Old-Style Liberal Blog

A Socialist Behemoth?

2012-01-12T15:14:00.003-05:00

To Washington Post columnist George F. Will:

George F. Will

Your noteworthy and extremely well-written column of January 6, 2012, appeared online as "Government: The redistributionist behemoth," but in the print edition it was called "The socialist behemoth." The implication of the morphing headline makes the point of the whole column: you think our federal government's policy inclinations are "redistributionist," thus "socialist," thus bad.

As an old-style liberal, I disagree with both epithets.

True, our government has been shaped by progressive policies for more than century. I don't dispute that. But I take exception to your finding this an increasingly degenerate and bankrupt way of doing things today.

I do agree that many of Uncle Sam's longstanding policies have redistributionist consequences, either intentionally or as side effects. Since we started paying federal income taxes a century ago, they have typically been progressive, with the rich paying higher rates than the less affluent. The primary intent has been to sufficiently finance government outlays. The secondary intent has been to distribute the tax burden upward. That, as a matter of simple fairness, leaves more money in the pockets of those who need every dollar they can get.

A bad idea, that? I can't see why.

Is this, as you put it, an instance of government "supplanting markets as society's primary allocator of wealth and opportunity"? It might be so if the top tax rate were downright confiscatory, with every extra dollar taken in by the wealthy vacuumed right out of their pockets, leaving no spare change. But the top rate is now only 35 percent ... far from confiscatory.

You say the redistributionist lust of progressive government "constantly expands under the unending, indeed intensifying, pressures to correct what it disapproves of — the distribution of wealth produced by consensual market activities." Were those "unending, indeed intensifying, pressures" toward ever greater wealth redistribution why we enacted the Bush tax cuts, then? But they favored the entire range of taxpayers, no? They were anti-redistributionist.

Given our country's history, in fact, I'd say that we tend to slosh back and forth between redistributionism and anti-redistributionism. Progressive government's urge to redistribute and equalize does have its checks and balances.

You note that "the elderly are, after a lifetime of accumulation, better off than most Americans: In 2009, the net worth of households headed by adults ages 65 and older was a record 47 times that of households headed by adults under the age of 35 — a wealth gap that doubled just since 2005." But that's an argument for means-testing Social Security and Medicare. It's not an effective argument that entitlements for the elderly are simply bound, by their very nature, to become a behemoth that will one day devour America.

I support means-testing, and I think many other progressives do, too. Means-testing old age entitlements is a tweak we now need to implement.

As for tweaks: you say that our tax code — "government’s favorite instrument for distributing wealth to favored factions" — gets repeatedly tweaked: " ... about 4,500 times in 10 years."

What's bad about that? At least it bespeaks that Congress can do things, despite what so many are claiming today.

Redistributionist government "siphons power into itself," you say. Concomitantly, we see a political culture of increased "rent-seeking." Rent-seeking is, says Wikipedia, an attempt to obtain economic advantage "by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth."

David Brooks

New York Times columnist David Brooks writes in his recent op-ed piece "Where Are the Liberals?" that rent-seeking, run amok, convinces us that "the whole system is rigged."

And, yes, we do hear that kind of talk today. I admit it. But what's the fix for the problem?

We learned in the late nineteenth century that unfettered economic activity on the part of railroad barons and manufacturers' trusts likewise made people feel the system was rigged. The progressive era got its start when the federal government stepped in to bust the trusts.

Sometimes effective progressive government is the fix.

Brooks calls rent-seeking "the disease that corrodes government at all times and in all places." And I would agree with him, and with Will, that we now have too much of it — what Brooks calls the Instrument Problem:

Americans may agree with liberal diagnoses, but they don’t trust the instrument the Democrats use to solve problems. They don’t trust the federal government.

But, I would say, what is needed in not government that is less progressive in its goals. Rather, we need government that is less bureaucratic and more transparent in its methods.

To get it, as Brooks points out, today's liberalism desperately needs "a Martin Luther, a leader committed to stripping away the corruptions, complexities and indulgences that have grown up over the years."

So true. President Obama ran on "change we can believe in" in 2008 and won handily. Many, myself included, thought he would become liberalism's Martin Luther. It's not too late for him to do so now. If he does, he could put paid to George Will's "socialist behemoth" argument for a generation or more.

Don't Even Scan My Junk!

2010-11-24T13:15:00.006-05:00

To Washington Post op-ed columnist Ruth Marcus:

As a liberal Democrat, I generally agree with your practical yet slightly-left-of-center opinions, if I may so characterize them, but your column "Don't touch my junk? Grow up, America" (Nov. 24) is unconvincing to me. I just don't want to have my genitals subjected to a stranger's gaze or touch so that some bureaucrat's or politician's idea of enhanced airline security is served.

I have been patted down in an airport, by the way. It happened years ago, in Kenya, which is a country that may need such intrusive procedures. I'm not yet convinced such procedures are needed here.

Maybe "whether this is real security or security theater is to some extent unknowable," as you admit. Yet I want to be shown some hard evidence, please, before I submit to the depersonalization of a full-body scan or patdown that is not clearly for my own individual — or at least somebody else's — benefit.

Here are actual airport-style scans of a woman and a man, with faces blurred:

Those are "millimeter-wave" scans. The alternative Rapiscan process gives:

The second impresses me as quite graphic, the image of the male notably so. How exactly, I'd like to ask, is it any less depersonalizing if a scanner blurs or obliterates my face while it's outlining my "package" so faithfully?

Many of the things you wrote bother me greatly, Ruth:

" ... where is the harm if some guy in another room, who doesn't have a clue who I am and doesn't see my face (it's obscured on the machine), gets a look at my flabby middle-aged self?" Maybe so, but you're still being depersonalized — rendered anonymous — while your "junk" is put on display. This is acceptable???

The question of one's flabbiness being limned, and one's middle-aged sag being exposed to view, makes your position more tenuous, not less, I'd say. I myself am far enough past middle age to expect to hear loud guffaws emanating from that nearby room of high-tech privacy invasion. But even if I were young and buff, I'd still loudly say, "Keep your eyeballs off my junk." (And, by the way, are those prying eyeballs ensconced in a nearby room female eyeballs or male eyeballs?)

"The images are automatically deleted once the screening is completed"? Not necessarily ... from Gizmodo.com, "One Hundred Naked Citizens: One Hundred Leaked Body Scans" is proof that they don't always get dumped into the bit bucket.

"'Don't touch my junk' may be the cri de coeur - cri de crotch? - of the post-9/11 world, but it's an awfully childish one"? It misses the point for you to say how immature some of the blogging has been about this issue. Immature men and women, like the rest of us, have a right not to be ogled by complete strangers or patted down by begloved officials in Transportation Security Administration uniforms.

"The marginal invasion of privacy is small relative to the potential benefit of averting a terrorist attack," you say? Two thoughts:

• One, the invasion of privacy is not marginal, it is (as I said) depersonalizing. Patdowns are no better just because the patter-downer can see our face and we his or hers. Breast, genital, and posterior prodding, no matter how brief, is depersonalizing. What is depersonalizing is never marginal.

• Two, exactly how much do the odds of a terrorist attack decline if this kind of scanning/body-touching is insisted on? I'd like a rigorous comparison, please, between:

The odds of my plane crashing with no survivors, due to causes other than a terrorist bomb
The odds of my plane being blown up by a terrorist bomb if we go back to the older, less intrusive screening procedures
The odds of my plane being blown up with the new procedures in place

If odds-number-three can't be demonstrated to be palpably greater than odds-numbers-one-and-two, is odds-number-three justified?

"We let people touch our junk all the time in medical settings"? Air travel is a part of many people's day-to-day lives. If I had to have my "junk" put on display on a basis more regular than an annual doctor's exam or mammogram, I'd certainly start to feel I was getting "objectified," after some period of time. In the case of frequent air travel — which I personally don't engage in — I'd like to feel that the benefits-to-depersonalization ratio was as significant as with the oocasional medical procedures I do voluntarily undergo.

"I undergo the pat-down, if I must, for the greater public benefit"? Again, where are the numbers to show how great the public benefit is?

Breast cancer survivors having their prostheses inspected; bladder cancer survivors having their urine bags ruptured ... yet you cover this by saying, "Effective screening does not require a complete suspension of common sense"? Do we really expect common sense to govern what each one of dozens or hundreds of TSA employees do in the performance of their duties?

An obvious problem with scanning/patting procedures that are this intrusive is that the line between what is OK and what is unacceptable is way too slender for unintentional oversteppings of that line to be rendered sufficiently uncommon.

And that doesn't even include the potential for intentional overstepping. Why might one think TSA employees any less immature than the average blogger?

"The stepped-up screening has generated a fascinating fusion of left-right outrage"? Well, duh. Maybe that's because there's no quantifiable, objectively verifiable case to be made for the stepped-up screening!

I could go on and on, Ruth, but I think you get my point. In a nutshell, I just don't see that stepped-up, intrusive screenings and pattings down of my private bodily parts in an attempt to reduce the likelihood of someone secreting non-metallic explosives on board an airplane enhances the public welfare in a quantifiable way.

And even if it truly forestalled what it purports to forestall, what is to stop the bad guys from, as you so delicately put it, "hiding explosives in body cavities" as the next phase of their war on civilization? If it ever comes to that, what would prevent your "reasonable" depersonalization-creep from one day acquiescing in anal and vaginal inspections?

An Old-Style Poll on the Debt Crisis

2010-11-13T15:07:00.005-05:00

First, take this poll:

Raise your hand if you think Uncle Sam — the United States government in Washington, D.C., that is — has been living way beyond his means.
Raise your hand if you know what the phrase "President Obama's budget commission" refers to.
Raise your hand if you know that the co-chairs of that commission came out with a paper last week that gives some ideas about reining in our ballooning federal deficit and debt before they rein in America's future economic growth.
Raise your hand if you have the slightest idea what it was that the co-chairs suggested.
Raise your hand if you believe the federal budget needs to be balanced — or, if the budget is not balanced entirely, at least the remaining yearly budget deficit has to be reduced to a fraction of what it is today.
Raise your hand if you think the budget can be balanced, or the deficit sufficiently shrunk, without any tax increases.
Raise your hand if you think the budget can be balanced, or the deficit sufficiently shrunk, without cutting federal spending in any major way.
Raise your hand if your hand was up for either of the previous two questions.

Now, if your hand was up for question 8 — or even if it wasn't — read Ruth Marcus's column in today's Washington Post and then take the poll again.

If you are still left with your hand up on question 8, congratulations! You may be one of the roughly half of Americans who believe the "budget fairy [can] magically solve the problem by tucking a trillion or two under the national pillow," and that "snipping away at waste, fraud and abuse and sprinkling magic growth-dust on the economy" will fix everything.

Income Inequality: Way High by Historical Standards

2010-10-06T14:05:00.023-04:00

The Washington Post's economics columnist Steven Pearlstein has an article and graph in today's newspaper showing how high income inequality has gotten in America.

Here's his "Percentage of Americans' pretax income going to top 10% of households" graph:

Before the recent economic downturn, fully 50% of the (pretax) income received from private (non-governmental) sources went to the top "decile" (10 percent) of earners. The bottom nine deciles (90 percent) of earners were left to split the remaining half of total pretax income.

SInce the downturn, the share of the top 10 percent has edged downward. But it still receives fully 48 percent of private pretax income!

The last time the slice of the pie going to the richest 10 percent was in the same high range as it is today was around 1929 — just about the time a stock market crash led to the Great Depression!

From the end of World War II until about 1976, according to the graph, the top 10 percent took home only about one-third of private pretax income. Pearlstein calls these "the 'golden years' for the U.S. economy."

As you go higher up the income ladder, things get more and more skewed. "By 2007, the top 1 percent of households took home 23 percent of the national income," writes Pearlstein. That's almost a quarter of national income, going to just 1 out of 100 American households.

That figure was attained after "a 15-year run in which [the top 1 percent] captured more than half — yes, you read that right, more than half — of the country's economic growth." Translation: from 1992 to 2007, as gross domestic product and national income rose mightily, the bottom 99 percent of households took home less than half of the overall increase.

Here's a chart showing the inequailty in income in a different way:

(It's from this web page. Scroll down about halfway to the "August 3, 2008--Growing Inequality in Income" entry.)

In this second chart we see that as of 2006, the bottom 90 percent of earners had an income level that was, on average, $30,173 — down from $31,437 in 2000. Meanwhile, the average family in the "top 10% to 5%" range of incomes took home $117,688 in '06. There were almost 7.5 million such families, compared with over 133 million in the bottom 90 percent.

Then, once you get into the "top 5% to 1%" range and above, the income disparity grows by leaps and bounds. There were, for example, fewer than 15,000 families in the "top 0.01%" in 2006, each taking home an average income of over $17 million dollars!

* * * * *

Pearlstein adds:

Because so much of the nation's income is siphoned off to the super-rich ... a struggling middle class trying to maintain its standard of living [must] take on more and more debt. ... [Meanwhile,] in order to respond to the stagnant incomes of their constituents, politicians took a number of steps to keep the "American Dream" within reach, including subsidization of home mortgages and college loans [and] politicians also were quick to cut taxes for the middle class even when it meant running up the national debt to pay for popular entitlement programs and government services.

See the common thread? When income inequality is high, there are irresistable pressures both at the national and at the family level to take on huge amounts of debt.

In an earlier post, I showed this graph:

It illustrates the fact that the percentage of our gross domestic product represented by the size of our national debt (i.e., the total amount of debt owed by the federal government to those holding its bonds and other debt instruments) has never been higher in our nation's history ... with the single exception of the years immediately following World War II.

The national debt represents the accumulation over time of our annual federal budgetary deficits. Unless we quickly rein our annual federal deficit in by means of a series of difficult political choices, this ratio of national debt to GDP will (according to the Congressional Budget Office's "alternative baseline scenario") soar way past the sky-high post-WWII level, sometime during the 2020s.

Even if we make the tough political choices now, the CBO's rosiest scenario — the "extended baseline scenario" — has the debt-to-GDP ratio increasing from today's already high-by-historical-standards level.

Pearlstein also points out that the "polarization of income distribution in the United States coincides with a polarization of the political process. Just as income inequality has eroded any sense that we are all in this together, it has also eroded the political consensus necessary for effective government."

Translation: don't hold your breath until the politics-as-usual we see in Washington and around the country today steps up to the tough political choices that will make the CBO's disturbing "extended baseline scenario" come true, as opposed to the truly scary "alternative baseline scenario."

* * * * *

We await with bated breath, meanwhile, the report forthcoming by December 1 from the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Appointed in early 2010 by President Obama and headed by Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, and Erskine Bowles, White House chief of staff under our last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, this commission (see its website) is ...

... charged with identifying policies to improve the fiscal situation in the medium term and to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run. Specifically, the Commission shall propose recommendations designed to balance the budget, excluding interest payments on the debt, by 2015. In addition, the Commission shall propose recommendations that meaningfully improve the long-run fiscal outlook, including changes to address the growth of entitlement spending and the gap between the projected revenues and expenditures of the Federal Government.

The recommendations of the commission will be non-binding on Congress or the president. It is just barely possible, however, that they would be submitted to Congress for an up-or-down vote, without allowing Congress the ability to pick and choose among the recommendations. If that even succeeds, it's unclear how the package would be translated into actual legislation and passed as such, with the president's eventual signature.

Even so, the commission approach may be our best hope to rein in deficits and balance the federal budget any time soon. Doing so is the only way to get the debt-to-GDP ratio back under control, barring stunning GDP growth which is not likely to happen.

Meanwhile, we need to address income inequality. There's no way we will be able to rein in the federal largesse aimed by politicans at "keeping the American Dream within reach" of the broad middle class if a fairer distribution of income is not somehow brought about, thus reducing the pressure on the politicians to keep the federal money tap flowing, deficits be damned.

* * * * *

The figures I gave earlier were for pretax income. We use a "progressive" income tax in the U.S. to charge the well-to-do a higher percentage of their income, based on their tax bracket. Hence, after-tax income distribution is not quite as skewed as pretax income.

You can check out an easy-to-use tax calculator here to see how tax brackets work. Try it! Enter your filing status (single, married filing jointly, etc.) and the tax year you are curious about to see what the tax brackets looked like in that year.

Now set the filing status to married filing jointly, the most common status for the proverbial "family of four." Advance the tax year in successive steps from 2000 through 2003. Notice how the tax rates for the top three brackets suddenly dropped in 2003.

By 2003, taxpayers in the third bracket from the top — with taxable incomes of at least $114,650 — were taxed at 28 percent of the taxable income above the lower edge of their bracket. The same bracket was taxed at 30 percent the previous year. Meanwhile, the two top brackets went from 35 percent and 38.6 percent to 33 and 35 percent, respectively. Those changes reflected the "Bush tax cuts."

According to Steven Pearlstein's article, households that take home more than $110,000 a year (in today's dollars) constitute the top 10 percent of our population income-wise. But in the 2010 tax year, as the tax brackets worksheet shows, the bottom edge of tax bracket #3 is fully $137,300. That means that a huge slice of America's top 10 percent income-wise currently gets taxed in the fourth bracket down, at a maximum rate of only 25 percent!

* * * * *

The Bush tax cuts will expire at the beginning of 2011 unless Congress steps in. It is not entirely clear which earlier year's brackets would be reverted to, or whether the dollar amounts associated with those reverted brackets would be raised to offset inflation. Yet if one assumes the 2001 brackets would come back into force, possibly with inflation-adjusted dollar amounts, the worksheet suggests that the three (no longer four) tax brackets embracing roughly the top decile of incomes would have to pay taxes at maximum rates of 30.5, 35.5, and 39.1 percent. Thus, everyone in the top decile would pay taxes at higher maximum rates than now.

We hear that Democrats want to let the Bush cuts expire for the most well-off while keeping them in force for the vast middle class. But we also hear that they would raise taxes (by letting cuts lapse) on only the top two brackets, not the top three, as would be needed to pull in extra tax dollars from the over 13 million households in the top decile but below (roughly) the top 1 percent.

In my opinion, we will instead need to raise taxes on the entirety of the top decile if we want to be able to afford not raising them on those in the bottom 9 deciles!

Why doesn't it feel like an economic recovery?

2010-10-05T12:21:00.005-04:00

Today's The Washington Post features "Why it doesn't feel like a recovery," a revealing graph accompanied by a short article. They are presented interactively here.

Here's the crucial graph itself:

You'll need to view the online presentation for full details. Here's a summary:

Our economy's "size" is given by its gross domestic product: how much valuable "stuff" gets produced by Americans each year. The potential GDP grows as the potential size of the workforce does. Meanwhile, improved techniques of production are usually expected to increase the "productivity" of workers, so they can make ever more "stuff" per hour on the job than they otherwise could. That's why there is an almost straight diagonal line in the graph that steadily ascends as the years roll by, reflecting a GDP that potentially grows at a nearly constant rate.

But the actual GDP is currently under — less than — that potential GDP. That's the area shown in red on the graph.

Actual GDP can sometimes exceed the line shown as potential GDP, during short, unsustainable bursts of economic activity. The areas shown in blue — the bigger of the two that are shown comes around the years 2000-2001 — reflect that.

The key point is that the vast shortfall between actual and potential GDP that we see today is what is wrong with the economy. Too many people without jobs, too much industrial machinery idle, too many office buildings under full capacity — it all adds up to a woefully underperforming economy.

This is so even though actual GDP stopped dropping and began heading upward in the middle of last year, 2009. The graph shows that fact ... and it is what economists mean when they say that the recession officially ended then. We are no longer in recession because we have positive GDP growth now; that's all that means. It does not mean the economy is in good shape.

What would it take to get the economy back to the level where actual GDP matches potential GDP, so that everyone who is not simply "between jobs" actually has a job, factories are all humming, office buildings are full, retail stores are not empty, etc.?

As the graph shows, we can get back to that point as soon as 2012 — in time for the next presidential election — if only actual GDP could rise at the rate of 6 percent per year between now and then. 6 percent growth would so far outstrip the more modest expected rise in potential GDP, that all but the roughly 5 percent of workers who are typically "between jobs" at any given moment are actually working.

However, if actual GDP growth takes place at a more modest rate of 3 percent a year, it will take us until 2020 to squeeze all the red out of the graph.

And it gets worse. If the rate of actual GDP growth tops out at only 2 percent a year into the foreseeable future, we will never squeeze all the red out. In fact, in that scenario the unemployment rate, which is now at an unacceptable 9.7 percent, would rise to fully 11.9 percent by 2020 if GDP grows at a scant 2 percent between now and that year.

In short, this graph gives us all valuable insight into why words like "the recession ended in mid-2009" are meaningless from a practical — and political — perspective today.

The "Relocating" of America

2010-08-05T12:55:00.296-04:00

My last post, America Dislocated, was about how America needs to recover its old, small-town values. I said I believe that our loss of erstwhile small-town values is like a joint that has been dislocated. We've been successfully favoring it for decades, but now it needs to be (painfully) reset.

That is what is in fact in store for us, I said, owing to a huge impending crisis over our national debt. According to Congressional Budget Office estimates ...

From CBO's deficit forecast shows need for early action, Washington Post editorial, Saturday, July 31, 2010

... between now and about 2035 the ratio of federal debt to the size of our economy — the debt-to-GDP ratio — is likely to soar to unprecedented, unsustainable levels. This so-called "alternative baseline scenario"(the top blue line in the graph) could, if everything goes right, fail to materialize ... but even the rosier "extended-baseline scenario" puts debt-to-GDP ratios at levels higher than at any time in our nation's history, with the exception of the period surrounding World War II.

Even the rosier projections involve debt-to-GDP levels that are exorbitant by all peacetime standards, and look like they will continue long into the indefinite future ... unless something is done. What might that something be?

We can try to head off the crisis by raising taxes, thereby shrinking the annual budget deficits that feed into the national debt.
We can cut expenditures, with a similar belt-tightening result.
We can grow the GDP. (If GDP grows, the ratio of debt-to-GDP shrinks.)

Growing the GDP is problematic. If we could do that at will, we'd have no lingering recession today.

Raising taxes is likewise problematic. Republicans emphatically don't want to raise them on the rich, which would happen if the Bush income-tax cuts are allowed to expire on schedule at the end of 2010. GOP members of the House and the Senate would prefer to renew the Bush cuts in their entirety, but, failing that, they would like to renew the Bush cuts as they affect the top two income brackets specifically. Democrats want to keep the cuts for middle-income taxpayers and eliminate them for the top two brackets. Who knows where all this will end up, in a midterm election year?

Cutting expenditures is also problematic. Where do you cut?

Cutting interest payments on the debt is out, right off the bat.
So, effectively, are cuts in spending on the military, national defense, and homeland security.
Cuts in entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare are super-hard to accomplish ... and it is increasing Medicare/Social Security outlays for retiring baby boomers that most threaten to break the bank.
The recent health care reform package makes things even worse by imposing a yet greater financial burden on Uncle Sam, and even many of its supporters agree that its failure to seriously contain medical costs will have to be remedied in the very near future.
Remaining items in the federal budget are called "discretionary spending" — and they're almost as hard to eliminate as all of the above. Many of them are instances of "pork," a.k.a. "earmarks," that legislators get inserted in bills to help the folks back home in some way. Constituents love pork/earmarks when their own state or district is benefitted ... and hate it as a general concept when they themselves are not the beneficiaries. But because locally helpful pork gets legislators re-elected, it's nearly impossible to eradicate.
Much of the rest discretionary spending goes to programs that benefit everybody, such as federal assistance to local schools. You have to be a curmudgeon to oppose that ... or a member of the extreme political right which insists that Uncle Sam has no business telling the states and local school boards what to do to keep the "money tap" open.

Whatever the category of federal spending, it is hard to cut.

Why? At bottom — and this applies even to military, national defense, and homeland security expenditures, most of which wind up in pockets of us Americans here at home — it's because we have developed an "entitlement mentality." Put bluntly, we depend on the federal "money tap" to shield us from our onetime small-town, communitarian obligations.

The urge to leave
Bedford Falls is strong
for George Bailey.

Think of George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life." He wants to leave Bedford Falls, see the world, make his mark on it. And why not? He's seemingly not needed at the Building & Loan his father founded.

But, as it turns out, if he leaves (as he learns from the guided tour an angel gives him of the dystopia Bedford Falls will become if he goes) he will in effect be killing the community his father helped build. Instead, he stays and sets things to rights. Cue the happy ending!

