other leverage to control executive spending.
While Harry Reid has steadfastly refused – in blatant violation of the law – to pass a budget, Speaker Boehner has abandoned that process in favor of closed-door negotiations. The Speakership simply is simply not a position that generally produces men suited to that role. Boehner is acting like most Speakers – a legislator who sees it as his job to legislate. It is the relentless logic of the situation that led Boehner to punish fiscal hawks by removing them from key committee positions; he’s assumed a role that he really shouldn’t be in at all, and it’s led him to take some rash and unwise personnel decisions in order to try to preserve caucus unity. He would be better served by trusting his committee chairmen in a complex process such as this.
But as long as the Republicans are committed to this process, the defense angle may not be as one-sided as we’ve been thinking. Walter Russell Mead provides the clue:
The rising regional tensions, if anything, underline the need for a continuing U.S. presence. The Philippine foreign minister, like Japan, has welcomed that presence and agreed to “more U.S. ship visits and more joint training exercises.” This is a good sign. America is a stabilizing force in the region; we don’t want war, and we don’t want boundaries changed by force.
Reassuring our allies while reaching out to China and trying to keep the temperature cool is going to be a tough assignment, and there is no way to do this on the cheap. The President and his new Secretary of State have their work cut out for them. Pivoting is hard work.
Indeed it is. The US has already been initially shut out of a new multi-lateral trade pact in Asia, and much of the Chinese aggressiveness can be traced to administration weakness around the world. We can survive a couple of months of sequestration, if it leads the administration to recognize that its plans for its pivot to Asia depend on having a naval presence to back it up, assuming they really care.
In fact, the House Republicans could always simply walk away and let the cliff happen. They could also do as Rand Paul suggests, pass the President’s plan, an immanentize the financial eschaton. But they have a number of better options: they could pass Bowles-Simpson and dare the President and Harry Reid to ignore it; they could pass a bill retaining all of the Bush tax rates, and then pass an additional package that would target tax benefits largely enjoyed by blue-state limousine liberals. They could pass actual budget and tax bills, and inform Sen. Reid that until he returns to lawful and orderly governance, there will be no debt ceiling increase. The knowledge that the President’s high-profile foreign policy initiatives depend on getting a deal done should strengthen their hand considerably.
PERA’s Resolute Optimism, Part 2
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, PERA, PPC on December 9th, 2012
In the previous post, I mentioned that PERA, in retaining its 8% expected rate of return, was persisting in an unwarranted optimism, one that is likely to end up costing the citizens of Colorado billions of dollars down the line. Part of the evidence was that other municipal pension plans around the nation have recently lowered their expected rates of return. That said, as of 2009, the overwhelming number of plans in the Center for Retirement Research’s Public Plans database were living in what can only be described as Fantasyland, as the following histogram shows:
I’m sure the right part of the graph, which resembles a strong signal from those plans to their taxpayers footing the bills, is only accidental.
In fact, between 2001 and 2009, plans were extremely reluctant to revise their expected rates of return, despite the fact that they rarely met them for more than a year at a time, and continued to fall farther behind in their funding. If you look at actual returns for those years, they don’t come anywhere close to what was projected:
The result is that plan assets haven’t kept up at all with plan liabilities, even in these years when the market has performed reasonably well (Source: Public Fund Survey):
Understanding that many factors go into whether a plan’s funded level increases or decreases, the fact is that looking forward from 2001 to 2009, over the succeeding 21 years, the median plan would have to return about 10.5% over the following 21 years, to make up for having fallen behind in the first decade:
The problem, of course, is that plans have spending requirement every year; they can’t simply choose to sit on their assets and wait for their investments to catch up. It means that low returns in early years require even higher returns in the later years for the plans to return to 100% funded levels, without increasing cash infusions or a reduction in benefits.
One guess as to which will be the plans’, the governments’, and the SEIU’s first choice.
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