In 1946, when "It's a Wonderful Life" was made, the federal "money tap" had been opened wide due to WWII and, before that, the New Deal during the Great Depression. Frank Capra, the film's director, was clearly worried that America's small towns were dying, as was the sense of communitarian responsibility which George Bailey dodged until set straight by an angel.

After WWII we had ... yet more federal programs. One was the G.I. Bill of Rights that sent returning veterans to college and on to lives in the new suburbs, such as Levittown, that were springing up like mushrooms. Federal largesse grew, and as it grew, it was more than matched by GDP growth for quite a long time, as cheap oil from America and abroad fueled economic progress. (Our "cheap oil tap" was shut off in the 1970s with the first Arab oil embargo.)

But we were also getting warnings, in the form of books like Sloan Wilson's 1955 novel "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," that there was trouble in paradise. In 1956, the casual, carnal, illicit sex going on among neighbors on Grace Metalious's imaginary "Peyton Place" showed us how a real place like Levittown could turn into the complete antithesis of our old, small-town values.

When we left small-town America behind, three important, and interrelated, things happened:

First, we freed ourselves of strictures that formerly held our individual behavior in check. We became what George Bailey might have become if he had in fact left Bedford Falls.

Second, we accordingly grew able to shine — brightly, individually — and to live unprecedented sorts of lives that were ofttimes super-productive economically, technologically, or in some other important way. But we at the same time became "men in gray flannel suits" — à la the currently popular TV series "Mad Men."

There was, as I say, trouble in paradise.

Third, those who for various reasons were unable to shine in the brave new world we were creating were made wards of the expanding welfare state.

If the welfare state now has to be curtailed to head off a debt-to-GDP crisis — and I think it must — then how will that affect American lives? My hypothesis is that at some point we will have to rein ourselves in, in terms of the individual freedom we have known. It was that freedom which, in effect, allowed us to "leave Bedford Falls behind" and to live life on our own unfettered terms.

Why will that happen? Because we will have to reinstate our presently dormant communitarian values, the ones that prevailed cinematically in Bedford Falls, and actually in the small towns of America's past.

And why will we have to reinstate our dormant communitarian values? Because the only alternative would be, as the federal money tap dries up, the dystopia which George Bailey's angel showed him.

Nobody wants that.

***

But we have to be on guard here. Small-town values have traditionally been narrow-minded values.

Nobody ought to want those again.

I talked in my earlier post about a recent Washington Post op-ed piece by Kathleen Parker, Olive Street, by heart, which extolled her tiny three-block enclave in Washington, DC. On Parker's street ...

Olive Street, NW
in Washington, DC

... the people are kind. The kind people of Olive Street include (gasp!) a pair of gay men, next door to Parker, who have been together for a quarter century. They also include those who, like Parker, help watch over neighborhood children whose ethnicity (gasp! again) is not the same as that of their adoptive parents. Would such families fit in, in Bedford Falls?

They are going to have to fit in, in a "relocated" America.

I see the "relocating" of America as upholding the good, communitarian values of our small-town past and as refusing to uphold the narrow-mindedness of that past.

For Joel Fleischman, it's
4,000+ miles back
to the Big Apple

Remember "Northern Exposure," the early-1990s TV series? The denizens of fictional Cicely, Alaska, were about as variegated as those of Olive Street, Washington, DC, but that didn't matter: they somehow coexisted as an egalitarian, big-tent community.

Dr. Joel Fleischman, fresh from from New York and medical school, had managed to get deposited there and desperately wanted to get away. A lucrative career awaited elsewhere. But he was under contract; he had to stay. As he became unwillingly enmeshed in the Cicely community, he learned values of self-denial, mutual caring, and communal integrity that he'd never imagined as a medical student.

We are about to become Joel Fleischman ... all of us. We are about to be permanently relocated to community-minded, tolerant, self-sufficient Cicely, AK.

This has to happen: the federal money tap is about to dry up. We, in all our variegated diversity, are going to need a resuscitated Bedford Falls Building & Loan — a metaphorical stand-in for local, communitarian spirit — to come back to life and help us over the rough patches, real person face-to-face with real person.

America Dislocated

2010-08-01T11:19:00.073-04:00

Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
'Cause your heart's bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can't you see the sun's settin' down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.
—Iris DeMent, "Our Town"

Post
Columnist
Kathleen
Parker

In a recent Sunday Washington Post, in Olive Street, by heart, 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Kathleen Parker is right on target: Today's America is pining away for lost small-town values.

Parker describes an idyllic three-block-long enclave in Washington D.C. where she has nurtured her own personal desire for community for the past four years. Then, after extolling Olive Street's virtues, the columnist reveals she is pulling up stakes for "a much bigger town — New York City — to begin a new adventure."

In the Big Apple, will she find next-door neighbors like Jack and Craig, who took her in the night a friend died? Among the "daily expressions of what it means to be human" that Parker attributes to this gay couple of 25 years' standing have been ...

... the dozens of times I knocked on their door to say, "I'm hungry and out of food," knowing they would say, "You're in luck!"

Will Parker find in NYC another ...

... Meaghan, a widow [who] went to Guatemala to adopt Josephina, who, now bilingual and a determined tricyclist, has become the block's child. Not long ago, Meaghan married Nigel, who added Reagan and Drew to our neighborhood brood.

Maybe Parker will find another Olive Street. Or, maybe not.

Another piece from the same Sunday Post, Crafton family enjoys rare closeness after seven years together at sea, tells of a family-of-five who bought a double-masted, oceanworthy sailing vessel in 2003 and, with several months-long stays in various island communities en route, took it all the way around the world. Dad, Mom, two teenage girls and one teenage boy, living and sleeping together in a cabin no bigger than a hotel bathroom ...

The Craftons in their cabin

... and they had the time of their lives.

What's leaving America entirely and then enduring the culture shock of coming back home after several years away have to do with small-town values? Three things. One: father Tom Crafton reports, "The day we moved onto the boat, the sibling rivalry stopped. I don't think [the kids] ever complained, not once." Two:

Vanuatu, where the people owned the least and smiled the most, was one of their favorites [among stopping off points]. They stayed three months. "They are the happiest people in the world," Tom says. "It reinforced everything we believed about putting time with the family over this blind pursuit of material things."

Small-town values — Vanuatu is essentially a small town on a tiny island — are family values. Three:

Rudest encounter: a few days after reaching Maryland [upon their return home], when a cranky boat owner warned Jena and Ben to keep their rowboat away. "I can't remember a mean word anywhere else on our trip," Tom says. "We're relearning how things are around here."

Williamsburg
reenactor

Yet another article in the same edition of the Post, "Tea party" activists drawn to Williamsburg and its portrayal of Founding Fathers, talks about a recent influx of sometimes temper-toting tourists to Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, where scenes of our country's founding are reenacted daily. These members of the Tea Party movement are ofttimes speaking up, and out, at the reenactments:

They clap loudly when an actor portraying Patrick Henry delivers his "Give me liberty or give me death" speech. They cheer and hoot when Gen. George Washington surveys the troops behind the original 18th-century courthouse. And they shout out about the tyranny of our current government during scenes depicting the nation's struggle for freedom from Britain.

"General, when is it appropriate to resort to arms to fight for our liberty?" asked a tourist on a recent weekday during "A Conversation with George Washington," a hugely popular dialogue between actor and audience in the shaded backyard of Charlton's Coffeehouse.

Standing on a simple wooden stage before a crowd of about 100, the man portraying Washington replied: "Only when all peaceful remedies have been exhausted. Or if we are forced to do so in our own self-defense."

Williamsburg tourists being instructed
in using a musket

In pre-Revolutionary America, Colonial Williamsburg was a small-town seat of local government set in a farming community. Thomas Jefferson, who lived at Monticello, another dot on the map in Virginia, was a farmer.

Add all three of these recent Post pieces together, and you get an indictment of today's dislocated America. If you don't actually live in a small town — as few of us do today; this blogger comes from small-town people but has never himself lived in a small town in 63 years — you have to be extremely lucky to find an Olive Street where you live. You have to go to great lengths, such as sailing the whole family around the globe in a cramped twin-master, to put aside today's hyper-material culture and bond tightly with your own kin. And you are likely to be increasingly angry that the simpler America Jefferson and others knew has vanished.

Ex-Alaska
governor
Sarah Palin

Which is why this blogger thinks Sarah Palin will be elected our next president in 2012.

I think of Palin as Ronald-Reagan-in-a-bra — which, for all you misogynists out there, is not meant as a slight or a slap against the former Alaska governor and GOP vice-presidential candidate. This country is overdue for a female chief executive, and I think Palin will presently become its first.

President Reagan was much like Palin in many ways. He had little grasp of the nuances of current affairs in the 1980s and was the exact opposite of a policy wonk. Ditto, Palin. (Except that both were/are much smarter than we liberals give them credit for. It was just that they had/have the gift of sieving out the daily buzz that stands in the way of their enacting their guiding principles, whatever they actualy are. We'd all be better off if we had a little of the same.)

Reagan was a consummate actor, folksy and telegenic. Ditto, Palin — though she has never been paid to read lines in movies and on TV, as Reagan was for decades. Palin is simply a natural at it — as was the young Reagan. He just happened to stumble into a profession that gave him an outlet for his inborn acting bent.

Then he stumbled into another: politics. Reagan the politician could come up with lines, pithy and humorous, that epitomized what he wanted to make us believe he stood for. Ditto, Palin.

Reagan:

Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.

Palin:

I love those hockey moms. You know what they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull is? Lipstick.

Reality check time:

Under Reagan, the national debt ballooned as a percentage of GDP. Reagan wanted to convince the Soviet Union, through an American arms buildup, that we were dead serious about opposing the "evil empire." Reagan also wanted smaller, cheaper government, true, but he wanted to scare the communists in Moscow even more.
We have yet to see which of her pet convictions Sarah Palin will sacrifice in the name of ... well, of whatever it is that really motivates her. We do know (see Anne Applebaum's recent Post op-ed piece, GOP shows historic amnesia on spending cuts) that "as mayor of Wasilla, Sarah Palin hired a former [ex-Alaska Senator Ted] Stevens chief of staff to be a Washington lobbyist. As a result, the 6,700 inhabitants of [Palin's own small town of] Wasilla enjoyed $27 million in federal earmarks over a four-year period." That's over $1,000 of federal largesse per Wasilla resident per year!

Still, even if she's not always made good on her small-govrnment rhetoric, it's clear to me that Palin marches to the beat of her own drummer — as did Reagan — and will not be hemmed in as president (should she be elected) by the Tea Party movement or anything else.

How American, by the way, for Sarah Palin to have a quintessentially small-town independence from any and every mainstream set of beliefs and constraints that may come down the pike.

President
Barack Obama

President Obama, whom this blogger adores, will, in 2012, lose to Palin because he has taken on the thankless task of trying to heal the side effects of the dislocation of America without necessarily fixing the dislocation proper.

Small-town, Main Street America would never have produced the fat cats on Wall Street who made a financial balloon out of "bad paper" — subprime mortgages that no local savings and loan would have countenanced — and inflated it to the point where it burst, taking the economy down with it. Now Obama, with his bailouts and stimulus plan, is trying to patch things up and put Americans back to work. But what he doesn't seem to get is that Americans want their jobs back, sure, but they also want to get back to small-town values that the faceless Wall Street fat cats, like other miscreants before them, have blithely detonated.

In a small town, everyone takes care of everyone. When people are down on their luck or in poor health, other people step in to help. Today, with that small-town mentality a perennially endangered species, we need hugely expensive, massively intrusive "Obamacare" health reforms, bailouts, stimulus plans, etc., etc., etc., in lieu of what was once the American way of life.

We now face a ballooning of the national debt over the next decade or more that will make the Reagan balloon in the 1980s, extending as it did into the 1990s, look like a baby bump. By 2020, if things don't go exactly right — and they won't — our national debt as a percentage of GDP will dwarf even that of the World War II period:

From CBO's deficit forecast shows need for early action, Washington Post editorial, Saturday, July 31, 2010

That steeply rising top blue line which will breach a debt-to-GDP ratio of 150 percent by about 2030 is the Congressional Budget Office's "alternative baseline scenario." It will be, says the Post editorial cited in the caption, what happens if our political leaders wimp out and extend the Bush tax cuts, index the alternative minimum income tax to the rate of inflation, and fail to reduce Medicare payments to doctors dramatically. But that's not the main point. Even if those bad choices are avoided in the short term ...

... growth in spending on federal health-care programs and Social Security would drive up debt to about 80 percent of GDP by 2035. That is, actually, the rosy scenario.

In Reagan's time, debt-to-GDP never got above 50 percent.

The CBO's best case/worst case scenarios reflect the huge cost, I'd say, of trying to use big government to offset our loss of small-town values. Small-town America would never pollute the well everyone drinks from, but our pollution levels today threaten to inundate coastlines everywhere with polar icecap meltdowns due to global warming. The Tea Party right resists believing that because ... because what, after all, is the proposed solution? More massive government intrusion in the form of a carbon tax — whether it's an explicit one or a hidden one that emerges from a cap-and-trade system!

The CBO's frightening debt-to-GDP predictions largely reflect spending on federal health-care programs and Social Security as the baby boomers retire. Those programs are, I'll say again, substitutes for having a "small-town someone," perhaps kinfolk nearby, who will set aside their own private pursuit of more and more "stuff" and take care of you in time of sickness, old age, or economic need. Social Security was a product of the New Deal in the Great Depression, which in the graph above shot America's debt-to-GDP upward to then-unprecedented heights. This was also a time of massive human dislocation: think of the small-town Okies forced by adversity to migrate from the Dust Bowl to California.

Sign of the times
in the 1970s

That there was not a similar blip in the 1960s, when Medicare began as part of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society initiative, is very likely a reflection of strong GDP growth during that era — fueled by cheap petroleum, a sweet situation that ended abruptly in the 1970s with the first Arab oil embargo. Since Reagan, the only period in which debt-to-GDP has shrunk has been under President Clinton. As Anne Applebaum points out in GOP shows historic amnesia on spending cuts, President George W. Bush, supposedly a small-government consrvative, expanded government spending ...

... by an extraordinary 104 percent. By comparison, the increase under President Bill Clinton's watch was a relatively measly 11 percent (a rate ... lower than during Ronald Reagan's). In his second term, Bush increased discretionary spending — that means non-Medicare, non-Social Security — 48.6 percent. In his final year in office, fiscal 2009, he spent more than $32,000 per American, up from $17,216.68 in fiscal 2001.

It's only gotten worse under President Obama, says Applebaum, "the Obama administration is far more profligate than Clinton or Bush, terrifyingly so."

So it looks to me as if the so-called welfare state, full of ever-expanding federal entitlements, is a dangerously overinflated tire that has already been patched too much. It looks as if the only way to avoid a blowout is to get debt-to-GDP radically back in check — which is going to mean massive new tax revenues, as well as cutbacks in "discretionary spending" and maybe even in entitlement benefits and eligibility.

Or, put it another way: It looks like the only really effective way to deal with the coming debt-to-GDP threat — given that new taxes and spending cutbacks are, both of them, political poison pills in today's culture of dependency on Uncle Sam's largesse but resentment of the tax hikes which, short of going further into debt, are necessary in order to pay for it — is to somehow reconstitute small-town values in America. To eliminate the need for massive federal entitlements in the first place, by making people's general welfare a matter of local, face-to-face concern.

Sign of the times
in the 1930s

Our society, I am coming to believe, has been "dislocated" and "out of joint" since at least the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, when Uncle Sam began taking responsibility for helping Americans who could no longer rely on local, face-to-face charity to keep them afloat in hard economic times such as the country had never seen before.

It was a pragmatic response to being between a rock and a hard place, economically and socially. Local, face-to-face concern for one's hard-luck neighbors was not going to get the job done. The federal government had to step into the breach. The New Deal didn't so much set our country's "dislocated joint" properly as give us a crutch so we didn't have to walk on it.

I think that in view of the debt-to-GDP crisis that loom just ahead of us, we now need to reset the nation's "dislocated joint" properly, for a change — which, like all joint resettings, will unfortunately involve a lot of short-term pain and will require a physician (our political leadership) with great courage and resolve.

By "resetting the joint" I mean weaning ourselves off federal largesse and reinstituting the small-town concern for our neighbors' welfare that is the best — nay, only — real alternative. No one says that will be easy.

This need for short-term pain on the part of the populace and political courage on the part of its leaders is what just about all of the ambitious Obama agenda is trying to head off, through ever greater federal tinkering with the way things get done in this land, and also with what things (eschewing health insurance, for instance) Americans are allowed to do.

This insistence on re-patching a bulging, unpatchable tire is what Sarah Palin symbolically stands against. What she symbolically stands for — whatever her actual record as mayor of Wasilla — is a return to America's small-town values and a concomitant reduction in the size of federal discretionary (and even entitlement) outlays.

That's why I think she'll be our next president, come January 2013.

George Weigel - An immigration debate primer

2010-05-21T10:52:00.002-04:00

"An immigration debate primer" is a must read for Catholics like me who are concerned about the debate over illegal immigration. It's by Catholic ethicist and columnist George Weigel, whose syndicated column can be accessed here at the Archdiocese of Denver website.

Weigel writes that:

Catholic political theory places a high value on the rule of law, which it regards as morally superior to the alternative, which is the rule of willfulness imposed by brute force.

Hear, hear! The reason why liberal Americans like myself — people who shudder at the new Arizona law making "breathing while Hispanic" a dangerous proposition for Mexican immigrants, legal or otherwise — should insist on tighter border security is that the rule of law as Weigel defines it is crucial to everything America stands for. Unlawful immigration by definition undermines the rule of law.

Weigel:

The laws we make through our elected representatives are under the scrutiny of the natural moral law we can know by reason, which means that our political judgments should be rational, not glandular.

Catholic thought has always been "anti-glandular," meaning it is based on reason and reasonability. The "natural moral law" is basic to Catholic understanding: a "supreme and universal principle, from which are derived all our natural moral obligations or duties" (The Catholic Encyclopedia). It is the foundation-stone for reasoning about right and wrong in the political arena and elsewhere. (Nice to have in this topsy-turvy day and age, no?)

Weigel:

The inalienable dignity and value of every human being from conception until natural death is the bedrock personalist principle from which Catholic thinking about public policy begins. The dignity does not confer an absolute right on anyone to live wherever he or she chooses. A proper Catholic understanding of limited and constitutional government grasps that the state—which in the American case means the national government—has a right to enforce its citizenship laws and a duty to conduct that enforcement in a just way.

True, a lot is packed into that bullet point.

"Inalienable dignity": It applies to illegal immigrants, too. We as Catholics, as Americans, and as human beings are not to despise anyone based on their immigration status.

No "absolute right [for] anyone to live wherever he or she chooses": The inalienable dignity of every person is not a blank check to do whatever he or she wants. "The rule of willfulness" is suspect at both the national and the personal levels, in Catholic thought.

"The [national government] has a right to enforce ... citizenship laws": Though Weigel is a conservative theologically and politically, he's no extreme libertarian. There are things that a strong central government must do.

"... a duty to conduct that enforcement in a just way": Yes, must do. Justly, though — not (as with the Arizona law) a matter of "willfulness imposed by brute force."

Weigel:

With the exception of our Native American brethren, every Catholic in the United States today is the descendant of immigrants ... [a fact] which reflects the national tradition of hospitality to the stranger [and] should create a predisposition to be pro-immigrant within the Catholic community in America. That the vast majority of Catholics in the United States today are law-abiding citizens whose economic and social well-being is made possible by living within a law-governed political community should incline us to live that pro-immigrant predisposition through the mediation of the rule of law.

" ... predisposition to be pro-immigrant": Unfortunately, many American Catholics lack it.

" ... living within a law-governed political community": They (in my opinion) lack it in part because they fear illegal immigration's potential to undermine the rule of law.

" ... should incline us to live that pro-immigrant predisposition through the mediation of the rule of law": OK, let's be frank. Not just Catholics but many others worry that the rule of law has broken down in America's struggle to deal with immigration matters. So our "pro-immigrant predisposition" is taking a back seat to our fears.

Weigel:

It is absurd to suggest that the United States has become xenophobic, racist, or anti-immigrant. Last year ... the United States naturalized 1 million new citizens, most of them from Mexico, and over the past decade ... another 10 million people who have worked their way through the system legally. Millions more are in the legal immigration pipeline or are working in the United States with legal permits. If these are the marks of a racist or xenophobic nation, it’s a nation that displays its racism and xenophobia in very odd ways.

" ... absurd to suggest that the United States has become xenophobic, racist, or anti-immigrant": The U.S. as such is not anti-immigrant, but many people within it are. It's sad, but true — hello, Patrick Buchanan. So this is the only point Weigel makes that I'm not fully on board with. But I cheer loudly that over the last decade we've naturalized some 1 million new Americans a year, many of them from Mexico.

Weigel:

The canons of justice dictate that people should not be rewarded for law-breaking, and that is what illegal immigrants do: they break the law. Realism dictates that we cannot send some 10 to 20 million illegal immigrants home. The present situation—border porousness, which is exploited by criminals as well as by those looking for work; a large population of illegals; millions of people seeking U.S. citizenship while playing by the rules—is intolerable. Any morally acceptable solution to immigration reform will address all three facets of the present mess.

" ... canons of justice ... ": A nice Catholic turn of phrase, that.

" ... law-breaking ... is what illegal immigrants do ... ": Yes! Until we liberals come to grips with that fact, the immigration debate will stay topsy-turvy and glandular.

"Realism dictates that we cannot send some 10 to 20 million illegal immigrants home ... ": Suggesting that we need to get to the point where an amnesty (by whatever name) can be granted to those who are already here and are not otherwise in trouble with the law.

" ... border porousness ... exploited by criminals ... ": Facet #1 needing to be addressed.

" ... a large population of illegals ... ": Facet #2.

" ... millions of people seeking U.S. citizenship while playing by the rules ... ": Facet #3.

Weigel:

Responsible citizens who wish to be generous and uphold the rule of law and create a solution to the problem of illegals that doesn’t divide families or otherwise treat unjustly those who have ... “taken advantage of a situation we Americans have allowed to exist for too long” should demand that politicians stop playing the demagogue on this issue. Responsible citizens, while understanding the angers of fellow-citizens along the southern border of the United States who are appalled at the situation they face on a daily basis and while demanding that the government fulfill its duty to protect the border, will also appeal to the common sense of their neighbors who imagine that deportation is a real-world solution.

" ... politicians [must] stop playing the demagogue ... ": Yes, it's up to us citizens to demand they do, but how? This seems to be one of the most pressing issues of the age — how can we get our elected representatives to stop shirking their duties and pass immigration reform?

" ... Responsible citizens, while understanding the angers of fellow-citizens ... will also appeal to the common sense of their neighbors ... ": A synonym for "natural law" is (properly qualified) "common sense." We all need to employ common sense more than we do. Common sense more than anything else can rescue our republic from the wing-nuts.

George F. Will - Arizona law's foes are using the real immigration scare tactics

2010-05-20T11:30:00.001-04:00

Let's talk some sense about illegal immigration, please.

Washington Post columnist George F. Will wrote recently in "Arizona law's foes are using the real immigration scare tactics" of his dissent from Cardinal Roger Mahony, who said in "Arizona's Dreadful Anti-Immigrant Law" that Arizona's new law pertaining to illegal immigration involves

... reverting to German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques whereby people are required to turn one another in to the authorities on any suspicion of documentation.

The statute, signed into Arizona law by Governor Jan Brewer on April 23, requires state police to question anyone who appears to be in the country illegally. This has been called a mandate for racial profiling. In effect, "breathing while Hispanic" in the state of Arizona can now get you in trouble with the cops.

Cardinal Mahony is right to oppose it, and George Will was wrong to take umbrage. (In fact, there can be little doubt that the Arizona law will quickly be shot down constitutionally by the very liberal U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which sits in San Francisco. The U.S. Supreme Court, though it tips conservative, will likely uphold that ruling.)

But Will was also right about something:

... the vast majority [of Americans] who do not favor completely open borders believe that there should be some laws restricting who can become residents, and presumably they believe that such laws should be enforced.

Once Americans are satisfied that the borders are secure, the immigration policies they will favor will reflect their -- and the law enforcement profession's -- healthy aversion to the measures that would be necessary to remove from the nation the nearly 11 million illegal immigrants, 60 percent of whom have been here for more than five years. It would take 200,000 buses in a bumper-to-bumper convoy 1,700 miles long to carry them back to the border. Americans are not going to seek and would not tolerate the police methods that would be needed to round up and deport the equivalent of the population of Ohio.

We need to get control of the border. Senator John McCain was on the same page with Will in this campaign ad:

"Completing the danged fence" along the Mexico-U.S. border is a politically necessary prelude to granting amnesty to the 11 million illegals who are already here and not otherwise in trouble with the law. So is getting sufficient numbers of U.S. Border Patrol on the job in Arizona and other states along the border.

Why is it so hard to find anybody who sees all of the following:

how important securing the border is
how necessary amnesty for the illegals already here is
how laws like the new Arizona one are an insult to basic American values

Greek Crisis Looming for America?

2010-05-19T13:59:00.001-04:00

Will the recent debt crisis in Greece one day be echoed here in America? There is a lot of reason to believe it will, and soon, unless we get our government deficits at federal, state, and local levels under control.

In "European and American debt crises signal an era of austerity,"in today's Washington Post, columnist Michael Gerson points out that "In 2009, the federal government spent $1.67 for every $1 it collected in taxes." The extra 67¢ has to be borrowed and becomes part of our national debt.

Our national debt is bankrolled in large part by China and other foreign countries. Banks in those lands buy securities issued by the U.S. Treasury. To get them to do that, the Treasury pays the banks interest. Right now the interest rate is low, because the perceived likelihood of our failing to pay back our solemn debts is nil.

But as the size of the accumulated debt rises with respect to our annual GDP, our creditors will rightfully become nervous and insist on higher interest rates.

That's what's loomed over Greece in recent months. Certain other European nations may be in the same boat. And we may be soon, too. Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson writes in "The welfare state's death spiral" that:

Greece is exceptional only by degree. In 2009, its budget deficit was 13.6 percent of its gross domestic product (a measure of its economy); its debt, the accumulation of past deficits, was 115 percent of GDP. Spain's deficit was 11.2 percent of GDP, its debt 53.2 percent; Portugal's figures were 9.4 percent and 76.8 percent. Comparable figures for the United States -- calculated slightly differently -- were 9.9 percent and 53 percent.

The welfare state's death spiral? Dramatic phrasing but, maybe, yes.

The "welfare state" is what "entitlements" such as Social Security and Medicare are all about. Government entitlement programs are duty bound to provide people with money to cover certain of their needs such as financial security in old age.

The recently passed health care reform is an entitlement. It subsidizes those who cannot afford health insurance, while at the same time making sure that adequate insurance coverage will be available to them.

Where does the money come from which the government duly provides to those who are deemed entitled to it? If it doesn't come from tax revenues, it has to come from somewhere else. For every dollar Uncle Sam collects in taxes, he has to find an additional 67¢ elsewhere. Hello, China!

Pundits are saying we can't keep it up. The 67¢ figure, already high, is due to rise dramatically. As the deficit soars, our national debt will too.

George F. Will, in "Greece and GM: Too weak to fail":

America's projected $9.7 trillion in budget deficits in this decade will drive the nation's debt to 90 percent of GDP (Greece's is 124 percent).

What can we do? Some options:

Raise taxes — i.e., impose higher tax rates on incomes and other things
Impose new kinds of taxes like a value-added tax
Lower non-entitlement government expenditures
Reform entitlements — e.g., raise the minimum retirement age
Grow the economy such that incomes and other things we pay taxes on go up

The pundits are pessimistic about all of these, and there is no magic bullet.

Other solutions get mentioned, such as devaluing the dollar so the goods we make are cheaper for foreigners to buy. If they buy more from us, it will help fuel economic growth and bolster tax revenues.

All of these solutions are politically or economically problematic. Raising tax rates and/or imposing new taxes offends the political right. Entitlement reforms offend powerful interest groups who usually support Democrats. Reducing non-entitlement expenditures is easier said than done. And if there's a way to juice the economy, we'd be doing it already.

Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein writes in "Solving the deficit problem requires an open mind, common sense and courage" of his blueprint for a solution:

... we can safely run a deficit of 2 percent of GDP. That suggests a "hole" to fill of about 5 percent of GDP.

Federal outlays are due to be about 26 percent of GDP, while tax revenues will come to about 19 percent. The difference is 7 percent. If we shrink the deficit to 2 percent of GDP, we'll be OK. But how do we fill that 5 percent "hole"? Pearlstein:

The compromise I propose is a 50-50 split between tax increases and spending cuts in the medium run, rising to 60 percent spending cuts as limits to entitlement spending start to compound.

Pearlstein wants to:

Hold federal health spending increases (Medicare, Medicaid, premium subsidies) to GDP growth plus 1 percentage point a year, rather than the GDP-plus-2.5 percent that has been the norm.
Raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare by one month for each two-month increase in average life expectancy.
Slowly reduce the cost of living increases on Social Security benefits for wealthy seniors ... while slowly increasing their Medicare premiums.
Limit growth of "discretionary" spending -- defense as well as domestic -- to the rate of inflation, except to pay for wars, natural disasters and safety-net spending during recessions.
Impose a new, broad-based value-added tax of 6 percent, with rebates to low-income households. (A value-added tax is a fancy sales tax. It would hit low-income families the hardest, since a greater portion of their income is used to buy stuff.)
Raise corporate tax revenues by 5 percent by closing loopholes, while at the same time lowering corporate tax rates.
Tax wages and salaries and short-term capital gains at only three rates: 17 percent for income from $50,000 to $150,000, 27 percent for income between $150,000 and $250,000 and 37 percent for income above that. This would represent a tax hike for the well-to-do, while an increase in the standard deduction and personal exemptions will mean no tax is paid by a family of four with income under $50,000.
Reduce the Social Security payroll tax slightly to 12 percent and over time impose it on wages and salary up to $150,000, up from the current cap of about $110,000.
Raise the Medicare payroll tax slightly, to 3 percent, and apply it to all income.
Replace the federal gasoline, diesel and jet fuel taxes with a carbon-based transportation fuels tax, set at a rate that would raise $25 billion more annually. (This carbon tax might help reduce greenhouse emissions and forestall global warming.) All revenue from the tax would go to a new transportation infrastructure fund, so it could be considered an investment in America's economic future.
Eliminate the inheritance tax, but require all estates to pay any deferred and unpaid capital gains taxes on all assets before any distribution to heirs.

Most of these wonky changes are calibrated, equal-opportunity offenders. Lowering their tax rates, for instance, might mollify corporate poohbahs somewhat, in exchange for their tolerating closing cherished loopholes.

Let's assume that Pearlstein's laundry list would just fill in the 5 percent hole. What would happen, then, if even one of his proposals couldn't get enacted, owing to political opposition? The hole wouldn't get completely filled in, unless Congress approved compensating replacement measures. Such measures would be sure to be politically more anathema than Pearlstein's, not less.

In other words, good luck.

Wonky, incremental, politically calibrated changes of the sort Pearlstein recommends, if they could ever be enacted as a package, might do the trick. But the odds are long that they could be bundled together and overcome the vaunted Senate filibuster. If they couldn't get passed, and if China and others wouldn't let us get away with not filling in the hole, then what?

Non-incremental change is the only other alternative. The death spiral of the welfare state ...

Health Care for All, Yes!!!

2010-03-24T10:34:00.000-04:00

The shouting must have been audible on the moon yesterday when President Obama signed into law the health insurance reform bill, after a year of political turmoil. Some of the shouts were of joy, others of anger.

To this "old-style liberal," the moment was beyond historic. We were present at the minting of a new fundamental right, the right to adequate health care for all Americans.

The pundits from the right and from the left all had it pretty much correct on the op-ed page of The Washington Post yesterday, at least if you strip out the pejorative bias from the conservatives' columns. Arch-conservative George F. Will wrote in "A battle won, but a victory?" that

The accounting legerdemain spun to make this seem affordable — e.g., cuts (to Medicare) and taxes (on high-value insurance plans) that will never happen — is Enronesque.

Liberal Eugene Robinson, meanwhile, wrote in "The health-care bill: A glorious mess":

Even when the "fixes" that have to be approved by the Senate are made, the health-care bill will still be something of a mess ... It may take years to get the details right. The newly minted reforms are going to need to be reformed or at least fine-tuned, and those will not be easy battles.

They are both talking about the same things, among them the notion that (as moderate-conservative Michael Gerson wrote in "Obama shows a president can be both strong and wrong") "cuts in ... Medicare will [have to] be used to finance someone else's entitlement." To wit, there will have to be cuts in today's Medicare program to pay for the freshly minted health insurance entitlement for those under the age of 65.

If the "fixes" bill passed by the House alongside the main health bill passes the Senate and Obama signs it, the combined legislation "would cut an additional $60 billion [above the Medicare cuts in the main bill], bringing total cuts to the program to more than $500 billion over the next 10 years," according to the Post article "With Senate 'fixes' bill, GOP sees last chance to change health-care reform." That $500 billion would go largely toward

paying to help the states expand Medicaid eligibility under the new law to cover individuals and families with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty line
paying for tax credits that will be used to subsidize purchases of health insurance on state-run exchanges by those who don't get insured by their employers, who aren't eligible for Medicaid, and who have incomes up to 400 percent of poverty ($43,320 for a single individual, $88,200 for a family of four)

In addition to promising cuts in Medicare, our existing federal health insurance program for those 65 and older, the new law imposes a tax on high-cost health insurance polices — one that supposedly takes effect in 2018 — and it creates a Medicare payroll tax on investment income for individuals earning more than $200,000 and for families earning more than $250,000 a year.

Future Medicare cuts, a union-offending tax on "Cadillac" health plans, an added payroll tax on high-earners: these are all postponed, politically poisonous promissory notes that were built into the health bill to keep it from busting the budget and scaring off deficit hawks ... among Democrats, that is, since no Republicans voted for it. Can we be frank? Not many people one either side of the ideological divide think all those things are likely to come to pass, on down the road. Thus Will's mention of "accounting legerdemain," Robinson's reference to "years to get the details right," and Gerson's concerns about how we are really going "to pay for the new health insurance entitlement."

Actually, some of the parameters of how to pay for it are already set by the new law. For one thing, the "young invincibles," people in their 20's and 30's who are never sick and often don't have health coverage today — they prefer a higher wage instead — will be forced into the risk pool. Insurance of any type, health or otherwise, is all about risk pools: those who don't receive payouts in effect subsidize those who do. In health insurance pools the well who never visit a doctor's office subsidize the sick who do — but only if the healthy are part of the pool in the first place. If they opt out, the premiums they or their employers would otherwise pay are missing from the pool and can't be used to buy care for those who get sick. Under the new law, anyone who voluntarily refuses health insurance will pay a penalty of at least $695 a year.

Another how-to-pay-for-it parameter is that your taxes and mine will be used to furnish insurance for the poor (Medicaid) and for the middle class up to 400 percent of poverty (tax credits to buy coverage on exchanges).

To this blogger, though, those are details. The key thing is the word entitlement. From now on, every American is entitled to insurance to pay for health care. Age doesn't matter. Pre-existing conditions count for nothing. You can't have your insurance cut off if you get sick. If your job doesn't cover you, you can get insurance on your own. If you can't afford it, you'll get a subsidy.

So there. We'll figure out how to pay for it later.

Shouldn't We Work on Maximizing Worker Productivity?

2009-12-08T15:59:00.001-05:00

"In debate over nation's burgeoning deficit, a surplus of worry," in today's The Washington Post, shows our national debt poised to skyrocket as a result of Uncle Sam's running huge annual deficits as far as the eye can see:

Our federal government is undertaking to pay for a lot of new stuff: health care reform, a military surge in Afghanistan, incentives to reduce our nation's carbon footprint, etc. Can we afford it?

We can if we can just get more revenue from income taxes and other sources than we project now. That would lower the anticipated deficits and, hence, the projected national debt.

The only politically acceptable way to get more revenue than expected is to grow the economy faster.

Economic growth is measured by gross domestic product. But growth that is based on anything other than increased worker productivity is but a temporary illusion. It is not sustainable. It is like the late, lamented dot-com boom: it's bound to go bust.

Worker productivity — how much real value each worker produces per hour worked — is where the rubber truly meets the road. The more valuable the goods and services produced by American workers, after inflation is factored out, the higher their wages or salaries can be, the more taxable income they can take in, and the more money Uncle Sam can collect.

By "workers" I mean everyone who is gainfully employed, not just those we used to call "blue-collar" workers, or "labor." Today, we are seeing "white-collar workers," "pink-collar workers," "green-collar workers," and so forth. Their productivity is a huge component of overall GDP.

It becomes a bit more difficult to measure the productivity of higher-ups like a corporate CEO, but the general idea is that CEOs' salaries ought to reflect the productivity of all those lower down in the pyramid — each of whose productivity depends on their underlings, and so on down to the worker bees who actually churn out all that valuable honey.

The more productive every worker-hour is, the more honey workers will produce. We need lots of honey, because huge amounts of it will soon have to be diverted from those who are currently employed to all those no-longer-employed baby boomers like me, to pay for our retirement lifestyles, our Social Security, our medical costs.

What makes a worker more productive? Well, technological advance, for one. When computers started talking to one another over the Internet, all kinds of productive jobs opened up.

Infrastructure, for another. The Internet is infrastructure, but so are roads, bridges, sewer systems, the grid that delivers our electrical power, natural gas pipelines, harbors, airports, rail lines, subway systems, and so forth.

Education is yet another source of productivity — that and worker training in skills required for doing a job.

Perhaps the most important source of worker productivity is energy. We need cheap, reliable sources of electrical power and of all the other ways we use to power our honey-making activities.

That last source of worker productivity, energy, needs to be not only abundant and, therefore, cheap, but also constant and predictable in its plenty and its affordability. That's where alternative sources of energy come in — wind, solar, geothermal, etc. Harnessing them will give us all the affordable energy we will ever need, someday soon.

The technologies we need to harness alternative, renewable energy will appear faster if the businesses that are intent on developing them can be sure that coal, oil, and natural gas prices will not drop precipitously and wipe out these various alternatives' profit potential.

This is why the best argument for lowering our dependency on carbon-based energy isn't necessarily the threat of global warming. It's that a switch to abundant, affordable energy sources like wind and solar will someday soon give us a basis for steadily increasing worker productivity, on into the distant future.

A switch to cheap, reliable, abundant energy can power the technological advance we need. It can provide us with the excuse we seem to need to invest in our nation's crumbling infrastructure, particularly that part of it which is used to distribute electrical power. Plus, we'll need better-educated and better-trained workers to manage our alternative, clean energy system and develop new ways to distribute the energy and tap into it after it arrives at the office, factory, or other workplace.

In fact, there will be whole new job categories such as Executive Vice President in Charge of Energy Strategies. It will be her worker bees who make sure that all the machines that sip electric power out of that newfangled "smart meter" on the wall of the factory or office are themselves "smart."

Smart machines will generate power as well as consume it. For example, a fleet of electric-motor taxicabs will charge their batteries at night when electric rates are low and return any unused charge into the power grid in the daytime when rates are high, thus giving the taxicab company an extra source of profits.

Our Executive Veep and her highly trained minions will be in charge of making sure those profits get maximized.

That's a whole new venue for American workers and their burgeoning productivity. Even if climate skeptics are right and global warming is not in fact imminent, we still ought to invest in alternative energy. Our nation's ability to avoid crippling debt may depend on it.

Health Costs Pressing on Everything Else

2009-12-07T19:49:00.000-05:00

In today's The Washington Post, columnist Robert J. Samuelson's Health Care Nation op-ed piece chills my liberal soul.

Samuelson, in his regular op-ed column, covers the economic waterfront. This time his topic is how health care reform efforts would create "burgeoning health spending that, even if the budget were balanced, would press on everything else."

We hear wild charges from the GOP that "Obamacare" would lead to "rationing" of health services, if not a full "government takeover." That's not the real problem, says Samuelson. The real problem is that our society, even if the current health care legislation happens to bite the dust, "passively accepts constant increases in health spending" — to the point that government outlays for health care already consume fully one dollar in every four that Uncle Sam spends.

That fraction will only increase under Obamacare. So even if the health bill that may ultimately pass the Senate is as deficit-neutral as proponents say, spending on health care as a percentage of the federal budget will grow and grow and grow, squeezing down spending on the military as well as on "universities, roads, research, parks, courts, border protection and — because similar pressures operate on states through Medicaid — schools, police, trash collection and libraries."

Oops. Unintended consequences galore, those.

Spending on health care is, says Samuelson, a sacred cow that uniquely "enjoys an open tab" in our economy and political system. No one in politics is ready to bite the bullet and propose reforms that would solve "the central political problem of health-care nation." Our huge problem "is to find effective and acceptable ways to limit medical spending."

Why won't anyone bite said bullet? Because "everyone believes that cost controls are heartless and illegitimate." No one wants to deny anyone in America (except perhaps illegal immigrants) "the best health care for ourselves and [for our] loved ones."

I would add that the health services any one of us might quite naturally demand for ourselves, or for our nearest and dearest, might actually not be of any real value, medically speaking. I myself have undergone any number of expensive tests that have proved nothing, as they happened to turn out. For example, I recently had symptoms that were speculatively diagnosed as a prostate infection. But an expensive cystoscopy showed nothing, and it turned out that my symptoms were in fact caused by an allergy to chocolate.

True, I have also had expensive tests and procedures that very likely have saved me from an early grave, such as the replacement of my aortic valve when a Sinus of Valsalva aneurysm was discovered via a CT scan.

There accordingly needs to be some mechanism put in place to keep me and my doctors from going off on pricey wild goose chases, such as the many unnecessary CT scans, MRIs, and other diagnostic procedures I have been given (because my generous insurance plan covers them) over the past several decades.

But, says Samuelson, "It's easier to perpetuate and enlarge the status quo than to undertake the difficult job of restructuring the health-care system to provide better and less costly care."

Amen to that.

Let's Support President Obama's Afghanistan Policy!

2009-12-04T19:29:00.001-05:00

President Obama is catching it from both the left and the right in response to his speech to the Army corps of cadets announcing his Afghanistan policy. In today's Washington Post, conservative Charles Krauthammer let him have it for his "call to arms so ambivalent, so tentative, so defensive" at West Point. In the same paper, liberal Eugene Robinson maligned the president for taking a "wrong path in Afghanistan" and (supposedly) paying scant attention to countries like Somalia to which al-Qaeda presumably could relocate if we succeed in freezing it out of Afghanistan.

They are both wrong.

I support the president's policy — I who opposed the Vietnam War, the first Gulf War, and the War in Iraq. Though I am a liberal Democrat and a dove, I think the war in Afghanistan needs to be fought, and won. The reason: we have simply got to defeat radical Islam.

I consider it a liberal thing, my support of the president. How could it be anything but a liberal value, to oppose those in the world who would dictate people's lives and beliefs at the point of a gun? Who would crush every society that does not share their version of their religion? Who would keep women in burqas and perennial servitude? Children in fear of other children?

Conservatives like Mr. Krauthammer want the president to announce his "outright rejection of withdrawal or retreat," insisting the president's July 2011 date certain to begin withdrawing troops is a lily-livered blunder. I don't think it's a blunder, I think it is a ploy. I think the president wants to use it to pressure Mr. Karzai to get busy instituting needed reform and building up his own forces' credibility, before time runs out.

Liberals like Mr. Robinson want the president to abandon the Afghanistan surge because "al-Qaeda's murderous philosophy, which is the real enemy, has no physical base. It can erupt anywhere — even, perhaps, on a heavily guarded U.S. Army post in the middle of Texas." But that kind of thinking is crazy. It's like saying don't take out a malignant brain tumor because the cancer could pop up somewhere else anyway. Not only that, but what if the surgeon can't get all of the malignancy?

That's lily-livered. And Mr. Krauthammer isn't much better, with his insistence on the president swaggering like John Wayne.

We are in this for the long haul. Afghanistan may not work out. There may have to be several more "new" Afghanistan policies before we find one that works. There may be no way to keep the war going long enough to win it. So President Obama is walking a real tightrope, but it is a necessary tightrope. Walking necessary tightropes is what great presidents do.

Tripwires and Obama's Night-Vision Goggles

2008-11-17T10:19:00.005-05:00

A recent article in The New Yorker has it that Barack Obama's administration betokens "The New Liberalism" that is abroad in the land. George Packer writes that Obama's presidency could be as momentous for today's liberals as that of FDR, first elected in 1932, was for progressives of an earlier era.

After a good start, however, the article bogs down in a morass of concern over whether Obama is more of a "post-partisan" than he is a progressive. For example, as Packer points out, even as, in one of the televised debates with his rival John McCain, Obama spoke positively about a woman's right to choose an abortion, he quickly modulated his strong rhetoric into a stated desire to seek "common ground" and to further abortion alternatives where possible. Pro-choice liberals, as a result, aren't quite sure of the extent to which President Obama will stand with them when the chips are down. They question, say, whether he will be too post-partisan to sign the pending “Freedom of Choice Act” (FOCA), which if passed would (according to this Web page)

prevent all governmental bodies at all levels from being able to “deny or interfere with a woman’s right to choose” or “discriminate” against the exercise of this right “in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services or information.”

Yours truly, oldstyleliberal, can't answer the Obama-on-FOCA question. But I do take the point of the liberal Mr. Packer when he says that, in contradistinction to hot-button issues like abortion, where Obama has sometimes waffled,

On questions of social welfare—jobs, income, health care, energy—which don’t immediately provoke a battle over irreconcilable values, [Obama] has given every indication of favoring activist government.

I don't think the post-partisan Obama is really in any way different from the progressive Obama, as in the question on everyone's lips, "Which Obama will show up on Inauguration Day, the progressive or the post-partisan?" Rather, the post-partisan/new-liberal Obama is the progressive/old-style-liberal Obama.

It all has to do with tripwires. The conservative columnist Michael Gerson wrote in this piece for The Washington Post that there are three issue areas where Obama needs to tread carefully in order to avoid triggering a showdown with conservatives. Gerson's three tripwire issues concern the broad field of abortion and bioethics; the Fairness Doctrine (which, if re-imposed, would force radio stations to balance Rush Limbaugh with equal time for liberal talk-shows); and "card check" union elections (which if permitted by federal law would mean workers voting on union representation might no longer cast secret ballots).

I don't know how apt or complete Mr. Gerson's tripwire list is for Obama, but his basic concept is key. Obama impresses me as a man who has a unique set of night-vision goggles that let him see where the tripwires are in the political minefield. It is for this reason that he is able to be "post-partisan": he carefully avoids the deadly tripwires even as he discerns real opportunities to move the progressive football forward toward the end zone.

Today, these opportunities cluster around, per Mr. Packer, "questions of social welfare—jobs, income, health care, energy" — to which I would add, crucially, the "green revolution" that I think will be the ultimate centerpiece of Obama's presidential legacy.

Post columnist E. J. Dionne wrote recently in "Bold Is Good" that "you don't have to be 'far left' to be bold." Obama, says the liberal Mr. Dionne, should take a page from the Ronald Reagan post-1980 playbook and be unafraid to call for meaningful progressive steps (Reagan's were, of course, conservative) early in his tenure. Per Dionne, "health care, energy, tax reform and education ... are issues on which Obama should not be afraid to be audacious."

They are so, I would say, to the extent that, though they will provoke pro-forma dissent from the GOP side of the Capitol aisle, they do not have outright tripwires associated with them that would surely launch us backward into a "pre-post-partisan" shouting match, à la the mid-1990s.

Obama, says the Packer article in The New Yorker, wants very much to avoid that sort of thing as being the opposite of pragmatic. No one ever wins an argument that is based on differences in core principles and values, Obama seemingly realizes.

A case in point: Those who say abortion is tantamount to murder have a different set of core assumptions about what is true and what is false about fetal life than I and other pro-choice thinkers uphold. Pro-choice people such as I think fetal life is not yet fully-formed human life ... and so women should have the right to choose. We think it is more important to ensure that a baby, if born, is wanted and loved than that all fetuses are carried to term. Pro-life folks, obviously, disagree ... and Barack Obama would surely like to avoid all aspects of the dispute that are sterile and unproductive and cannot underpin some kind of pragmatic change for the better!

It is by virtue of his unique night-vision goggles that he can be expected avoid a sterile and unproductive blundering into such a tripwire of the old-style culture war. I do not look for Mr. Obama to make a Clintonesque gays-in-the-military mistake in his first days in office.

Red Counties, Blue Counties

2008-11-06T15:21:00.018-05:00

Today's Washington Post has a pair of maps breaking down the Obama-vs.-McCain voting for president on a county-by-county basis across the nation. The counties that gave a majority of their votes to now-president-elect Barack Obama are shown in blue on one map of the pair, while those that favored Senator John McCain in this week's presidential election are in red on the other.

Here is a snapshot of a similar map online. Click on it to see the full-sized interactive map, from which you then can bring up other versions of the winners-by-county map as well:

In the maps, counties that went overwhelmingly for one candidate or the other are shown with a three-dimensional elevation the height of which is proportional to the candidate's margin of victory, in number of votes, in that county.

In addition, on both maps in the print edition the counties that switched their favored party in 2008 compared with 2004 are shown in gold. (In the online map, the flipped counties are not identified as such.) Surprisingly few counties switched: McCain flipped just 50 counties that had supported Kerry in '04, largely in a loose chain extending from Appalachia across the Upper Southland into Texas; Obama flipped some 286 counties that had gone for Bush in '04, mostly in the Upper Midwest, in African American-rich parts of the South, and here and there in the vast American West.

The huge majority of America's counties voted for McCain in '08, just as they had voted for Bush in '04, and the McCain 2008 map is about as close to being solid red as was the Bush map in '04.

Only a minority of the nation's counties voted majority-Obama in '08. His blue counties (the ones which Kerry also won in 2004) are heavily clustered in New England and the Northeast; in the upper Midwest, in economically distressed states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa; across the old Confederacy in areas in which I assume African-American voters predominate; in the heavily black Mississippi Delta in particular; in the Southwest, where many Hispanic and Native American voters cluster; and along the Pacific Coast in California, Oregon, and Washington State, where ethnically diverse populations include many Asians, Latinos, and blacks.

On the blue-county Obama map, however, there are several prepossessingly tall, or at least medium-sized, voter-margin spikes in large urban areas such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Atlanta, and the major cities of Florida and along the East Coast. By contrast, the "tallest" jurisdictions McCain could claim victory this year in are relatively puny in elevation, reflecting smaller numerical margins of victory: Fort Worth, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, and several other mid-size cities cast more votes for McCain than Obama.

My interpretation: where the bulk of the populace is white, without a college education, not rich but typically not poor, and largely middle-aged or older, McCain won. That demographic is a shrinking one today, though, and where it is not predominant, Obama won.

How solid the red is on the McCain map is worrisome to yours truly, oldstyleliberal, an ardent Obama supporter. Ditto, how sparse and discontiguous the blue of the Obama map is. We heard a lot of talk during the campaign about healing the political divide that has beset us since the 1960s. The two maps seem to show that that did not happen. The country segments just as sharply into blue and red swatches today as it did four years ago.

True, the fact that most of McCain's red counties are represented at "base elevation" on the map, not raised to show large voter margins, is encouraging; there may well have been sizable minorities of Obama voters in the red jurisdictions. Still, many of the McCain counties are probably so low in population that if McCain got every vote in them, they'd still look flat on the map. Small-town/rural America is by definition sparsely inhabited. (I'd like to see the same maps with elevations indicating percentage-of-vote margins rather than number-of-vote margins.)

Yet I'd have to say that, historically, small-town/rural America accounts for an outsized share of our uniquely American cultural experience — a share whose importance the vast, nearly solid red of McCain's America depicts quite accurately. Clearly, the folks that define a huge proportion of our land's cultural "footprint," once in the majority but a shrinking portion of our total population today, looked at Obama and found him wanting.

Obama's mixed-race background and African-American looks clearly didn't help him in the American Heartland, which is what I'll call the vast composite of red counties on the McCain map — even when they are far from the geographic middle of the U.S.A. Ditto, the president-elect's odd name for an American, and his seemingly rootless/possibly elitist cultural identity. (It boggled my mind how many people refused to believe that Obama wasn't a Christian/was secretly a Muslim, and that he was hiding a pro-terrorist agenda.)

The pundits are saying Obama's election augurs a "post-racial" America. I'd like to believe they're right, but the sheer geographic hugeness of McCain's red Heartland says they're being premature.

The aging, white, non-college-educated population was the one McCain picked running mate Sarah Palin to garner votes from. Palin's candidacy was also aimed at women who had supported Hillary Clinton over Obama in the Democratic primaries, and at the Republican "base" of confirmed conservatives, cultural and otherwise. (These three groups, of course, overlapped.) One reason the Palin strategy didn't work is that the Alaska governor turned out to carry a lot of baggage: her record in Alaska, her unguarded, untutored statements to the press, and so on. Obama supporters dug up a lot of ammunition and they didn't hesitate to fire it at her — endlessly, it seemed to oldstyleliberal — and many of the bullets struck home.

Still and all, I imagine that Palin firmed up a large number of votes for McCain in his red-county Heartland. They just weren't enough to propel him to electoral-college victory, for sheerly numerical, demographic reasons. With the possible exception of some Clinton supporters who may have peeled away from Palin when they twigged to her political feet of clay, I believe Palin's candidacy did its intended job very nicely.

But McCain's candidacy was cursed by the onset of the financial crisis. Had he somehow been able to sidestep that particular negative, I think he might have managed to keep Obama from flipping fully nine states (including North Carolina, if it remains in the Obama column) that went for Bush in '04. Yet I believe Obama would have eked out his victory anyway in the electoral college — though not necessarily in the popular vote.

A big part of the reason is demographics. Where there are lots of non-whites, where the white majority is highly educated, where voters skew young — in parts of the country outside the red-county McCain Heartland, that is — there were oodles of voters that didn't reliably vote old-style "values." For the highly "pragmatic" voters of these blue counties, the Washington Post points out, today's "family values" center around mainly education and health care, not abortion and gay rights.

Given the opportunity to single out conservative cultural issues one by one, though, a 2008 blue state such as California will (as we just saw) narrowly support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Because any presidential candidate's bag of promises is by definition a mixed, highly complex bag, a Barack Obama will win handily in California, even when some of his positions in and of themselves seem way too liberal to gain majority support in the state.

At a point in the not-too-distant future — or so we must all hope — "pragmatic" issues such as fears about the economy will evaporate as the economy gets more robust again. What then? Will Obama be able to cruise to victory in 2012, even if he does a fine job in his first term, or will too many of the 286 counties he flipped this year desert him as former Bush voters revert to their old-style cultural/values concerns?

I'm hoping, naturally, for a liberal efflorescence to take hold between now and 2012. If that happens, enough now-skeptical Americans would be swept up in an affirmative, unabashedly liberal, pro-big government mood to offset any deserters and return Obama to the Oval Office for a second term. But how can that happen?

Obama needs to change America's basic mindset in much the same way as JFK began to do in the early 1960s, before he was assassinated in '63. The best way for Obama to "do a JFK" is to do pretty much what JFK did, starting in his 1960 campaign: convince Americans that an agenda of progressive change is our best bulwark against future adversity.

Obama has indicated he'll call for an "Apollo program" to switch us to alternative, renewable forms of energy over a ten-year period ... exactly as Kennedy called for putting an American on the moon by the end of his own presidential decade.

We had to beat the Soviets into space, Kennedy said, to show the world we were still a great country. Meanwhile, we had to back the symbolism of his space initiative by solving our very real problems at home: poverty, educational shortfalls, medical care that "the aged" couldn't afford, racial inequality. Those were issues of grit and substance. But Kennedy's space program was more than just symbolic; it jumpstarted a high-tech economy we have all benefited from ever since.

Obama understands that an "Apollo program" for energy will likewise have all sorts of benefits. Admittedly, it will take a huge monetary investment to go green. That money will have to come first from Uncle Sam, just as the costs of the space program were borne by taxpayers. But exactly as the space program did, America's "green revolution," once it gets under way, will pay large dividends. It will stimulate economic growth and foster job creation. It will break our dependence on foreign oil, and it will combat global warming. Overall, it will create a new sense of pride in our country ... and that can translate into affirmative support for a 21st-century liberal agenda, à la Barack Obama.

Obama vs. McCain on Economics

2008-10-03T15:03:00.008-04:00

Here's an impartial rundown on the differences on economic policy between Barack Obama and John McCain: Obama and McCain have big economic differences. (The article was written before Congress passed a bill to bail out struggling financial firms, the ones holding "toxic" mortgage-backed securities, to the tune of up to $700 billion.)

A summary:

Income tax rates on wealthier Americans (individuals making over $200,000 and families with incomes over $250,000): McCain will keep them low, and even reduce them for the very wealthy; Obama will increase them by eliminating the Bush tax cuts for people in those brackets and even imposing higher rates.
Income tax rates for everyone else: McCain would cut them some; Obama would cut them even more.
Income tax rates for corporations: McCain would slash them; Obama would not.
Biggest tax goal: McCain's is to use tax relief to jump-start the economy and "give the country a boost"; Obama's is to "target his help to the squeezed middle class" and to narrow income inequality.
Extending the Bush tax cuts after 2010, when they are expected to expire: "McCain would extend all of them except the total elimination of the estate tax, while Obama would extend only the cuts for individual taxpayers making less than $200,000 annually or couples making less than $250,000."
Keeping the Alternative Minimum Tax on the wealthy from hitting millions of middle-income taxpayers in future years: both McCain and Obama would patch the AMT year-by-year to do that.
Eliminating the current tax on estates: McCain would; Obama wouldn't.
Overall effect on tax revenues: "McCain's plan would cut taxes by $596 billion over the next decade; Obama's would increase taxes by $627 billion during the same period [mostly by] raising tax rates on the wealthy and boosting the taxes they pay on dividends and capital-gains earnings."
Spending cuts: "While both campaigns argue they are not getting enough credit for their plans to cut spending, history shows that campaigns always pledge to pay for their tax cuts but seldom achieve that goal because spending cuts prove much more difficult to get through Congress."
Overall effect on the federal debt (assuming the proposed spending cuts take place): "The government's debt would go up sharply — by $3.5 trillion under the Obama plan and by $5 trillion over the next decade under McCain's plan."
Fixing Social Security: No plans by McCain are cited; "Obama has proposed levying a 2 percent to 4 percent tax on payroll earnings above $250,000 a decade from now to deal with Social Security."
Fixing Medicare: "Neither campaign has put forward any proposals that experts say would make a meaningful dent in fixing Medicare, the far bigger entitlement problem because of soaring health care costs."

Main concerns of independent experts:

"Higher deficits that are expected because of [McCain's] tax cuts [especially on the wealthy] could drive up interest rates, raising the cost of money for businesses and result in less investment, not more."
"[Obama's] new and expanded tax credits ... will further complicate an already complex tax system and won't make a very big dent in the problems of income inequality."
"Experts say that [Obama's future increase in payroll taxes on earnings above $250,000] would fix only a small part of the problem with the pension program."
"Some experts see tax increases, not cuts, in the country's future regardless of who wins the presidency."

If Roe Goes ...

2008-09-28T12:18:00.006-04:00

In If Roe Goes, Our State Will Be Worse Than You Think, in the Sunday Washington Post for Sept. 28, 2008, Linda Hirshman writes of a possible dystopia that may eventuate if John McCain is elected president. She points out, first of all, something we all know already: that any McCain appointee to the Supreme Court will surely tip the scale against the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in the U.S.

Some pundits who are not particularly anti-abortion have written that overturning Roe won't be all that bad. They say it may even be a good thing for each state to go through the political process and figure out what it wants to do about abortion. Potentially, many states will leave abortion legal, though perhaps with some restrictions.

But, says Hirshman, that state of affairs would mean that women in banning states who seek abortions would have to cross state lines to get them. This is a far bigger deal than just worrying about how these women could manage abortion travel. For it isn't at all out of the question that abortion-banning states could enforce their laws upon residents who obtain legal abortions out-of-state.

It would start very simply, with the state passing a law forbidding pregnant women to leave the state to seek an abortion that is illegal in the home state. But, once that is done, asks Hirshman,

How would state laws forbidding pregnant women to leave be enforced? The Hope Clinic in Granite City, Ill., is just 10 minutes from the Missouri border. Police from the prohibiting state can just take the license plates of local vehicles at the abortion clinics across the state lines and arrest the women when they re-enter the state. Or a traffic stop can produce a search. Tips from pharmacy workers, disapproving parents or disappointed boyfriends can alert the police to arrest the pregnant woman for intent to seek an abortion out of state. The state law may allow interested parties to seek injunctions to stop her from leaving.

Isn't there some legal or constitutional rule, though, that would keep states from such draconian law enforcement? Maybe, maybe not. There are Supreme Court decisions and other pronouncements on the books, writes Hirshman, that allow states to prosecute their own citizens for involvement in state-restricted activities that are perfectly legal elsewhere:

In some indirect — but ominous — cases, the Supreme Court has shown itself to be open to the idea that a state has an interest in its citizens' behavior wherever it occurs. ... In 1993, the court recognized the interest of a state that forbids gambling in upholding a federal law prohibiting broadcasters from tempting its citizens with advertisements for out-of-state lotteries.

The Supreme Court, if McCain wins, could go 5-4 in favor of (a) overturning Roe and then (b) upholding abortion-banning states' prosecutions of legal-elsewhere abortions.

Conceptually, however, a Democratic Senate could block any and all McCain nominees that might become complicit in Roe's demise. If, say, the aging liberal John Paul Stevens were to retire or die, and the Senate refused to confirm a McCain-nominated replacement, the court could operate indefinitely with only eight justices. Minus Stevens, the current lineup would be expected to split 4-4 on most abortion cases.

Not a problem? Think again:

Even if the Senate, uncharacteristically, refused to confirm a McCain nominee — or nominees, if he kept sending up names — leaving the court at eight justices, women's options would probably erode rapidly. It's easy to imagine the anti-abortion states pushing the envelope with once improbably restrictive laws, such as one requiring clinics to be licensed by the state and prohibiting women from getting abortions in unlicensed clinics, either in- or out-of-state.

If a clinic went to federal court to enjoin such a law, the case would eventually reach one of the 13 federal Courts of Appeal, 11 of which are firmly dominated by Republican appointees and would probably produce a decision either refusing to follow Roe or, more likely, making some transparent distinction between Roe and the new case. In a divided Supreme Court, four justices would probably vote to affirm the lower court, and four to reverse, leaving the appeals court's decision standing. This means that the states that fell within the Circuit in question would come under an anti-abortion umbrella allowing anything up to explicit reversal of Roe.

Get it? If a liberal justice departs the court during a McCain administration — even if the Senate majority remains staunchly pro-choice — Roe could stay on the books and yet abortions could go back to being legally unavailable, just be virtue of overly restrictive state licensing practices that the federal courts would decline to interfere with. oldstyleliberal thinks that is truly scary; he hopes Justice Stevens lives to be 110.

Redrawing the Electoral Map in 2008

2008-09-21T12:24:00.006-04:00

In order for Democrat Barack Obama to defeat Republican John McCain for president on Nov. 4, 2008, Obama will have to redraw the electoral map from 2004. When John Kerry lost to George W. Bush in that year, the map looked like this:

Says Wikipedia, "President George W. Bush won the popular vote in 31 states (denoted in red) with 286 electoral votes. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts won the popular vote in 19 states and the District of Columbia (denoted in blue) and 251 electoral votes." One maverick elector in Minnesota voted for John Edwards. Bush won by just 35 electoral votes; if Ohio had gone the other way with its 20 votes, Kerry would be president today.

Obama needs to (a) hold on to virtually all of Kerry's blue states, including Michigan (17 electoral votes), which looks dicey for him; and (b) pick up some of the Bush red states. If he picks up Florida (27 electoral votes) he could even lose, say, New Hampshire (4 votes) and wind up with 274 votes, enough to win.

Florida could thus be crucial to Obama, says Dan Balz's article Obama Hopes to Reverse Party Fortunes in Vote-Rich Fla. in today's Washington Post. Right now, most experts are giving the state to McCain by a hair. But, says Balz, Obama workers in Florida are "targeting 600,000 African Americans who are registered to vote but who do not regularly turn out on Election Day."

It will be a shock to oldstyleliberal if Obama's people can't flip Florida, with that many potential supporters to be brought off the sidelines!

At any rate, you can keep up to date on how the potential electoral vote stacks up in 2008 by visiting Electoral-vote.com. As of today, Sept. 27, the electoral map, based on independent polling results, shows Obama losing no Kerry 2004 states and looking to pick up Iowa (7 votes) and New Mexico (5 votes), which Bush won last time. Plus, Obama has razor-thin leads in former Bush states Virginia (13 votes) and Colorado (9 votes). If Obama flips all four of those states, he'll wind up winning 286 electoral votes, where 270 are needed to win.

That puts Obama currently at +16. If he can't flip Florida, and this map right now shows him not doing so, then he needs at least one of the two razor-thin, potentially "new blue" states, Virginia or Colorado. He also needs to hold onto "old blue" Kerry states like Minnesota (10 votes) and New Hampshire (4 votes) where his lead is currently tiny.

The Archetypal Sarah Palin

2008-09-16T16:00:00.009-04:00

Yours truly, oldstyleliberal, has been impressed with Sarah Palin.

So have millions of other voters, one way or another, since John McCain announced the Alaska governor as his running mate just before Labor Day. Some love her and some love to hate her, but no other vice presidential candidate has ever, in my recollection, stirred so much passion and controversy.

When we react with our emotions and our gut feelings, then try to get our intellect on the same page, we are projecting. Specifically, we are casting the recipient of the projection in the role of an archetype.

An archetype is a potent figure in our unconscious mind, said the psychologist Carl Jung. Such an archetypal figure, common to all human beings, is the (imaginary) perfect mother. We are all born with the mother archetype, which in childhood we project onto our actual mom. That's how we "just know" our mom will nurture and protect us, in advance of any actual experience of having a mother.

Another potent figure in the unconscious mind of every human male, Jung said, is the anima, the archetype which gives us men our image of the (again, imaginary) ideal woman.

Neither of these two archetypes, nor any other archetypal ideal hidden in the deep, unconscious psyche, bears any necessary relation to those whom we project the archetypes out upon. Mom may be cruel, and the woman that a man marries because his anima was projected out upon her may turn out to be entirely wrong for him.

But never mind. We project our archetypes out onto people all the same, and we react to people based on these projections. That's part of what's going on with Sarah Palin. It's why oldstyleliberal is so impressed.

But archetypal projections are more complicated than that. Archetypes serve as points around which our life experiences and memories cluster — again, in ways that we are scarcely conscious of. These clusters Jung called complexes. We not only have a mother archetype that we all hold in common, we each as individuals have a mother complex. The mother complex can modify the archetype in strange ways. If our mother was neglectful and cruel, the mother complex that we harbor can take the ideal represented by the mother archetype and append the qualifier "... not!"

We also have, each of us in our conscious mind, structures that can pull against the dictates of the unconscious archetypes. In this day of rampant feminism, we have all learned to expect different things of women and mothers than our archetypes might otherwise have us do.

What we project is accordingly inflected according to our culture and personal history. Today, our culture is in flux regarding women, wives, and mothers. Our personal histories are widely varied as a result. Whether we are male or female, young or old, we all have complicated histories with respect to how we image women.

Some of us see Sarah Palin as an "ideal" woman-wife-mother and say, "Right on! Such a person is just what the country needs right now."

Others of us see Palin as representing that same "ideal" woman-wife-mother and say, "No way! She'd set the clock back a hundred years on feminism, women's rights, and a lot of other things."

All the lionizing of Palin from the right, and all the disparagement from the left, are tinged with whether we like or dislike the woman we see in the light of our projections. If Sarah Palin were Abraham Palin, with the same (thin) résumé, McCain's pick for vice president would still draw criticism, à la Dan Quayle. But not nearly as stridently.

P.S. For another take on the archetypal Sarah Palin, see The Projection of Sarah Palin at the Symbol Watcher website. This one casts Palin in the role of the Great Mother archetype: "at once container, cherisher and guardian of life, as well as ruler, possessive controller/destroyer and seductress." Interesting reading!

Let's Focus on What's Important

2008-09-15T10:40:00.007-04:00

Yours truly, oldstyleliberal, thinks we all need to stop, take a deep breath, and retract our claws. This year's election campaign is setting all-time records for nastiness and ugliness, just when we need to keep our focus on important issues.

There is big trouble on the fiscal horizon. In his most recent Sunday op-ed piece, "The Next President's Due Bill," Washington Post columnist David Broder notes that according to the Congressional Budget Office, "the next president, whoever he is, will probably inherit a budget that is at least $500 billion out of balance — a record sum that will limit his ability to do any of the wonderful things being promised daily in the upbeat rhetoric of the campaign."

According to this report by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center:

Although both candidates have at times stressed fiscal responsibility, their specific non-health tax proposals would reduce tax revenues by an estimated $4.2 trillion (McCain) and $2.9 trillion (Obama) over the next 10 years. Both candidates argue that their proposals should be scored against a "current policy" baseline instead of current law. Such a baseline assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts would be extended and the AMT patch made permanent. Against current policy, Senator Obama's proposals would raise $600 billion and Senator McCain's proposals lose a similar amount.

And Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby summarized that in this recent piece:

According to the Tax Policy Center, over the course of a decade Obama's plan would result in a national debt $1.2 trillion smaller than you would get under McCain's plan.

We talk about the national debt in terms of changes and increments — plus or minus $1.2 trillion or so — because it's too huge to imagine in absolute terms. (To see how huge, click here.) The national debt — the nation's outstanding public debt — is the federal government's "accumulated deficits plus accumulated off-budget surpluses" (see this web page). When U.S. budget deficits grow, as they have done precipitously this year due to rising expenditures and falling tax revenues in an economic downturn, the national debt grows. And 22.7% of this debt is now owed outside the U.S. to foreign governments and international organizations (see here).

According to this article by Jeremy J. Siegel at Kiplinger.com, the ceiling on the national debt is about to be increased by Congress to $10.6 trillion dollars. This is not in itself bad, even if a lot of the money is owed to China and others: "Although our national debt is large, the annual output of the U.S. economy -- our gross domestic product -- now exceeds $14 trillion. With a national debt now totaling $9 trillion, the ratio of debt to GDP is only 63%."

So we can afford to carry a national debt this high, but even so, Siegel says, "The nation's debt will grow rapidly over the next two decades as entitlement spending surges to meet the demands of more than 80 million retiring baby-boomers." That's the "real debt crisis" we are going to be facing soon.

That's why "Defending the Insiders: Change in Washington? Not Without Them," Norman J. Ornstein's column in today's Post is must reading. Ornstein, one of those much-reviled "Washington insiders" for many, many years, says the key initiatives undertaken by the next president and Congress

... have to come in reforming our large entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — to cope with explosive growth in the number of older people. Change to these programs would mean pain for large numbers of voters. As that late, great Washington insider Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted long ago, serious reform of entitlements, absent an immediate meltdown, can only occur if there is broad, bipartisan cover from leaders on the left, center and right, from Democrats and Republicans, from inside Congress and key interest groups such as AARP and the business community.

That kind of consensus is forged through the political process. It's done by finding allies and building coalitions via intense bargaining and politicking. The skills needed are far more likely to be possessed by Washington insiders than iconoclastic outside reformers.

In other words, we can't really afford the kind of "change" both candidates are now offering the country, if "change" means a radical shift toward either the left or the right. The kind of "change" we actually need is one that greases the wheels for broad consensus — for meeting in the middle. Washington insiders can be our most precious facilitators in this, but only if the political hatreds this election seems to be breeding can be set aside.

So, as I say, can we all just retract our claws?

My (Nonexistent) Redneck Bar Mitzvah

2008-07-20T15:55:00.008-04:00

James Webb's 2005 non-fiction bestseller Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America has captured the fancy of your intrepid blogger, oldstyleliberal. I mentioned it in my last post, Long Live the Scots-Irish!, and I hailed its author as a good vice presidential choice for Barack Obama in Jim Webb for Veep!.

Now I want to get personal. Something Webb talks about toward the end of his book hits me where I live.

That something is what he refers jocularly to as the Redneck Bar Mitzvah. It has long been the custom among America's Scots-Irish for the boys to undergo an initiation. Jewish boys get bar mitzvah'd at age 13. Scots-Irish boys get their first rifle somewhat earlier, get taught to hunt and survive in the wilderness, master some form of physical or athletic challenge, even if it's mechanical like drag racing or virtual like video gaming, then go into the military. It's a process much longer than a formal initiation in a temple would take, but it is what allows a Scots-Irish boy to take his rightful place as a man within the group Webb calls the "Celtic kinship."

I missed my Redneck Bar Mitzvah. As a result, I turned out to be way too "sissified."

Though I am of (mostly) Scots-Irish background, my window of opportunity — from ages 11 to 13, roughly — opened and shut without my father doing what was necessary to take me across the crucial threshold to manhood.

I started out as something of a boy's boy, wanting to go into the military, wanting to go to the Naval Academy. Dad was a chief of police and wore a uniform (occasionally) and carried a gun (also occasionally). He had come up through the ranks, taking time out during WWII to serve as an officer in the Coast Guard, a part of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific theater during wartime. He was an expert marksman and liked to go on hunting trips with his buddies. I idolized the man my father was.

But I was also an incipient sissy. I sucked my thumb until I was 12, wet the bed until I was 16. When I got my first BB gun, my mother laid down the law that I couldn't actually shoot it unless Dad was present to supervise.

And that was exactly the problem: Dad wasn't present all that much.

I don't remember exactly what year the trouble started; it may have been in 1956 or '57, when I (an only child) was 9 or 10. My father had been promoted from captain to chief of the then-tiny United States Park Police in Washington, D.C., in 1954, when I was 7. He had beaten out two lieutenants, former buddies of his, who as the years went by became increasingly convinced he had gotten the promotion because he was Protestant and they were Catholic.

The Catholics on the force turned against him. One of them had a brother, not on the force, that began a harassment campaign that centered on dialing our home phone at 3 A.M. in the morning and letting it ring until Mom or Dad picked up ... by which time sleep was ruined.

So there developed an ongoing civil war on the U.S.P.P., and my father's head was being called for on a platter in some quarters of the Department of the Interior' National Park Service, which had authority over the force. My father was innocent of having obtained his promotion through prejudice, or treating Catholics on the force unfairly. But that didn't matter. He was pilloried repeatedly in the Washington papers for years on end. When John F. Kennedy became our first Catholic president in 1961, the handwriting was on the wall for his career.

(By the way, I write this as one who has converted as an adult to the Roman Catholic faith. Obviously, I bear no ill will toward Catholics, either today or "back in the day" when I was growing up — and, I can say with certainty, neither did my father, who was nominally Protestant but never much of a churchgoer.)

Between, say, 1957 and 1960, I went through my "years of trouble" when I needed but wasn't getting the strong fatherly initiation James Webb calls the Redneck Bar Mitzvah. It was during these same years that my father was fighting an internecine civil war while trying to administrate a police force. He was also unfortunately sick during a long stretch of this period with gall bladder problems that required two or three surgeries before he finally got well.

So he didn't have a lot of time for me. Not a lot of father-son bonding went on during these turbulent years.

When I was 11 and in sixth grade, my best friend Jip, a Thai boy, moved away. He had been my prime connection into the group of boys we played with and went to school with. I found it hard to forge my own bonds with the boys after that, and it got worse in seventh and eighth grades, by now in junior high school, when a couple of the boys began to bully me. I didn't know how to fight back. My father spoke of getting me some martial arts training, but it never happened.

As a result, I found out that I could by sheer will power make myself sick every school-day morning, so I wouldn't have to go to school. That went on for several months, until my parents consulted a pediatrician/child psychologist named Dr. Knop.

I don't know whether Dr. Knop believed in the Redneck Bar Mitzvah, but she had something like it in mind when she told my father he had to start being more of a father to me.

Pursuant to that advice, he decided to teach me to shoot a gun. But instead of doing it himself — he just didn't have the time — he had one of the cops on the force, Cpl. Papuga, a great guy and a super marksman, give me lessons every Saturday at the U.S.P.P. pistol range. I learned to shoot, but I developed no emotional attachment to it, as I would have if Dad were doing the teaching.

Later, there were horseback riding lessons. This time I was farmed out to the owner of a stable where the U.S.P.P. boarded some of its horses. Again, it wasn't the same as if Dad were doing the honors.

One day Dad and Cpl. Papuga took me groundhog hunting. For whatever reason, I was not eligible to do any shooting. Between the two of them, only Dad had a single shot at a groundhog ... and he missed. Then I got carsick on the way home. That day was not exactly my Redneck Bar Mitzvah, I can tell you.

I could go on, but you get the point. There are junctures in the life of every boy, of every person, where certain seemingly atavistic things have to happen. If they don't, it's as if life has pushed his head far down into deep water, and he has to kick one's way back up slowly, desperately, belatedly to the surface of normality. He eventually does surface, but meanwhile he is irretrievably behind in his developmental curve.

That's what happened to me, oldstyleliberal. As a result, my inclinations toward masculine stuff like going into the military simply evaporated. When I later entered as a freshman at Georgetown University in 1965, I was soon alerted to the fact that there was a war heating up in Vietnam, and I might one day have to fight in it. Little wonder that that war didn't appeal to "sissified" me. I was against it on moral grounds, but deep down I think I opposed it mainly because I knew that either (a) I wouldn't be able to hack it as a soldier, or (b) I would, but only by virtue of the belated initiation into manhood the military experience would represent.

People tend to resist belated initiations they have already compensated for having missed out on.

I'm not going to give you chapter and verse here and now, but I can now see that my having missed my Redneck Bar Mitzvah and become "sissified" has shaped my life ever since, both the good and the bad aspects of it. I am undoubtedly more prone to go along with, say, the feminist movement because of this omission in my developmental process ... and that I count as a blessing. On the other hand, I realize I simply do not have the ability to distinguish between a necessary war and an unnecessary one. It's one thing to be a "normal" man and yet decide one is against all war. That's an honorable choice. It's another thing entirely to be against all wars out of a reflexive "sissified" outlook that came about because one's father was too busy fighting alligators in his career path to see to one's Redneck Bar Mitzvah.

Postscript: My father and I remained close, if at daggers drawn much of the time, after I graduated college and went out on my own. Psychologists would say my attitude toward him was "ambivalent." But we both loved Mom and managed to patch up our differences rather than tear apart our little three-person family. In 1985 Mom died, and I kept on visiting Dad regularly — he was having his daily needs seen to by a wonderful young couple who lived in the living quarters Mom and Dad had built in the basement of their new home, in 1976, just for that purpose.

On the last Christmas visit before he died in mid-1988, he went to bed early one evening, as was his wont, while I usually hitched a La-Z-Boy recliner around to watch some TV before my own bedtime. On this particular evening, he came out of the bedroom and into the living room unexpectedly. He was, I'll never forget, wearing his navy blue bathrobe, the one he got when he was in the Coast Guard in WWII and still wore.

I suspect that his short-term memory loss due to the dementia he suffered from, at age 83, had led to his forgetting that I was in the house, and he came out to the living room to see why the TV was on. This is the moment I'll cherish forever: he saw me, his son, unexpectedly there, and his face lit up.

Wanting to cover up the fact that he had forgotten I was visiting, he said, "Son, I just wanted to tell you how glad I am to have you here with me now." But I realized it was also the truth, and the peculiar situation had simply jolted it out of him.

I said, "Dad, I am very glad to be here with you." I was too surprised to say or do much more than that in response. We Scots-Irish men don't do a lot of hugging. I was too far across the room to go to him without it seeming forced, anyway.

But that was fine with him. He smiled, said "Good night, son," and went back to his bedroom.

After I went home from that visit I never saw Dad alive again. But at the very end of his life we two had managed to reconcile all our silly differences of a lifetime in that perhaps thirty seconds of a brief, unexpected encounter, and we both knew it.

Long Live the Scots-Irish!

2008-07-16T16:18:00.005-04:00

In Jim Webb for Veep! I extolled the (hoped-for) sensibility of Barack Obama tapping this man to be his vice-presidential running mate:

The man is James Webb, recently elected senator from Virginia, a Democrat who takes a backseat to no one in his support of our fighting men and women in uniform — which is not the same thing as support for President Bush's ill-conceived war in Iraq, mind you.

Webb served with distinction in Vietnam and, at that time a Republican, became President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy. He has since switched to the Democratic Party because he feels "it is now the Republican Party that most glaringly does not understand the true nature of military service."

As any reader of Webb's 2005 non-fiction bestseller Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America will tell you, Webb comes by his love for the military's fighting spirit honestly: it's in his Scots-Irish DNA. In his book, Webb traces the centuries-long journey of his people from the Scotland of William Wallace, proudly remembered as "Braveheart," to the Ulster Plantation of 17th-century Northern Ireland, site of the famed siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne, to the backcountry mountains of Appalachia during the formative centuries of American culture.

Scots-Irish Americans were the primary fighters of the Revolutionary War and of the Civil War. These hardscrabble Calvinist Presbyterians from Scotland by way of Ulster — who in America often became Baptists and Methodists — are the unsung backbone of our basic notion of what it means to be an American, as they have spread far and wide from their original Appalachian hill country and taken their instinctive indomitability with them wherever they have roamed.

oldstyleliberal, your intrepid blogger, figures he is anywhere from one-half to three-quarters Scots-Irish. His last name is Stewart, and his lineal Stewart forebear is known to have emigrated from Ulster to the United States at about the time of the War of 1812 ... well after the main tide of Ulstermen arrived here during the fifty years or so prior to the American Revolution. My Stewart progenitor's brother (or was it a cousin?) emigrated with him; he was named Alexander Turney Stewart and founded the first department store, A.T. Stewart's, later to become Wanamaker's.

Other names in my family tree include Berry, Henry, Armstrong, Robinson, and Stephens on my mother's side, and Warnes, Davis, Campbell, and Thompson on my father's side. Of these, the only name I know for sure didn't arrive here on a boat from Northern Ireland is Warnes; the Warneses came to America direct from England. Some of the other names may or may not be Scots-Irish. I have some detailed genealogical information on my line of Berrys, for instance, but it seems to stop at the water's edge and leave in doubt where the original Berrys came from, pre-America.

My people in general seem to have spent a lot of time in Scots-Irish haunts in Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri. Some of those places are, of course, in the Appalachians, while others are mentioned by Webb as places that received an outpouring of the original Scots-Irish Americans, ever known (even before they were American) to have congenital wanderlust. Way back in the mists of prehistory, the Scots-Irish were descended from the nomadic ancestors of the Scottish people, the Celts.

The Celts pretty much had all of northern Europe to themselves when the Roman Empire conquered them ... anyone remember Caesar's Gallic Wars? The Gauls who held France in the Bronze and Iron Ages were Celts, related to the Celtic tribes whose territory included modern England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall. Even the Germanic "barbarians" before whose onslaught Rome eventually fell may have been Celts once. The Celts were everywhere, for two reasons. One, they loved to fight and conquer. Two, they hated to stay put in any one place.

Their fierce, uncivilized ways made it too hard for them to organize to fight off the well-disciplined Roman legions on the European continent, but it was a different story when Rome tried to subjugate the Celts in the far-flung extremities of Great Britain, where Roman supply lines couldn't easily reach. There the guerrilla tactics of the locals had a chance to win, and did win.

The Romans built Hadrian's wall and even another wall farther north to try to mark the top edge of their civilization. The Picts, Scots, and other Celts north of the wall weren't having any of it. They wanted their land back: the areas now known as the southwestern lowlands of Scotland and the border regions of England.

It was these areas that produced the heroes William Wallace, called "Braveheart," and Robert the Bruce, immortalized in song as the "Flower of Scotland," when another conquering civilization, that of the cruel Norman King Edward I of England, tried to force Scots to their knees in the late 13th century.

Starting in about 1610, during the period in England when the throne passed back and forth among Catholic and Protestant rulers and claimants, Northern Ireland's Ulster Plantation, controlled by England, was the target of Protestant colonization from Britain, following the mass exodus of the Catholic Gaelic leaders of that area in 1607. Many of those who arrived (were "planted") in Ulster then were lowland Scots or people from the English border areas who had basically the same culture.

Those people became known later as the Scots-Irish. When in the early 18th century the British throne tried to make these hardscrabble Presbyterians truckle to the Anglo-Irish Protestants who upheld the established Anglican faith in not-yet-independent Ireland, the Scots-Irish began decamping in large numbers to America.

Coming in largely through Pennsylvania, where they were quickly despised by the peace-loving Quaker power elite who had invited them there to act as a warlike buffer against the Indians in the western areas of the colony, they continued their trek southward and wound up in the Piedmont and Appalachian regions of Virginia and North Carolina.

Indian fighters and explorers who could not be content until they pushed further westward into the Ohio Valley and what are now the states of Tennessee and Kentucky — Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone were of Ulster stock — the Scots-Irish who did not move westward were tolerated (barely) by the Tidewater aristocracy of Virginia and the Carolinas, who allowed them to worship in their own Calvinist ways even though it was officially illegal so to do.

Those Scots-Irish Americans then proceeded to get ambushed by history. Many of them lived in states that seceded during the Civil War, and though few of them were rich enough to own slaves, their loyalty to the Confederacy was a foregone conclusion. After all, the North was in the political hands of those who reverently looked back, culturally, religiously, and philosophically, not to Celtic Scotland but to Norman England ... which made all the difference in the world to the people who were now America's Scots-Irish.

These people had always had a bottom-up way of organizing their loyalties. It was their local clan chieftain to whom they owed their sense of duty, no some far-off lord who may or not have cared one whit for their welfare. While England under the Romans and later under the Normans was evolving a top-down democracy with many layers of duty owed and duty received, the Celtic residues in the north kept to the old, bottom-up ways of owing personal, not institutional, fealty.

When the Protestant Reformation hit, the Celts were drawn to a Calvinist/Presbyterian version of Protestantism which was maximally suspicious of any sort of church hierarchy.

When their original homeland, Scotland, was becoming a leading light of Enlightenment philosophy in the 18th century, the Scots-Irish over in Ulster were fighting oppression where they now lived and trekking to the uncouth regions of America where the only reading matter — for those who could read — was the Bible.

When the tides of history turned against the African slavery so notable in their adopted new home, the southland of America, they found they were on the wrong side of history yet again. They fought valiantly and died for the Confederacy as the bastion of, again, their God-given right to liberty and self-determination as a free people.

It was the insult of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, during which those unspeakable bullies from the North rubbed the Scots-Irish southerners' noses in their own "backwardness," that the Presbyterian-Baptist-Methodist faith of the Scots-Irish hardened into an anti-Darwinist fundamentalism, as a way of saying no thank you, we aren't having any of your "better-educated" ways of doing business in the world. That was the real reason behind the Scopes "Monkey" trial of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee.

By the time yours truly was born in 1947, his father and mother had moved from the Ozarks of Missouri to the citified East, where they were upwardly mobile former Baptists (Mom) and Methodists (Dad), self-educated beyond their schooling and with modern lifestyles that were anathema to the old folks back home. When Mom and Dad took me to Springfield, Missouri, for a visit with Grandpa and Grandma Berry, they had to secrete themselves in their bedroom for a smoke and a drink of ... Scotch.

But they still delighted in watching southwestern Missouri's own version of Grand Ole Opry, called Ozark Jubilee, on TV. It was televised on a national hookup in Washington. D.C. and around the country. The music it featured was "country" music, just a hop, skip, and a jump from the music of the original Scots-Irish Americans.

Though their respective parents, my grandparents, were teetotalers, they relished a drink of spirits as much as any backwoods moonshiner of Scots-Irish derivation ever did. (Webb mentions over and over how the Scots-Irish were at one and the same time strong for God and religion and yet devoted to liquor, lasciviousness, and a life of the senses. This is something I don't suppose can ever be fully explained ... but I note that it is equally true of the African American descendants of slaves, whose sacred and secular music combined with that of the Scots-Irish to make rock 'n' roll.)

I grew up in a cultural atmosphere that derided everything my Scots-Irish forebears upheld: loyalty to one's local tribe over national aspirations, practicality over intellectuality, peace-loving ways over the love of a good fight, etc. Yet there has always been in me the sort of romantic who weeps at the end of the movie Braveheart and chokes up at a good old country music weeper like Dolly Parton's "Coat of Many Colors."

Perhaps it is the Scots-Irish in me that keeps me a moderate oldstyleliberal and not a partisan of the far left. Perhaps it's why, after reading James Webb's book, I want to shout from the rooftops, "Long live the Scots-Irish!"

"Heed lessons of '72"

2008-07-02T10:40:00.002-04:00

Religious studies professor Ira Chernus writes in "Heed lessons of '72," an op-ed piece in today's Baltimore Sun, that the Democratic Party of 2008 must avoid making the same mistake it did in 1972. In that year Democrats nominated the antiwar candidate George McGovern as their presidential standardbearer. Most Americans were by that time against the Vietnam War, but instead of backing McGovern, they reelected Richard Nixon in a landslide.

Republicans tarred McGovern as the candidate of "acid, amnesty, and abortion." LSD, known as "acid," was the drug of choice in the ostentatious counterculture of the day. The political radicals of the era were calling for amnesty for draft resisters. The following year, 1973, would find a liberal Supreme Court upholding a woman's constitutional "right to choose" in Roe v. Wade.

Chernus writes that the main reason McGovern lost was the insistence of insiders in the Democratic Party power structure that the platform McGovern would run on should contain a strong antiwar plank. Meanwhile, Nixon ran on a pledge to wind the war down gradually, while preserving America's "honor" — a code word, Chernus points out, for "keeping the nation's moorings in familiar cultural traditions of the past."

Chernus thinks this year's presidential contest parallels that one. Most voters actually oppose the Iraq War, but there is great danger that the skin color or unusual name and family background of Barack Obama will trigger a victory for war hero John McCain nevertheless, particularly if McCain is handed strong antiwar language in the Democratic platform on which he can embroider code words to draw votes from those who fear too much "change" in America too soon.

This analysis interests your blogger oldstyleliberal greatly, in part because he thinks it's correct, and in part because it reveals something profound about human nature. Most people want peace, preferring it in the abstract to war hands down. What's more, most people think this war is a mistake. Yet such sentiments take a back seat to an inchoate fear that coming out strongly against the war is the sign of a candidate who is more of a "goody goody" than America is ready for.

So people want to keep the "better angels of our nature" on a short leash. The "liberal" politics that promises to fulfill our human longing for peace (or justice, or equality, or unfettered liberty) needs to be restrained, lest America grow flabby and weak. We do not dare be more "goody goody" than our enemies, or they will have us for breakfast.

When push comes to shove, fear trumps our "better angels" every time.

Voters split over McCain, Obama views on Iraq

2008-06-25T11:23:00.003-04:00

Voters split over McCain, Obama views on Iraq is an article that has recently appeared in Yahoo! News. Worth reading, it pretty accurately reflects the crazy, mixed up sentiments of voters this year about the war in Iraq, oldstyleliberal thinks.

Clearly, the fact that sizable voter majorities think the war was a mistake does not help Senator Obama all that much. Senator McCain gets high marks for his seeming to be the better military leader, even though (or perhaps because) he vocally supports the war:

"He's more experienced militarily," said Ann Burkes, a registered Democrat and retired third-grade teacher from Broken Arrow, Okla. "And I don't know if I agree with [his] stay-the-course (policy), but I think the good probably outweighs the bad with him, experience-wise." ...

Leeann Ormsbee, a registered Democrat from Waterford, Pa., believes the United States rushed to war, but now does not believe troops should simply withdraw. The 29-year-old self-employed house cleaner says she has never voted for a Republican. She might this time.

"I do believe that he will do better in Iraq," she said of McCain. "Because he's served in the military and he has said we can't just pull out. ... I think we're just kind of stuck with it now and we have to finish."

Republican pollster Neil Newhouse calls these voters "nose-holders."

"They don't like the fact that we're over there, they don't think the decision was the right one, but they understand that if we simply withdraw our troops it would leave things worse off," he said.

The belief of yours truly, oldstyleliberal, is that things will eventually be worse off if we stay. oldstyleliberal believes that sooner or later, war begets war and violence begets vengeance.

Without fail, killing desensitizes the soul — whether one does it or merely witnesses it. And watching your comrades get killed spurs a desire for revenge. Put the two together, and you have a sure recipe for future violence.

The violent future can, however, be delayed. Those Iraqis who would seize power, terrorize their countrymen, and generally exact revenge for the last several years of killing may just be biding their time until a Democratic president enters the White House and cuts U.S. troop strength over there.

Which means that if we cross them up and elect the hawkish McCain instead, there may be a surge of postponed Iraqi atrocities coming to the fore at that time, provoking a President McCain to hit back even harder than ever, thereby stoking the resentment mill even further in Iraq.

War begets war. Violence begets revenge. It is an Iron Law of human behavior.

So Obama is right. We need to withdraw as expeditiously as we can, given the need for preventing the withdrawal itself from provoking additional chaos.

Once we are out of Iraq, we can expect to witness the ghastly sight of innumerable chickens coming home to roost in that country, and being slaughtered ... just as happened in Vietnam after the last American helicopter lifted off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

Americans such as those mentioned in the article who oppose the war, but also oppose withdrawal, are hoping in vain that something good will happen between now and when we finally do pull the plug ... something that will cancel the balance long overdue for vengeance in Iraq.

oldstyleliberal feels their reluctance to face facts and insist on ending the war will make for a worse outcome, not a better one.

Jim Webb for Veep!

2008-06-16T19:05:00.002-04:00

Check out Joe Klein's latest column for TIME, "Getting to Know Jim Webb." Though he won't say so right out loud, Klein thinks Webb, the recently elected senator from Virginia and a Democrat, is the clear top choice as Barack Obama's running mate in the November presidential election.

oldstyleliberal agrees. Webb served with distinction in Vietnam and, as a Republican, became President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy. He switched to the Democratic Party because he feels "it is now the Republican Party that most glaringly does not understand the true nature of military service." Klein says Webb, in his recent book A Time to Fight, "takes a well-calibrated ... swing at the Bush Administration's naive neoconservative foreign policy — after all, Webb opposed going to war in Iraq in a 2002 Washington Post Op-Ed piece."

I like the fact that Webb could not be more sympathetic to and supportive of those who serve in uniform, those who have so served in the past, their families, and their general culture ... which ties in closely with Scots-Irish working class from which Webb himself proudly hails. My own family's roots are likewise to be found in this slice of the American soil.

I also like something else Klein quotes from Webb's book:

"The ultimate question," Webb writes about Democrats and the military, "is this: When you look at a veteran, what do you see? Do you see a strong individual who overcame the most difficult challenges most human beings can face ... or do you see a victim?" But if some Democrats tend to pity members of the armed forces, the Republican Party "continually seeks to politicize military service for its own ends even as it uses their sacrifices as a political shield against criticism for its failed policies. And in that sense, it is now the Republican Party that most glaringly does not understand the true nature of military service."

As some of my recent posts have indicated, on Memorial Day Weekend of 2008 I "saw the light," becoming, in my heart, a pacifist. I now oppose the Iraq War, and all wars from this point forward, as being insane. This does not mean, however, that I despise — or pity — the military. Jim Webb may or may not agree with me that we should never fight another war unless we're attacked. But I agree with him that the values of duty, honor, and personal sacrifice which the military stands for are the best things about America and should be revered by its political class, not exploited for the civilian leaders' own twisted ideological purposes.

So I think Barack Obama will have to look long and hard before he'll be able to find a better running mate than Senator James Webb, Democrat of Virginia.

Polls and the Iraq War

2008-06-15T18:51:00.006-04:00

This web page provides a handy-dandy list of a whole slew of polls concerning the Iraq War. This particular blogger, oldstyleliberal, finds they seem to show a lot of disaffection with the war, yet the disaffection does not translate into a prospective rout of John McCain by Barack Obama in the fall election.

John McCain is well-known to support the war, seeing it as part and parcel of the fight for our country's life in the global war on terrorism. Barack Obama, meanwhile, has opposed the war from day one on grounds that it was "dumb" for the U.S. to start it. Their attitudes could not be further apart and still be considered by any stretch of the imagination reasonable. So one might think Obama's antiwar stance, in that it matches that of the bulk of the electorate, would make him odds-on favorite in November.

But, no. Obama may be very narrowly ahead of McCain right now — see Poll Finds Independent Voters Split Between McCain, Obama, with actual Washington Post-ABC News polling data here — but it is not clear that the war dominates the decision-making process voters are going through in lining up behind one candidate or the other in 2008. This is itself odd, I think, since questions of war and peace have historically played big roles in how we elect presidents. (Or am I wrong about that?)

At any rate, it looks as if roughly two-thirds of us continue to feel that President Bush is not handling the war well, and a clear majority feel it is not still possible to achieve victory in Iraq. A slight majority used to want us to bring the troops home in 2009 without waiting for Iraq to stabilize, but in more recent polling that percentage drops to 49 percent, possibly in response to the lower rate of American deaths of late and the consequent increase in hope that Iraq can be stabilized.

Even so, 61 percent in a May 30-June 3, 2008, CBS News poll say Iraq will probably never have a stable democracy.

Blunting the effect of pro/anti war sentiment on the prospective general election outcome is the fact that the roughly two in three Americans who are disenchanted with the war split down the middle on whether all of the troops, or just some, ought to be withdrawn immediately. Clearly, there must be quite a few of us who cannot imagine that leaving the troops in Iraq will ever bring stability, but do not want all the troops taken out of Iraq now.

That seeming contradiction probably reflects a widespread unwillingness to have us look like failures in the eyes of the world, plus a practical appreciation of the fact that a hasty departure would expose our troops to more risk, not less, during any sped up, hence chaotic withdrawal period.

Meanwhile, Democrats are nearly unanimous in opposing the war, while Republicans and Independents break about 2-to-1 in the war's favor. However, though Republicans and Independents support the war in roughly equal numbers, the former are much less willing to have the next president wind the war down than are the latter.

About a third of Americans say the country is safer from terrorist attack due to the war in Iraq than it otherwise would have been, and the number who think deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks on us has only very recently begun to decline from roughly that same level to, presently, something more than a quarter of the populace.

It is clear that continuing support for the war depends greatly on the many among us who in their minds connect the war's onset directly to the terrorist attacks on American soil on 9/11. Given that skeptics spared no effort in debunking the Saddam's-links-to-terrorism myth during the early days of the war, it looks as if over a quarter of Americans have simply made up their minds that such "liberal" carping should not be listened to.

Debating the Iraq War?

2008-06-10T09:37:00.004-04:00

Ever since this blogger underwent a Memorial Day 2008 conversion to a sort of pure and simple pacifism — in addition to continuing to oppose President Bush's current war in Iraq — he has noticed a strange dearth of op-ed chatter about the war. Not only is the idea that all war is bad well off today's radar screen — nothing new there! — but the chattering classes have gone eerily silent on questions of supporting or opposing the Iraq conflict as such.

I decided to pay a visit to the Opinions area at WashingtonPost.com to see what gives.

Most of the current verbiage I saw thumbnails of was, as expected, about politics: What we can look forward to with the coming Obama-McCain match-up was second to the rehash (will the instant replays never cease?) of the drawn out, supposedly bitter Obama-Clinton slugfest. Doing a Firefox Find on "Iraq" or "war" on the Post web page linked to above turned up exactly zero hits.

I bethought me to look for mentions of Iraq in the archives of various honorable Post scribes. First up was Anne Applebaum. The most recent Applebaum allusion to Iraq seems to have been in a May 13 '08 column on "the cruel, power-hungry, violent and xenophobic generals who run Burma," wherein she takes a sideways slap at "the damage done by the Iraq war [that] goes far beyond Iraq's borders." Not really about Iraq at all.

I skipped David Broder, as his beat is domestic politics per se.

Richard Cohen seems to have mentioned Iraq but twice in recent months. McCain in the Mud has it that "McCain supports the Iraq war. But Iraq is still a mess." Ohh - kaaay. That settles that. Clinton in the Wilderness reveals that Clinton "offered a weak and disingenuous defense of her Senate vote in support of going to war in Iraq." Thin gruel, both of these.

Jackson Diehl has two recent pieces mentioning Iraq. The main references therein are to:

Pundits and bloggers [who] have seized on the proposal as proof that McCain, like George W. Bush before him, is in thrall to the "radical neocons" who allegedly authored the war in Iraq.
The rockets fired from Gaza and from Sadr City [being] two prongs of an offensive aimed at forcing the United States out of Iraq, putting Israel on the defensive — and leaving Iran as the region's preeminent power.

OK. At that point I got tired of trying to avoid stepping in "all" the incidental references to Iraq, however infrequent even these seem to have been, and went looking for just one column by someone, anyone, that addresses Iraq square on. I found an April 11 piece by E. J. Dionne Jr., Turning No Corners, which is almost on topic. Actually, its topic is not the war per se, pro or con, but rather the way that supporters and opponents of the enterprise talk past each other:

For supporters of the war, the primary issue is Iraq itself and what will happen if we leave. For the war's opponents, the focus is on how the conflict in Iraq is sapping our energies, weakening our military and diverting our attention from our interests elsewhere in the world.

Notice that opposition to the war is, per Dionne, not grounded in the war's merits or lack thereof, but in the supposed sheer impracticality of continuing to inject our ever more thinly stretched military forces into Iraq with no end date in sight.

No one today is coming right out and saying that this war should never have been fought. No one is courageous enough to say we simply ought to wrap it all up and bring the troops home now, because they oughtn't be there in the first place. No one wants to be labeled a peacenik.

Thus there is no real, ongoing debate over the war as such. To which my reaction can only be, "What's wrong with this picture?"

The Solidarity Sentiment

2008-06-09T19:55:00.005-04:00

As I have been indicating in recent posts, I have become convinced that "war is not the answer" — not any more, not in today's world. It is accordingly of great concern to me that not many of my fellow Americans seem ready to denounce the war in Iraq in no uncertain terms. The "antiwar" Democratic presidential nominee-presumptive, Senator Barack Obama, has not engaged in ringing rhetoric against the war, by any means. Meanwhile his opponent, Senator John McCain, is at least as much of a hawk as President Bush is.

The dominant sentiment in this country seems to run as follows. The president, as commander-in-chief, made a judgment call in the wake of 9/11 that U.S. troops had to be committed indefinitely in Afghanistan, to harry Al Qaeda, and also in Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein. The justification for the latter involvement turned out to be ill-founded, perhaps, but at the time almost all of the present opponents of the Iraq War (with the conspicuous exception of Obama, who was not yet in Congress) concurred that Bush ought at least to be given authority to go to war if necessary.

Once he had been so authorized by Congress, he went ahead and invaded Iraq. We can argue about whether he was right or wrong, about what his real intentions were, about whether he was totally honest with the American people, about whether this war can ever be won, etc., etc., etc. What we cannot argue about now is that our troops are there, in Iraq, in harm's way right now. Many of them have sacrificed lives, limbs, physical and mental health, marriages, and other less tangible things. The mission is not yet accomplished, and more valiant sacrifice remains to be made. The last thing we at home ought to do now is pull the rug out from under our troops.

Keeping faith with the troops is job one of the patriot today ... so the story goes.

When a duly authorized commander-in-chief sends troops into danger, even if his judgment is and was flawed, we all henceforth need to suck it up and stay the course, however unlikely the chances of ultimate success may seem. To cut and run now guarantees that all the sacrifices made to date will have been in vain.

Once the bleeding and dying have begun in a war, any war, we at home must have infinite patience. If we back away hastily, we are in effect spitting on the graves of the 4,000+ who have died while carrying the American flag into peril in Iraq.

Solidarity with the troops is thus the gripping hand when it comes to sentiment about the Iraq War, for many Americans today — even those who tell pollsters of their private doubts about the purposes and justifications of that war. On the one hand, spreading democracy around the globe sounds like a good idea. On the other hand, Iraq doesn't seem ready for it. Eliminating Saddam's WMD threat was necessary; yet, was there really any threat? Saddam was, or was not, in collusion with America's mortal enemy, Al Qaeda.

Debate between these two outlooks would ordinarily be understandable, even healthy. But there is that third, gripping hand to take into consideration: the need to support the troops. Undercutting the commander-in-chief by attacking his motives and challenging his reasoning only prolongs and intensifies the danger they face every hour of every day.

That's the dominant motif in how many patriots see the war. This blogger understands it, and even though he doesn't personally subscribe to it, he realizes that it is the prime impediment to any hopes he may have for an effective peace movement to arise that will push this country away from war. Solidarity with those in uniform who bleed on our behalf is always an honorable and noble point of view. To ask people to insist on peace seems accordingly to be asking them to behave dishonorably and ignobly.

I also recognize that today's widespread solidarity sentiment is being advanced as a beautiful way to try to make amends for the shameful lack of solidarity with returning soldiers many citizens exhibited during and after the Vietnam War.

How can one argue with such a sense of duty and obligation and honor and nobility? By its very nature, it transcends pro-and-con argumentation. It repudiates reasoned discourse and silences philosophical debate ... which is a large part of its appeal. It can be a way of coming together behind the Man in the Driver's Seat and putting mere ideological disputes in the back seat or trunk, where they belong in time of war.

How to Work for Peace?

2008-06-09T08:18:00.010-04:00

In Let there be peace on earth ..., and then in ... and let it begin with me, I told of my recent peace conversion. A PBS Memorial Day celebration, broadcast from the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and intended as a paean to staunch patriotism, included the reading of a series of letters about what the war in Iraq has done to two American military families, taking the life of one husband and nearly that of the other, causing a newborn daughter to never be able to know her father, bringing untold sadness and misery to the wives of the two soldiers ... all this drove home to me that not only this Iraq War but all wars are insane.

But how do I seek peace and pursue it ... meaningfully ... in today's environment?

Is there actually a peace movement today?

According to this section of a Wikipedia article, there is. But reading it and following the links contained therein convinces me that most of its member organizations have main agendas other than peace qua peace, such as libertarianism or the environment or gay rights or radical politics. I resist utopian or ultra-ideological approaches to peacemaking instinctively. It is as if their proponents are saying that we can't have peace until we have a perfect world ... which I think we will never have until we are all perfect people.

Isn't there a more practical way to work for peace?

Besides, I personally feel the basic impetus for peace comes from a gut-level antipathy to war that bypasses all argumentation and nuanced reasoning.

This past weekend I attended a play at a local repertory theater, In The Heart of America, by Naomi Wallace, a searing indictment of war that depicts imaginary (or are they?) atrocities in the Iraq War superimposed with not-so-imaginary ones from Vietnam (think Lt. William Calley and Charlie Company's massacre at My Lai). I was accompanied by a woman friend who was raised in a military family, lost a husband in Vietnam, and would like to be thought of as true to the red, white, and blue ... but who opposes this war and this President.

In our discussion after the play, she told me she'd felt like she was being torn in two. On the one hand, it was hard for her to resonate with the anti-military, antiwar thrust of the play. On the other, she knew that the brutality laid at the feet of the warrior characters was an honest reflection of reality.

I told her about my peacenik conversion on Memorial Day weekend, about how I now see all war — even the so-called "good wars" — as insane.

I went on to present a case for believing that it's an illusion to put different wars in separate cubbyholes, according to how "good" or "bad" they seem to be. I didn't think of alluding to the image at the time, but upon reflection what I should have told her was that every war sows dragon's teeth that grow into new warriors destined to clash in the future.

World War I set the stage for World War II, which set the stage for the Cold War and fears of nuclear Armageddon, which engendered the Vietnam conflict. The "good" (in my estimation) war by which Holocaust-decimated Jews forced their way into their new and rightful home in Palestine, has led to endless bloodshed. Etc., etc., etc.

The "good" wars such as WWII lead people to believe that war can be right and just and honorable.

The "bad" wars such as Vietnam lead patriots to blame a failed war's opponents for "aiding and abetting the enemy" — implying that, next time, job one is to marginalize or silence opposition.

Either way, there will always be a next time. There will never come a time when "war is not the answer."

For war to end, conflict must be resolved peaceably. Diplomacy must be given every chance to work. Aggression must be fended off regretfully, as a last resort. But most of all, people must lose their taste for war.

That happened in Europe following WWII. A continent whose soil has historically been drenched with blood beat its swords into plowshares. Movements of the human spirit away from war are possible.

What would it take to have one here?

... and let it begin with me

2008-05-27T18:08:00.009-04:00

Since I posted Let there be peace on earth ... yesterday, I've been asking myself what can make people want peace so badly they'll set aside the ordinary reasons they have for supporting a war such as the war in Iraq.

The answer, I think, is identification.

When I watched the PBS telecast of the Memorial Day celebration on the Mall, I identified with the soldiers and their wives whose letters to one another were reenacted on the stage. One of the men died of combat wounds in an American hospital after having helped evacuate the other man, seriously hurt in a previous battle. They were best war buddies, and their wives were too. When one of the wives finally lost her shot-up husband just days before her first child was born, the other wife was by her side — even though it was touch-and-go for her husband at that point, in a hospital far from home. He had told his wife to go where she was most needed, which meant she couldn't be with him.

When one identifies with one's fellow Americans — an infant who will never know her father and a wife whose husband breathes no more — one is apt to become an instant pacifist.

This is separate from questions of whether the war is "worth it." No war is worth it, not if it can be avoided with honor and safety intact.

This war could have been avoided with America's safety and honor intact. But that is a caluclation we may make — or not — and it has nothing at first to do with identification. We can calculate the rightfulness or wrongfulness of a war until the cows come home, and that baby will still not have a father.

When will we adopt the attitude that war is just plain bad, no matter its "justification"?

For when we do that, we will seek alternatives to war — not all of which are necessarily craven or defeatist. There are ways of neutralizing threats that do not involve bombs or bullets.

Nor is the real point whether we ought to identify with those who pay the ultimate price on our behalf, but rather whether we do identify. Of course we ought to feel their pain, as fellow human beings and fellow Americans. But how hard it is to actually do so, most of the time! It takes a special set of circumstances to trigger true empathy.

Mine was triggered because the Memorial Day concert was clearly not a peace demonstration. I knew that, and so when that tableau of heroic sacrifice and personal pain was presented on stage, I could not duck its impact by imagining that someone was trying to indoctrinate me.

And so I identified with people who I was aware probably would not have wanted me to not support the war. For that widow to oppose the war now that her husband has given his life in it would be to have his — their — sacrifice be in vain. Identification is not the same thing as agreeing with the person identified with.

At some point, reason has to chime in and say the best thing one can do for somebody with whom one disagrees fundamentally, but with whom one nonetheless identifies totally, is to respectfully continue to disagree.

At some point, reason has to generalize the individual identification and conclude that war is just plain bad.

It starts with identification, but it ends with reason.

Let there be peace on earth ...

2008-05-26T15:32:00.008-04:00

... and let it begin with me!

It's Memorial Day 2008, and oldstyleliberal (that's me) feels a positive hunger for peace.

Last night I watched the Memorial Day celebration at the National Mall, at the U.S. Capitol, thanks to the Public Broadcasting System. In one segment, three actors read from letters written by three of the honored guests. Two were the wives of soldiers formerly stationed in Iraq, and the third was the first of the two soldiers. The second soldier is dead, having died in combat only days after helping evacuate the first, his best buddy who had been shot and grievously wounded in a firefight, and who is yet only a hairsbreadth away from having to have a leg amputated.

The soldier who died took several days in the hospital, back in the U.S.A., to lose his struggle for life, leaving behind an oh-so-young wife who was days away from giving birth to a daughter, a first child who will never know her father. The other wife was there beside her at the hospital, of course, lending support to her own best "war buddy" in an hour of danger and despair ... even though her own husband remained hospitalized in Germany and she knew he might not pull through.

After that presentation, Gladys Knight sang "Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me." The audience, even if it was a military pageant, sang earnestly along. Then Sarah Brightman and a children's choir sang Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Pie Jesu." Sweet Lord Jesus, who takes away the sins of the world, grant them [the fallen in America's wars] rest everlasting. Not a dry eye in the crowd.

Why can't we have peace on earth? Why can't we have no more fallen?

I want to work for peace.

I was a young man in the 1960s when there was a peace movement opposing the Vietnam War. I was part of it. Why isn't there a peace movement today, opposing the Iraq War?

What would be a constructive way to work for peace now?

It seems to this observer that a peace movement, to be successful, would have to bring a lot of people together. It's no good making a peace movement out of the tiny minority of folks who are naturally disposed to pacifism. Their arguments may be good ones, but they're conceptual, intellectual, high-minded, and based on assumptions that average people don't subscribe to.

Average people are patriots first. They feel a deep connection to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have a horror of repeating the Vietnam aftermath, when returning soldiers were spat upon, ridiculed, and, worse, ignored.

Average people have a difficult time converging the facts that Saddam Hussein wasn't really an al Qaeda facilitator, wasn't really on the verge of getting weapons of mass destruction, with what seems to be the right attitude after 9/11. God bless America. Support the troops. Shoot first and ask questions later. Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out.

The facts seem to suggest that the Iraq War, and even the more broadly supported conflict in Afghanistan, aren't working.

The attitude seems to require us to have infinite patience anyway.

The indisputable facts are that there are terrorist organizations and whole societies out there that want to do us dirty.

The attitude tells us to arm ourselves and fight.

Yet there is another attitude that is latent in all of us even now: Let there be peace on earth.

How do we bring that attitude to the fore?

It might be the case that we can succeed in ending the terrorist threat only if, however paradoxically, we make peace today and not war. Peace, not just as a far off hope but as something lived here and now, is the only real answer to conflict.

Who Will Listen?

2008-05-20T08:35:00.014-04:00

A controversial recent offering from columnist Kathleen Parker, "Getting Bubba," brings out what may be the driving force of Election '08. It once could be called "class resentment," but it's broader than that today.

What is it? The takeoff point to understanding it is embodied in the negativity some voters bear toward Senator Barack Obama, in that he does not impress them as a "full-blooded American."

This seems to be about more than his mixed race. Senator Obama's mother was herself a "full-blooded" (in her case, white) American. She was of no particular religion but had great respect for all religions, meaning that she herself was a freethinker, already out of step with mainstream American religious values. Most American religions tend to be more close-minded, truth be told. Obama's father was a Kenyan, a black African, whose religious background was Muslim.

This also seems to be about more than economic strata, since Obama does not come from wealth.

And it is not much about gender, since Democrats who are fleeing the uncertainty they feel about Obama are running to the supposed safe haven of ... Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

What is it about? Parker puts it this way:

Politics may no longer be so much about race and gender as about heritage, core values, and made-in-America. Just as we once and still have a cultural divide in this country, we now have a patriot divide.

True enough, but it's a culture divide, too. Obama got into trouble for talking about disaffected working Americans who assuage their bitterness by "clinging" to their religion and their guns. At root, the dispute was over cultural differences, not just differences about patriotism.

Obama was likewise in trouble several months ago with African Americans who worried that he's "not black enough." That criticism seems to have died down for now. Yet it pointed to the same kind of anxiety as felt today by working class whites: will this man listen to us?

Or is he too much of an elitist?

It seems to me, the oldstyleliberal who writes this blog, that I myself have been too much of an elitist of late, too inclined to think in terms of wonky positions on issues like health insurance or the war in Iraq, to recognize that my fellow Americans are crying out from their respective communities and armed camps for some unifying national leader to take them seriously and pay them heed.

Meanwhile, the elites are urging upon us an enlightened, multicultural, manifestly relativistic agenda for sweeping change: bold strides along the "information superhighway" into an uncharted future. In that bright future as the educated elites see it, we will all be able to just get along because we will have put aside the benighted, old-fashioned, insular, absolutist beliefs to which we used to cling so desperately.

There are two kinds of American today. One American clings to the old absolutes (never mind that they may be different absolutes, depending on what group he owes his allegiance to). The other American sees all truth as relative, slippery, changeable.

For the old American, the prime value is just that: constancy of allegiance. For the new American, allegiance is itself negotiable.

The American whose constant allegiance is to the old ways is Bubba. Bubba thinks no one up there is listening to him ... and he's right about that. For the bright elites, listening to Bubba would just derail the glorious future they want to hasten into existence. The bright elites must pretend to listen to Bubba, of course, since they need Bubba's vote. But once in office, they'll have their own elitist agendas to see to.

That's why Bubba is so wary of Barack.

Boomers planting a debt bomb -- baltimoresun.com

2008-04-30T11:25:00.006-04:00

Baltimore Sun financial columnist Jay Hancock writes in today's "Boomers planting a debt bomb" of the impending disaster that today's spendthrift ways will become for post-boomers:

The biggest U.S. financial crisis isn't the housing crunch. It's the government debt bomb being planted by baby boomers to explode in the faces of their children and grandchildren ...

The country already owes $9 trillion, a record, and almost half of it to foreigners, also a record. [The U.S. government] pays more in interest [on the national debt] than the annual cost of the Iraq war.

By the middle of this century, 20 percent of the national income — not just a fifth of the budget but a fifth of the whole economy! — will have to be diverted to pay interest on the debt ... . Another 20 percent will be needed to finance health care and pensions for boomer geezers.

That'll leave virtually nothing for education, roads, basic research and other investments that make the country great.

Oh, wonderful! Not only do we have to worry about the threat of global warming and the need to wean ourselves off foreign oil, we have to stop spending so much money into the bargain. Or everything will go bust.

Only problem is, not only do liberals like to spend money, so do today's conservatives à la George W. Bush.

oldstyleliberal sees little evidence that either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton can fix this. They are, after all, liberals.

Nor does one, such as oldstyleliberal, who hopes to seem wise, tend to feel that John McCain — he who is willing to keep troops in Iraq for the next 99 years, and hang the cost — has a handle on the impending meltdown of the federal budget.

All of the presidential hopefuls will, like oldstyleliberal, be long gone by mid-century. (Well, maybe the youngish Obama will be still here, in his geezer-hood.) In fact, the next president, should he or she serve two terms, will be leaving office in 2017, just about the time that, the experts say, we will have begun to spend over 20 cents of every dollar of U.S. gross domestic product on health care alone.

That figure is due to go up to 25 cents on the GDP dollar by 2030. When the Hancock column talks about "20 percent ... to finance health care and pensions for boomer geezers" by mid-century, he means 20 percent of the federal budget, and it doesn't include private expenditures on health care/health insurance.

All of this, of course, pales in insignificance compared to whether Sen. Obama ought to wear a flag lapel pin or Sen. Clinton is fighting too dirty a campaign.

We hear more about how Sen. McCain is supposedly too soft on illegal immigrants than about how, with Sen. Lieberman, he has co-sponsored a bill that would put a down payment on quashing global warming.

McCain-Lieberman would set up a cap-and-trade system for reining in companies that spew too much carbon into the sky and rewarding companies whose carbon footprint is moderate and shrinking. But that's not a topic that commands our attention as voters; lapel pins are.

If the next president doesn't get a grip on our looming problems, we will know who to blame.

As Pogo used to say, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

The Tao of Conservative Government, Part 1

2008-03-13T16:11:00.000-04:00

"Governing a large state is like boiling a small fish," reads the Lao Tzu, one of the foundational texts of Chinese Taoism. Also known as the Tao Te Ching, it holds (according to D.C. Lau, one of its esteemed translators) that ...

... the state or the empire is a delicate thing that can be ruined by the least handling, or a sacred vessel which must not be tampered with. The empire is as much a part of the natural order as [it is a part of] the world of inanimate objects and, being part of the natural order, will run smoothly so long as everyone follows his own nature. To think that once can improve on nature by one's petty cleverness is profanity. The natural order is delicately balanced. The least interference on the part of the ruler will upset this balance and lead to disorder.

This wisdom from the 4th century B.C., out of a cultural tradition not America's own, resonates with some of us moderns today as we consider what to do about, among other things, our health care financing system that threatens to go bust in coming decades, or Social Security's looming fiscal crisis, or our planet's inability to keep sidestepping the climate change coming from all the carbon we are spewing into the air.

This ancient wisdom, applied to today's political controversies, admittedly seems an apostasy to a political liberal such as oldstyleliberal. We liberals are folks who say show me a problem, and I'll show you a way to have the government fix it.

Health care getting too expensive, with a sixth of the populace uninsured? Fix it by legislation mandating that everybody buy health insurance privately, if they can't get it from their employers. Then set up the government as insurer of last resort and give tax breaks to citizens who can't afford the premiums.

Social Security heading for a fiscal crackup as the burgeoning number of retirees drawing from the kitty overburdens the dwindling number of workers feeding the kitty? Fix the system. How, exactly? That remains unclear, but what seems ultra-clear to most liberals is that privatizing Social Security and subjecting it to the ungoverned vicissitudes of financial markets is out of the question.

Global warming threatening to swamp not only the planet's coastlines but also its sustainable agriculture and its potential for economic growth? Again, bring government power to bear on whatever or whoever is responsible for creating the climate change in the first place. Only problem is, we have met the enemy and he is us. We all have a huge carbon footprint. Even on paper, what could the government fix be for that?

It is beginning to become apparent to oldstyleliberal that, well ... that the old-style, liberal approaches to solving the world's problems have gone bankrupt.

Take, for example, the woes of our health care system today. Primary care physician Kevin Pho writes in an op-ed column in a recent USA Today that a real problem is the acute shortage of doctors who aren't specialists, but rather general practitioners, family doctors, and the like. Medicare and the rest of the health care financing/insuring system pay them much less handsomely when they use "30 minutes to discuss a patient's hypertension, diabetes or heart disease" than if they use the same 30 minutes to perform a procedure or render a tangible service. The incentives are all stacked in favor of primary care docs doing more and discussing less.

Meanwhile, there are the "annual government threats to indiscriminately cut reimbursements despite rising office and malpractice costs, [such that] physicians are faced with no choice but to increase quantity to maintain financial viability." Hence, "primary care physicians who refuse to compromise quality are either driven out of business or to cash-only concierge practices, further contributing to primary care's decline."

Patients naturally respond to the demise of the old-fashioned way of interacting with the family doctor by going directly to specialists who are eager to perform procedures that result in themselves, the specialists, being reimbursed generously. In the old days, the family doc would act as an intermediary and clearinghouse for possible specialist interventions, discouraging those that aren't really going to do the patient much good. Today, though, "studies show that increasing fragmentation of care results in a corresponding rise in cost and medical errors."

How did we get things so messed up?

In the estimation of oldstyleliberal, the culprit may have been the litany of attempts over the past half-century or more to "improve" or "fix" the health care system. They have all had in common that they make the consumers of health care services insensitive to the real relationship of benefits to costs, since "someone else" is paying the costs.

So consumers demand health care services more indiscriminately than they otherwise would ... and the primary care physician whose counsel might help avoid that is out of the loop. Because of the laws of supply and demand, prices go up, and the "someone else" bearing the costs — whether an employer, a private insurer, or the government — tries to impose artificial rules to keep things in check.

But the rules typically rebound. For instance, there was a time not too long ago when experts said "managed care" facilities (HMOs and the like) were the fix we needed. The HMOs, originally benign, soon began imposing all kinds of rules on who may see what doctor when and for what, simply to hold down costs. Massive customer dissatisfaction ensued, followed by an exodus from HMOs.

Again, oldstyleliberal believes the underlying problem with HMOs and the various other "solutions" that have been tried is that they have all been attempts to overrule or undermine the health care marketplace. As columnist George F. Will mentioned in this recent piece about Cuba, a market is "an information-generating mechanism, communism cannot know what things should cost."

Neither can the participants in an American health care financing system that suppresses the ability of consumers to find out, or even care about, what things actually cost.

Now, according to Dr. Pho, "if the Democrats' universal health care proposals come to fruition, the primary care system will be inundated with at least 45 million newly insured patients. As Massachusetts is finding out in its pioneering attempt to provide universal coverage, our system is not ready for this burden."

Dr. Pho's prescription

... starts with reforming the physician reimbursement system. Remove the pressure for primary care physicians to squeeze in more patients per hour, and reward them for spending time with patients, optimally managing their diseases and practicing evidence-based medicine. Make primary care more attractive to medical students by forgiving student loans for those who choose primary care as a career and reconciling the marked disparity between specialist and primary care physician salaries.

oldstyleliberal is not convinced, though, that these solutions wouldn't rebound in some unexpected way, should they be enacted, because they don't solve the underlying problem: the health care market has been jiggered and re-jiggered so that the "information" it provides suppliers and consumers with is ever more bogus. It doesn't give anyone any real idea of what things should cost. The reason it doesn't is that the level of demand for health services is divorced from what might be termed "cost-benefits reality" whenever "someone else" pays. Then the "someone else" typically tries to impose artificial cost-cutting measures, which always end up cheating somebody even more than purely market-driven forces might do.

In short, government soultions too often end up boiling the proverbial "small fish" into fish paste. There has to be a better way. oldstyleliberal increasingly looks to the so-called conservative initiatives — what this recent editorial in the Baltimore Sun recently lambasted as John McCain's "raft of small-bore policy ideas centered around giving individuals more control over [health care] spending" — that might allow the bottom-up forces of the marketplace to do what the top-down imperatives of government controls have conspicuously failed to do.

2008 Election - SUSA Polling Suggests New Battleground States

2008-03-09T10:22:00.003-04:00

Remember 2000? The Democratic candidate, Al Gore, got more of the popular vote than the Republican George W. Bush did, but lost the election in the Electoral College (with the help of the Supreme Court). This year, it looks like another ultra-close general election may be on tap, and it's not unimaginable that it will be the Democrat this time who'll need an electoral-vote edge, after possibly getting fewer popular votes than John McCain. We Democrats need to be prepared for that.

Trouble is, we Democrats are unlikely to know who exactly our 2008 presidential nominee will be until the 796 superdelegates make their individual choices at the Democratic National Convention, August 25-28 in Denver.

The superdelegates are Democratic members of Congress, governors, mayors, and state and national party leaders. Each superdelegate can vote for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, as they prefer. Some have already pledged for one, some for the other, and some have not tipped their hand. Once "committed" by announcing their own personal choice, they can still switch candidates at will if they feel the need. There is no rule or law that forces them to cast their vote a certain way.

As of Sunday, March 9, Clinton has a slight edge in committed superdelegates, 242-210, while more than 300 remain uncommitted.

Interesting fact: the identities of only 719 of the 796 superdelegates are presently known. A group of 77 "add-on" superdelegates will be named later by state party leaders. The Obama-Clinton race may wind up in the laps of those 77.

Another interesting fact: if the delegations from Florida and Michigan wind up not being seated at the convention — they've been barred because their states violated party rules and scheduled too-early primaries — neither will Florida and Michigan superdelegates. But if some kind of deal is struck by which those two delegations get seated after all, then an as-yet-undetermined number of superdelegates from those states would be added to the current total of 796 — and their votes could end up picking the nominee.

Unless either Clinton or Obama takes all the remaining primaries/caucuses by large margins, then even in the wake of Clinton's victories in Ohio and Texas on March 4 it looks as if neither candidate can amass enough elected, pledged delegates to sideline the superdelegates at the convention.

How should the superdelegates decide how to vote?

2008 Election - SUSA Polling Suggests New Battleground States gets at what oldstyleliberal thinks the superdelegates ought to be thinking about when they decide. Specifically, they ought collectively to try to vote for the candidate most likely to lick John McCain in the Electoral College in the crucial battleground states.

Says the SUSA (SurveyUSA) pollster, "McCain leads [Obama] in the blue states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey while Obama leads [McCain] in the red states of Virginia, Ohio, North Dakota, Nevada, and Colorado." Meanwhile, "McCain leads [Clinton] in the blue states Washington, Oregon, and Michigan while Clinton leads [McCain] in the red states Florida, Ohio, West Virginia, and Arkansas. McCain leads [Clinton in] two of the three purple states, but trails Clinton in the neighboring purple state of New Mexico."

The "purple states" are the three states that changed parties in 2004's Bush vs. Kerry election, vis-à-vis how they voted in the 2000 Bush-Gore election: New Mexico (which went for Gore in 2000), Iowa (for Gore in 2000), and New Hampshire (Bush in 2000).

If these precise SUSA polling results hold up over time — and no one really sees that as coming about — Obama looks to be the better choice for Democrats concerned about winning Virginia, North Dakota, Nevada, and Colorado in November. Clinton looks to be the better choice if Florida, West Virginia, Arkansas, and New Mexico are held in focus. Both Democrats look like McCain-beaters in 2008 in Ohio. And so on.

Obviously, it's too soon to know for sure how Obama or Clinton would actually do against their Republican foe in all the various states in November. This particular early poll was of too few voters and had too wide a margin of error to be determinative. The point oldstyleliberal would like to make is that, come August, each superdelegate first of all needs to figure whether his or her state will be one of the close-fought ones in November.

If so, then that superdelegate ought to consider how Clinton and Obama will poll against McCain in his or her home state, and vote for the Democrat that can be expected to be most likely to take that state's electoral votes.

That is, each superdelegate from a battleground state should vote for whichever candidate they think has the best likelihood of keeping their own state's electoral votes from going to McCain.

Notice that this is not necessarily the same thing as knowing which candidate, Obama or Clinton, is the more favored by Democrats in the superdelegate's home state. It may be that Democrats in (say) Ohio prefer Clinton, yet Obama might be the better choice as McCain's opponent in Ohio because he could pull more independents, crossovers, and marginal voters into his column in the general election.

Unfortunately for Clinton, there seem to be few if any states where she would be expected to run stronger than Obama with independents, crossovers, and marginal voters such as young adults who typically don't vote, and who might or might not turn out. It is hard to find a state whose primary/caucus voters favored Obama but whose superdelegates ought to back Clinton as the more likely McCain killer.

So unless it somehow becomes clear that the electoral vote in November will turn on one or two swing states where Clinton does in fact stand a better chance than Obama against McCain — if such states exist — then superdelegates in general ought to lean toward Obama.

Accordingly, each superdelegate from a non-battleground state might wish to choose to make an estimate of each candidate's viability in the key battleground states specifically. The Democrat who polls best against McCain in those swing states will likely get more electoral votes in the November election than the other Democratic possibility would receive. Hence, the non-swing-states superdelegates might want to try to throw the nomination to that candidate — who, per the above analysis, is more likely to be Obama than Clinton.

Clearly, it will be pretty hard for any given superdelegate to presume to know how Clinton or Obama will do against McCain in the whole of the Electoral College, once all the people have voted in a close election on November 4. Given the cloudiness of everyone's crystal ball, oldstyleliberal thinks that if a superdelegate is from what will clearly be a battleground state, he or she still ought simply to vote for the Democrat who will be most likely to beat McCain in that state.

As a practical matter the other superdelegates, the ones from states that will probably not be close, might still want to vote for the Democrat who will poll better against McCain in their own states. For instance, the Democratic governor of oldstyleliberal's home state of Maryland, Martin O'Malley, will be a superdelegate. He might opt to vote for whichever candidate, Obama or Clinton, would more certainly prevail in Maryland against McCain, in the unlikely event that huge numbers of Republican voters come out of the woodwork and make the race close in the Old Line State.

That way, O'Malley and the other Maryland superdelegates could avoid having to psych out the likely Electoral College results in the other 49 states, a Herculean task.

So there are several possible alternative strategies open to superdelegates who aim to angle their convention votes in August toward an Electoral College victory in November. oldstyleliberal admits he does not know exactly which micro-strategy for choosing between Clinton and Obama is most likely to pay off in November, given all the clouds in the crystal ball. Still, being ever-mindful of the electoral vote in the general election seems to oldstyleliberal the best way for the superdelegates to carry out their unprecedented duty to actually choose the Democratic nominee.

"BGE rate to climb higher in June" | baltimoresun.com

2008-01-23T12:08:00.000-05:00

According to an article in the Baltimore Sun today, January 23, 2008 — click on the image above to see the whole article — residential electricity customers who are served by Maryland's Baltimore Gas & Electric, a subsidiary of the Constellation Energy Group,

... will pay an estimated 5.5 percent more for electricity starting in June, largely as a result of federal rules that are driving wholesale energy prices higher. ... The increase will add about $100 to the average customer's annual utility bill ... When combined with increases imposed since rate caps expired in 2006, BGE customers will be paying 85 percent more for electricity than they were before the General Assembly approved deregulation in 1999.

In 1999, the Maryland General Assembly deregulated the state's providers of electrical power in an effort to introduce competition into the electricity market and thereby hold down prices. An unintended consequence of that, combined with recent regulatory (not deregulatory) initiatives at the federal level, has been:

... more than a year into that effort [by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to impose new rules on the wholesale energy market], the latest increase shows just how difficult it is for state regulators to influence the federally regulated ... market. Many policy decisions affecting prices in Maryland are made in Washington with only limited input from state regulators.

"Because utilities no longer own generation plants that the state can regulate ... [utility customers are] at the mercy of what comes out of those wholesale energy markets," said Bill Fields, an attorney for the state Office of the People's Counsel, which represents utility customers.

This is just one more reason why oldstyleliberal has come to wonder whether strong government involvements in economic markets doesn't do more harm than good.

Even though Maryland has "deregulated" its electrical power marketplace, no real competition among BGE and various potential alternatives has materialized. Customers like me who live in locations where BGE once had a state-protected monopoly still don't have viable alternative providers of electrical power to buy from, eight years later. Moral: even when governments deregulate, they bungle the job.

This is something oldstyleliberal hates to admit. He is, after all, a liberal, and liberals believe that government programs help, no? Yet, time and again, government "solutions" just make bigger problems.

"Majority favors legalized unions" | Baltimore Sun

2008-01-17T10:54:00.000-05:00

In a poll of Maryland voters, responders were asked about their views on same-sex unions. The Baltimore Sun reports that in the poll, a "majority favors legalized unions." 39% supported civil unions, but opposed gay marriage. Another 19% supported gay marriage outright. A solid majority, 58%, thus supported some sort of legalized same-sex union. That surprised oldstyleliberal.

Meanwhile, 31% opposed legalizing same-sex unions in any form.

Maryland's governor and legistlature are expected to take up the issue this year. Gov. O'Malley has said he favors civil unions, while being against gay marriage. The President of the State Senate, Thomas V. Mike Miller, a Democrat, opposes both civil unions and same-sex marriage, while supporting "increasing rights for same-sex couples," such as those concerning property ownership and medical decision-making. Another leading Democrat, House of Delegates Speaker Michael E. Busch, endorses civil unions but apparently not same-sex marriage.

Per the Sun, "Maryland law defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. A lawsuit seeking to overturn that statute failed last year, effectively moving debate over the issue to the State House."

Republicans in the State House may introduce a measure to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex unions:

Foes of gay marriage also plan to push their cause this year. Del. Donald H. Dwyer Jr., an Anne Arundel County Republican and one of the General Assembly's most outspoken critics of gay rights, said it is time for the legislature to vote on all of the proposals so that constituents know where their representatives stand. He plans to sponsor a constitutional ban on gay marriage and civil unions.

The Sun article says that "only half of [the 31% of poll responders who opposed same-sex unions] said a constitutional amendment is needed to ban them."

Gay rights advocates "are pushing for a marriage bill with an exception to make it clear that no religious institutions or clergy would be compelled to perform or recognize those marriages."

In other words, opinions are all over the map on this issue in Maryland.

oldstyleliberal thinks gay marriages — secular, not religious — ought to be made legal. If that is impossible politically, then civil unions ought to be legalized, as they are marriages in all but name, conferring all of the legal rights that heterosexual marriages do. But outright recognition of gay marriage would be better, as it forecloses on the legal hair-splitting that is sure to arise if civil unions become law.

***

"Maryland bishops speak up for marriage: Statement supports marriage as union of man, woman," says a headline in a recent issue of the Catholic Review. The article began:

Archbishops Edwin F. O’Brien of Baltimore and Donald W. Wuerl of Washington, D.C., and Bishop Michael A. Saltarelli of Wilmington, Del., released a statement Jan. 5 supporting the traditional definition of marriage.

The statement, “Marriage in Maryland: Securing the Foundation of Family and Society,” was distributed to all parishes for inclusion in January bulletins by the Maryland Catholic Conference (MCC), the legislative lobbying arm of Maryland’s Catholic bishops.

Though oldstyleliberal is a Catholic — and not gay — he disagrees with the Church's position on marriage as a matter of civil law, as opposed to a religious sacrament, which it is in the Catholic Church. As a sacrament, whether marriage can be extended to include same-sex couples is a theological question which oldstyleliberal is frankly unable to resolve. As a civil matter, however, marriage ought to be open to all comers, gay or not.

oldstyleliberal thinks this is a good Christian way of looking at things, in fact.

We Christians believe, or ought to, that making love (in all senses of the word) trumps the ability of a married couple to make babies. The Catholic Church insists that a married couple be open to conception and childbirth at all times — supposedly impossible (depending on what "open to" means) for a same-sex couple. Being open to procreation is, however, not contradicted when a heterosexual couple is infertile, or when the husband and wife use the "rhythm method" to avoid pregnancy (since the woman is biologically infertile at certain times of the month). Why doesn't the exception for biological infertility apply to same-sex couples?

According to the CR article, a priest who is pastor of a local Catholic church said:

“Marriage is a sacred institution.” If the definition of marriage were altered, [the priest] said, “It would undermine a pillar of our society and would be a terrible fall down the moral ladder.”

oldstyleliberal doesn't buy that. oldstyleliberal thinks allowing gays and lesbians to marry would, if anything, improve the moral tone of society. For one thing, it would cut down on promiscuity among gays if gays could have settled marital relationships. Promiscuity is bad; gay sex is (for gay people) not.

For another thing, having a married gay couple next door might teach the rest of us to be more accepting and tolerant.

"O'Malley to offer energy package" | Baltimore Sun

2008-01-14T10:14:00.000-05:00

This morning's Baltimore Sun has a front page article about how Maryland's recently elected governor, Martin O'Malley, is responding to looming energy and electrical power shortages in the state. The headline is "O'Malley to offer energy package." The article says that among the measures the governor's energy administration contemplates submitting to the legislature is a bill to have the state's power companies contribute money to a "strategic energy investment fund." The fund in turn would "invest in energy-efficient technologies and promote nonpolluting power alternatives."

oldstyleliberal lives in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland, and buys his electrical power from Baltimore Gas & Electric, a part of the Constellation Energy Group. BGE and companies competing with it to sell electrical power in Maryland in 2006 ruffled consumers' feathers mightily by announcing steep price hikes. The rate increases were softened somewhat when politicos in the state legislature objected and threatened to take severe action — see New Electricity Rates on Tap for Maryland.

Since then, now-Governor O'Malley, a Democrat who was Baltimore's mayor at the time, ran against and defeated a Republican incumbent, Governor Robert L. Ehrlich. O'Malley, says today's article, "campaigned on the unfulfilled promise of undoing a 72 percent electricity rate increase for 1.2 million Baltimore Gas & Electric customers." This set of new proposals floated by the O'Malley administration instead "appears likely to ... further increase consumer costs in the short term."

The energy fund portion of the proposed legislative package — which also eyes laws "reducing overall electricity consumption by 15 percent by 2015" and "requiring utility companies to buy 20 percent of their power from wind, solar or other renewable sources by 2022" — would "not rely on tax revenue. Instead, the governor is banking on proceeds from the auction of "pollution credits" under an initiative of 10 states to voluntarily reduce carbon dioxide emissions." CO₂ emissions are a major part of the "greenhouse gases" that are said to promote global warming.

The O'Malley brain trust is banking on a regional "cap-and-trade" system, just getting under way, to generate something like $100 million in windfall revenues that would wind up in Maryland's energy fund. The Sun article is not totally clear on how this would work; it says, "Maryland expects to receive about $100 million a year from the sale of its pollution credits." This has to do with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, under which power plants in ten voluntarily participating Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states, including Maryland, "must keep emissions below a downward-sliding limit, or buy credits from cleaner power plants."

The assumption here may be — it's not perfectly clear to oldstyleliberal — that power plants in other RGGI states, because they emit more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than Maryland plants do, would have to buy up some of the permits issued to the (relatively clean) Maryland plants. The money the Maryland power utilities would receive would, under the O'Malley plan, wind up in the energy fund. That way, Maryland utilities would supposedly not have to pass along the costs of filling the fund to their customers in the form of higher electric bills.

At least, there is that hope. O'Malley's political opponents are, however, skeptical:

Del. Warren E. Miller, a Howard County Republican on the [Maryland House of Delegates] Economic Matters Committee, said he doubted that the "cap and trade" system would create even a $100 million windfall, and that added costs borne by power plants would probably show up on consumers' electrical bills.

The dollar size of the permits windfall is in doubt in part because "the yield won't be known until the first [RGGI] auction this summer." But Maryland Public Service Commission Chairman Steven B. Larsen, an O'Malley appointee, said (according to the article) that he expects "the amount could be twice as high."

There is also this consideration: " ... recent tax increases and economic uncertainty might spur a fight in the legislature this session if lawmakers prefer to give all or some of the $100 million back to consumers."

It sounds to oldstyleliberal as if the O'Malley people want to make sure one of two things happens:

If Maryland's power producers do reap an RGGI windfall, it (because the money goes right into the new fund) won't wind up reducing consumers' electric bills. Lowering electric rates would give consumers no incentive to conserve energy. That would wind up exacerbating global warming.
If by chance there is no such windfall, utilities would still have to pay the required money into the new fund, which would cause electric rates to go up as the utilities pass some or all of these costs on to consumers. Higher rates would encourage even more conservation.

Either way, the recently boosted Maryland electricity rates would tend not to go down, as O'Malley suggested on the campaign trail that he wanted, and might well go up. No matter where the money to be injected into the new energy fund comes from — from an RGGI windfall or from Maryland power companies' general revenues — it will ultimately come from energy consumers in Maryland, and/or those in other states participating in RGGI.

So the proposed fund would encourage energy conservation and ameliorate global warming in two ways. It would invest in sustainable, environment-friendly energy technologies. And it would encourage energy conservation by in effect adding a hidden surcharge on electric power consumption in Maryland, or elsewhere, to pay for the fund.

Megan McCardle: "No Country for Young Men" | The Atlantic

2008-01-13T15:06:00.000-05:00

In "No Country for Young Men," in the January/February 2008 issue of The Atlantic, associate editor Megan McCardle paints a bleak picture of what we're headed for as we Baby Boomers (yours truly is 60) start spending more time in doctor's offices and the old folks' home than we do working and earning our keep.

We geezers-to-be are already starting to retire, but many officially "retired" Boomers are starting some sort of second career as they exit career #1. They'd like to find "work-as-personal-fulfillment" and all that sort of thing, yet many find themselves limited to a less-than-wonderful job at Wal-Mart or Home Depot, Staples or Walgreens.

Still that's not the big problem. The big problem comes when they get too old to contribute labor to the workforce in any way, shape, or form. Then they'll be living off the productivity of their juniors, at a time of life when their, the seniors', medical expenses can be expected to grow and grow and grow.

McArdle:

And indeed there’s no getting around these facts: in 1945, the year before the Baby Boomers began entering the world, each retiree in America was supported by 42 workers. Now each retiree is supported by three. When the Boomers are fully retired, each of them will be supported by just two.

What happens when currently optimistic Boomers finally face the hard realities of their savings accounts? Will they ask for more from the government? At a bare minimum, seniors already struggling with their finances are not apt to look kindly on benefit cuts. Yet the cost of the benefits we’ve already promised them will weigh heavily on the workers expected to support a half-Boomer apiece.

Social Security is the comparatively easy problem to solve. It will go from consuming 4.3 percent of GDP in 2007 to absorbing about 6.2 percent in 2030. That’s a big jump—if the cost were spread evenly, it would be equivalent to about a 5 percent increase in payroll taxes for each worker—but by and large, the economy will be able to cope.

Medicare is a different story. Health-care costs now consume about 16 percent of GDP, but projections by the Department of Health and Human Services suggest that by 2016, that will have risen to almost 20 percent. [David Wise, head of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s aging program,] speculates that closing the Medicare budgetary gap would require a tax increase of something on the order of 8 to 12 percent of total payroll. That is a massive tax increase—$4,000 to $6,000 a year on a $50,000 income (again assuming the tax were spread evenly). Many economists and budget analysts have drawn up plans intended to fix Social Security, through some combination of benefit cuts, higher retirement ages, and tax increases. But almost no one claims to have any good ideas about Medicare.

As oldstyleliberal mentioned in Samuelson: Rx for Health Care, by 2030 health-care costs will most likely eat up 25 percent of GDP! A quarter of every dollar's worth of products made by Americans will be earmarked for medical bills alone. A hefty portion of that will go to pay the medical bills of Medicare recipients.

In other words, we're presently tied to a railroad track with a locomotive bearing down on us at breakneck speed. And "no one claims to have any good ideas about" how to loosen the rope.

The presidential candidates have said very little about Medicare. The Republicans want to chip away at the various reasons why health care costs in America are rising so fast, and that's good. Also good is the Democrats' insistence that all Americans who want to be insured can be (or, in some of their proposals, must be). But no one is talking about how something else — something really big, and something fairly painful, politically — is going to have to be done, and soon, to keep Medicare from killing the goose that lays America's golden eggs.

David Brooks: "Middle-Class Capitalists" | New York Times

2008-01-12T09:22:00.000-05:00

David Brooks' op-ed column in the New York Times of Jan. 11, "Middle-Class Capitalists," contains some interesting information about the Republican presidential candidates' positions on health care reform:

While Democrats emphasize [insuring] the uninsured, Republicans emphasize cost control. They [unlike an earlier generation of Republican conservatives] understand that it’s not a question of protecting health markets from government takeover. Government already controls and distorts health care. It’s a question of straightening out the system so that it is clear who is paying and for what.

Mitt Romney supports private insurance enforced by a universal mandate. [John] McCain talks about paying for outcomes rather than tests to cut down on unnecessary procedures. Mike Huckabee promotes an activist agenda to reduce obesity and prevent chronic illness.

When Brooks says "government already controls and distorts health care," that sounds like a bit of hyperbole to oldstyleliberal. But it's basically true. It's verbal shorthand for the idea that, mostly by virtue of running market-distorting programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), Uncle Sam (along with state and local governments) influences the supply and demand relationships that pertain to medical-care goods and services.

That affects in a major way what health care items patients (or their insurers) can buy, and how much it will cost them to buy it. Accordingly, certain health care categories may cost more than they otherwise would, because (government-subsidized) demand for them is higher than it would otherwise be.

Because of said marketplace distortions, certain things may wind up being in too-short supply, even at higher prices; there may be too few doctors in a certain area of the country, because bureaucrats there have decreed that local health care providers don't get paid as much as they do elsewhere. So it may take a while to get a doctor's appointment in East Podunk. Meanwhile, there may be too many doctors and health care facilities in other areas, so eager patients may wind up having too many health care services bestowed on them, with no measurable improvement to their health, life expectancy, or any other objective indicator of the quality of their health care.

But, Brooks implies, GOP reform proposals (and those of Democrats) will not eliminate these market distortions. They simply hope to "straighten out the system" by at least making it more "clear who is paying and for what."

In the health care financing system as it is currently set up, it is not at all clear who pays for what. Even if you don't personally get any benefits from Medicare, Medicaid, or S-CHIP, and even if you do not have employer- or individually provided health insurance — you buy your medical care on a pay-as-you-go basis — you are probably already shelling out for the health care of other people.

If you, as a "young invincible" who normally "never gets sick," happen to undergo an emergency appendectomy at a local hospital, the bill which you are going to pay entirely out of your meager savings account probably has been inflated to help the hospital defray the costs of patients whose government-provided insurance programs — because of price controls or coverage limitations — don't fully defray the expense of treating them. That's what policy wonks call "cost sharing," and it also applies to the costs of treating charity cases: patients who have no insurance at all, government-provided or otherwise.

Cost sharing already distorts health care markets. Even if the government completely got out of the health care financing business — which is politically impossible, owing to the popularity of Medicare — and even if private insurers and HMOs acted in a totally greedy way to inflate their bottom lines at the expense of providing everyone with the health care we all so desperately need, the very fact that each of us can expect to use more health care than we can pay for, at some point in our lives, means cost shifting is inevitable. If all of the other market-distorting aspects of health care financing — government insurance programs, tax incentives to employers to provide health insurance for their workers, state regulations, etc. — disappeared overnight, cost sharing for charity cases would remain. And a great many of us, lacking huge financial reserves, would at some point become its beneficiaries.

So it is not a question of ever having a strictly market-based health care financing system, with zero distortions to "pure" supply-and-demand relationships. The "market footprint" of the government is, and will remain, huge. And unless we went to a full-bore "single payer" system of government-financed health care — an idea that has completely failed to gain political traction in America — there would continue to be private insurers, employers, doctors, hospitals, and managed care organizations who quite naturally fear their health care costs are getting way out of proportion to their levels of recompense. In a pinch, these entities, as recent history shows, tend to want to cut back their outlays — at the expense, too often, of making it too hard or even impossible for the sickest among us to get the care they need.

The Republicans all want to re-jigger the current system in various ways short of a single-payer system or a mandate that those who lack health coverage must buy it from the government. Romney would mandate the purchase of private insurance and would presumably arrange (somehow) for it to become available and affordable to all (good luck there!).

McCain would control health care costs by "paying for outcomes rather than tests." By that, oldstyleliberal assumes, McCain means health care providers would not be able to charge public or private insurers for procedures that don't measurably improve patients' health — though how that would be adjudicated is admittedly a bit of a mystery to oldstyleliberal at this stage.

And Huckabee emphasizes promoting "an activist agenda" to keep us from incurring serious (and expensive) illnesses in the first place: a noble goal, but again, good luck!

On the other hand, most of the GOP hopefuls' health care platforms contain, somewhere in the fine print, a plank that would permit the health savings accounts (HSAs) that became available to Americans under a 2003 law to become larger and less restricted. oldstyleliberal thinks this is a good idea. Accounts which are stocked with tax-free money, year by year, and which can be drawn upon at any age to buy health insurance and/or health services, while remaining tax-free, are a fine thing.

Right now, if you establish such an account, you are forced to buy so-called high-deductible health insurance along with it. The enlarged HSAs proposed by various Republican presidential hopefuls would eliminate that restriction and other drawbacks which keep HSAs from being as popular as they might be. oldstyleliberal thinks "large HSAs" would be the perfect complement to a universal-access health care plan such as Democrat Barack Obama proposes, which would make government-provided health insurance available to all adults and children but would mandate coverage only for children.

Samuelson: Rx for Health Care

2008-01-10T10:38:00.000-05:00

Newsweek economics columnist Robert Samuelson recently prescribed this Rx for Health Care in the December 10, 2007, issue of the magazine. oldstyleliberal feels the article should be required reading, not because he necessarily agrees with all of Samuelson's solutions, but because it captures some of the essential dimensions of the problem which confronts all of us in this election year and beyond.

Dimension 1: "Health spending already totals more than $2 trillion annually, about 16 percent of national income (gross domestic product). By 2030, it could easily exceed 25 percent — one dollar out of four — projects the Congressional Budget Office. Higher health spending is the main force expanding the federal budget."

Those figures presumably include both private and government expenditures on health care, whether they come out of patients' pockets to cover their medical expenses, copayments, and insurance premiums; out of insurance companies' payments to health care providers; out of employers' payments to insurance companies to provide health coverage to the employers' workers; out of government health care payments through programs like Medicaid and Medicare; or what have you. Total it all up, and we Americans now carve 16 cents out of every dollar of our income "pie" to spend on health care, on the average, and within the lifetimes of many of us, that number will go up to a shiny quarter of a dollar or more.

Dimension 2: "There's a massive transfer of income from young to old. Americans 65 and older now represent about an eighth of the population and about a third of all health spending. By 2030, their population share will be about a fifth, and they could account for nearly half of health spending, finds a study by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Under present law, the 19- to 64-year-old population would pay most of those costs."

Put those two dimensions together, and by 2030 working adults between the ages of 19 and 64 will be covering the lion's share of the nearly half of total health spending that seniors will by that time represent. That's roughly a dime out of every dollar of each youngster's income. Under present law, every able-bodied member of the pre-retirement workforce would have to fork that dime over in one form or another to underwrite the health care of doddering Americans. Hence the description, "massive transfer of income."

Dimension 3: "Neither the government nor the private sector has succeeded in controlling health spending. From 1970 to 2005, average spending per Medicare beneficiary rose 8.9 percent a year; spending for Americans with private health insurance rose 9.8 percent annually over the same period (the figures cover similar health services). The small difference may reflect cost shifting. When Medicare imposes price controls, doctors and hospitals increase prices for privately insured patients."

Think about that a while. Recent history has shown that health care prices are not held in check either by market-based activities of private insurers and health care providers looking to improve their bottom lines or by government agencies trying — and failing — to rein in costs through price controls.

Samuelson says we Americans don't see how the money flows through the complicated plumbing of today's health care system. It comes out of the pockets of us all, but in hidden, indirect ways. For instance, the health insurance coverage an employer buys for a worker is paid for — in part, since the worker also pays in premiums — by money the employer gives the insurance company. That money could alternatively have come directly to the worker as higher wages. But the worker never sees that.

When governments, federal and/or state, provide insurance coverage, as in Medicare, or subsidize patients' health care costs directly, as in Medicaid, some of the expenditures come out of general tax revenues, largely derived from income taxes or sales taxes. Again, the taxpayer doesn't see his or her tax dollars flow through the system and come out in the bank account of a doctor, nurse, technician, hospital, or pharmaceutical manufacturer.

Meanwhile, the patient himself or herself racks up expenses that are — apparently — paid for by other people. Other members of the same insurance plan. Other taxpayers. Other patients at the same hospital, through the accounting practice called cost shifting. Whoever the "other people" are is hidden from the patient's view, and the patient has no incentive to comparison shop for the lowest prices consistent with getting the best quality of health care services.

Often, the patient not only has no incentive to shop for health care bargains, he or she simply cannot do so. Perhaps the prices for drugs and other commodities are fixed at a certain level by the health insurer's agreements with providers in its network, so shopping around is pointless. Or perhaps there is only one available source of whatever it is the patient needs, because the health care system limits competition as an unintended consequence of how it is currently set up.

Patients today are therefore not really "consumers" in the usual sense of the word: people who desperately prefer to keep prices as low as possible when they shop for goods and services, and who avoid paying too much by bargain hunting.

And that, oldstyleliberal thinks, is both a good thing and a bad thing.

It's a good thing because, if you need a heart bypass, a liver transplant, or a mastectomy, the last thing you want to do is shop around ad infinitum for the best quality-to-price ratio. That takes time and effort when what you really want to do is get the scary thing over with as quickly as possible. You want to put yourself in the hands of the best surgeon you can find, and not necessarily the one who charges the least. You're unexpectedly sick — or maybe you've finally found a solution for a debilitating condition that's been sapping your strength for a long time — you're frightened, and you just don't want to die. So careful comparison shopping is not going to be uppermost in your mind.

But the fact that the current health care system pretty much obviates the need for comparison shopping and bargain hunting is also a bad thing because, as Samuelson points out, it is driving the explosion in health care expenditures. As a 60-year-old, oldstyleliberal can easily remember when there was not all that many surgical remedies available for heart patients, there were no liver or bone marrow transplants, there were no CT scans or MRIs, no screenings for breast cancer.

Medical care was pretty cheap in the days when penicillin was still the latest wonder drug. There was nothing that could be done to prevent you from getting tuberculosis or polio in 1947, oldstyleliberal was born, and if you did get one of these dread diseases you could easily die from it without ever racking up a lot of the life-prolonging medical expenses associated with ongoing patient care today.

Or you could wind up crippled or in diminished health for the duration of a normal lifetime — yet the monetary costs associated with post-polio or post-tuberculosis status were not all that high. President Franklin Roosevelt, a polio victim, could do little but visit the spa at Warm Springs, Georgia, and wear braces on his legs.

Sick
by Jonathan
Cohn

The current health care financing system actually got its start in the days of FDR: the great depression, World War II. Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis — and the People Who Pay the Price, by Jonathan Cohn, is more must-reading for Americans today. It details (among other things) how employer-provided health insurance got its start during the Second World War, at a time when employers were trying to attract workers from a labor force diminished in size by all the boys in uniform overseas. Uncle Sam gave employers a big tax break for the health insurance coverage they were starting to offer as a fringe benefit to their employees, and private employer-based health insurance soon became an American institution.

At the time, as already noted, health care costs were moderate for even the sickest among us. The fact that being covered by insurance took away a patient's incentive to price-shop for health care had little negative impact. Things are a lot different now.

A little back-of-the-envelope figuring shows that when $2 trillion is spent each year to provide health care for 300 million Americans whose average life expectancy is 78 years, then every American will on average use $5.2 million worth of health care over the course of a lifetime. Think of it. Even in this age of homes that cost more than $1 million, that figure dwarfs what used to be considered the single most expensive thing a middle class person would most likely buy in his or her life: a house.

Of course, the prices of health care have gone way, way up, and way too fast, so oldstyleliberal figures the amount of money actually spent on his own health care needs during the first 60 of his allotted 78 years has been much less. Then again, if prices keep skyrocketing, he may still wind up costing the health care system $5.2 million by the time he is done.

A baby born today can expect to cost the health care system a lot more than $5.2 million, owing to the fact that health care costs continue to zoom upward. Something must be done, and soon.

As Samuelson points out in his article, "People need to see and feel health costs." Whatever else we do, we have to stop letting health care consumers proceed as if they're getting a free ride (even if the dollars they don't think they are spending on health care are actually feeding the present system in hidden, indirect ways).

Samuelson want to: "First, make Medicare beneficiaries pay more; many retirees can afford more. Second, create a dedicated federal health tax to cover all government health spending (Medicare, Medicaid, etc.). If health spending rose, the tax would rise. People would know why."

Third, he wants to "eliminate the income-tax exclusion for employer-paid insurance and replace it with a tax credit of lesser value. Workers would have more pretax income, but they'd have to spend more after-tax dollars for insurance."

Of the three proposals, oldstyleliberal likes the second one best. He thinks there ought to be a dedicated federal health tax as an income surtax. It ought to cover all of Uncle Sam's health care expenditures, such that Medicare, Medicaid, S-CHIP, and the various other programs would not draw from general revenues at all. It would be charged at a flat percentage of income; there's no sense in alienating economic conservatives by making it progressive, so as to take a proportionately greater bite out of the pocketbooks of the rich.

Starting it at a flat (say) 5 percent of income would make it easy for Americans to see how the rate was changing from year to year and ask embarrassing questions of politicians if the rate went up too much — and that's the whole point.

Meanwhile, oldstyleliberal favors substituting for Samuelson's first and third proposals — designed to re-jigger the monetary disincentives of the current health care system to patients to comparison shop and thus hold the line on prices — so-called "large HSAs": health savings accounts with fewer restrictions than today's HSAs currently have. Americans would use these accounts as "401(k)s on steroids" to replace or amplify the proceeds of regular health insurance coverage with their own tax-free dollars — dollars that it behooves them to spend wisely.

Cynthia Tucker: "Obama's Rise Signals Shift" | Baltimore Sun

2008-01-07T11:17:00.000-05:00

Kudos to op-ed columnist Cynthia Tucker for pointing out in "Obama's rise signals shift," available at BaltimoreSun.com, that few of us are being really upfront about how we're dealing with Barack Obama's blackness. Says Tucker, who is black:

While this country has made great strides toward genuine racial equality over the last 50 years, we're still hampered by a race-consciousness that lurks just below the surface, in our reptilian brains, where stereotype, prejudice and unconscious judgments override rational considerations. That's true for all of us — black, white and brown.

oldstyleliberal is white, and although he intends to vote for Obama in the upcoming Maryland Democratic primary, he has to admit there were parts of Obama's victory speech in Iowa during which he had to tamp down a negative reaction to the vocal cadences Obama was employing, which he realized were right out of the African-American pulpit. Whoa, thought oldstyleliberal. Where did Obama, who wasn't raised in such a church, pick that up — from Al Sharpton?

Another part of oldstyleliberal's brain duly kicked in and said something like, "Shame on me for even feeling that." If Obama, whom some African-Americans have deemed "not black enough," can't appropriate the rhythmic, rhyming cadences and grunts of a Jesse Jackson or an Al Sharpton, how can he possibly bring American blacks along with him into a new ethos of political "change."

All of us, black, white, or brown, respond to what one might call "extra-rational" rhetorical cues that are intended to say, "You and I are the same." But if these cues are designed to pull some folks toward a candidate, other folks who might otherwise feel a bit alienated by them have to be smart enough to cut that candidate, who after all wants to lead us all toward some brighter day, a degree of slack. Right?

All of which brings up the question, just how do we decide, individually and corporately, what our opinions are about candidates and their programs? As Ms. Tucker says, there's a lot going on just below the surface, in our "reptilian" brains, which we can't very well admit to, but which might wind up making all the difference in the world.

Yet More on Health Care

2007-12-26T09:28:00.000-05:00

This is the fifth post in oldstyleliberal's series on the current health care debate among the presidential contenders. This morning's Baltimore Sun has a front page article on the topic, available here. Reporter David Nitkin writes in the article, "Clinton, Obama clashing on health," about the fact that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is calling for mandatory health insurance for all Americans, while Sen. Barack Obama would leave the choice to buy health insurance optional for adults and mandate it only for children. (Both would set up a new, government-run health insurance provider that would insure all comers who do not have or cannot get private health insurance through their workplace or on their own.)

The Nitkin article says, "Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut have included the requirement [to be covered by health insurance] in their health plans, making Obama the most notable outlier in the party's presidential field." It does not mention Rep. Dennis Kucinich by name as the main presidential proponent of a "single-payer" system of health care financing, called in the article "a Medicare-style government program that replaces private markets."

The article seems to suggest that none of the Republican candidates are offering universal-coverage plans for health insurance. Oddly enough, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, a GOP presidential hopeful, was responsible for shepherding through the legislative process in his state the only state-level program to date that mandates health coverage. The article says it is too early in the game to see whether that program, which assesses the uninsured with a financial penalty unless they buy insurance, will actually bring about universal coverage. Mrs. Clinton's proposal for the country as a whole is very much like the Massachusetts system.

Switzerland and the Netherlands are the only other countries with a health insurance mandate, but their plans are notably dissimilar to the Clinton proposal. So it's anybody's guess how many people would fail to buy "mandatory" health insurance under the Clinton system, either because they were legally granted exemptions or because they simply scoffed at the law.

Nonetheless, Clinton's side is accusing the Obama proposal of failing to cover everybody. The Obama folks say the "young invincibles" who today opt out of the private health insurance sector could be brought in without a mandate. These are the youthful, healthy souls whose finances are stretched thin enough, during the years in which they are getting started in independent life, that the extra burden of paying premiums for insurance they don't "need" appears an unjustifiable expense. Obama wants to change the law to allow them to continue to be covered under their parents' health insurance until age 25, regardless of whether they are still in school.

He also favors "reducing the costs of insurance, which would almost certainly require huge government subsidies for the poor. Obama says it makes most sense to focus there first" — rather than go immediately to a health insurance mandate, as Clinton wants to do.

The reason both Clinton and Obama want to bring the "young invincibles" and others without health insurance into the system is not just to make sure no one gets slammed with huge, unpayable bills if their health suddenly deteriorates. It is also to make sure those who continue to have good health do their part to spread the risk of illness and its associated cost over as broad a base as possible, providing their fair share of the money to finance the system as a whole.

Supporters of the Clinton mandate are, the article says, intent on changing the thinking of Americans. Robert Blendon, a health policy professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, is in the Clinton corner:

The details of a mandate are less critical than the change in thinking that such a requirement would instill, Blendon said.

"The most important thing you want to achieve is a cultural change which sort of accepts the responsibility that people have coverage," the Harvard professor said. The country must create an attitude where everyone is expected to have health insurance, he said, so "when you go into a doctor's office, they are horrified if you don't have coverage."

Clearly, under the Obama proposal there would be less of an impetus toward such a cultural change of attitude. Even though Obama's voluntary-for-adults approach to health insurance might wind up covering just as many Americans as Clinton's mandatory-for-all approach, it would not stigmatize the uninsured. oldstyleliberal favors the Obama approach for this reason. He does not approve of stigmatizing individuals such that "when you go into a doctor's office, they are horrified if you don't have coverage."

***

Still, oldstyleliberal feels Barack Obama's approach to health care financing could be improved by including something most of the Republican candidates support: enlarged health savings accounts.

HSAs are only a few years old, and many Americans have yet to hear of them. In their current form, they allow Americans to set up accounts that are like "401(k)s on steroids." Account owners can contribute so many dollars a year to these accounts, and their employers can likewise make contributions up to a certain amount. Both types of contributions are exempt from income and payroll taxes.

If the owner of the account wants to pay for his or her medical expenses out of the HSA, or for the requisite high-deductible health insurance premiums, that too is tax-free — no matter what age the account owner is. After age 65, any withdrawals for all other types of expenses are also tax-exempt. Before age 65, non-medical withdrawals are taxed as income.

Currently, the rules for HSAs insist that the owner have high-deductible health insurance to supplement the accounts. HSA owners are responsible for paying their own way, in terms of their ongoing medical expenses, until the relatively high annual deductible is reached each year. Beyond that, owners continue to pay copayments for their health services, at a set rate, until a certain number of dollars of out-of-pocket expenses (above and beyond the deductible) has been accumulated. Until that point is reached, the requisite insurance covers only those covered medical expenses above and beyond the copays. From that point on, the health insurance takes over and pays all covered medical expenses.

The assumption here is that the deductible amounts and the copayments would come directly out of the HSAs, assuming they contain enough money to begin with, since using HSA funds for medical expenses is tax-free.

HSA advocates want to remove many of the restrictions and limitations of the current law as it pertains to health savings accounts, bringing in the era of so-called "large HSAs." They want to increase the contribution limits to allow employers to deposit the full value of workers' health benefits directly into their HSAs; eliminate the health insurance requirement for HSAs entirely; and allow tax-free HSA withdrawals for all voluntarily incurred health insurance premiums, not just those spent on the currently mandatory high-deductible health insurance.

In other words, owners of "large HSAs" and their employers would be able to choose not to obtain/provide health insurance coverage at all; to choose the currently mandatory high-deductible health insurance; or to choose an "ordinary" health insurance plan that does not feature high deductibles and/or high limits on out-of-pocket copayments. Those who wish to do so could combine a "large HSA" with their existing insurance coverage and then, if they want to later, optionally migrate either to high-deductible coverage or to no coverage at all as they become comfortable with making such choices on their own behalf.

Proponents of "large HSAs" believe they would put more decisions about health-care purchases in the hands of consumers themselves and bring all the benefits of informed marketplace participation to the health-services and health-insurance domains. Competition would flourish. There would be fewer incentives for those who now have comprehensive, low-copay, low-deductible coverage provided by their employer to continue to demand more health services than they would if they were paying the costs themselves. These individuals and their families would opt to save money in HSAs instead and economize on medical outlays, resulting in less health spending overall. Studies show that the "extra" services today demanded by the comprehensively insured don't really improve their health status or life expectancy, but they do inflate health-services prices. Health-services prices would accordingly come down if "large HSAs" were enacted into law.

Opponents of "large HSAs" object that the tax-free aspects of a growing plethora of them would drain the Treasury of needed revenues, in terms of foregone income taxes and payroll taxes. Supporters counter that "large HSAs" would offset the anticipated drain on the Treasury associated with Medicare, as baby boomers cross the age-65 threshold.

Opponents also object that there is no reason to be sure "large HSAs" would spread health risks and their associated costs equitably over the entire population, the way a Clinton-style universal-coverage program supposedly would. An Obama-style universal-access plan would presumably make it less likely that all of the medically needy among us would have insurance.

Still, it's not clear that mandated universal coverage would turn out to be truly universal. And it would stigmatize those who lacked it. That's why oldstyleliberal thinks we ought to try an Obama-style universal-access plan, augmented with "large HSAs," before proceeding — and then only if necessary — to a full-fledged Clinton-style mandate.

More on the Health Care Debate

2007-12-21T09:50:00.000-05:00

In three earlier posts to this Health Care series oldstyleliberal addressed one of the primary issues looming in the 2008 election, that of health care and whether or not all Americans have a right of access to it at reasonable prices. That topic leads naturally into the question of health insurance, which some 47 million of us (16 percent of the population) do not have.

The Democrats running for president tend to follow the lead of the top two contenders, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, in proposing some form of universal access to health coverage through job-based, privately purchased, and/or public insurance plans. The public insurance plan, offered by the U.S. government, would be new. It would become mandatory for Americans without any other health insurance, under the Clinton proposal. Under the Obama proposal, only coverage for children would be obligatory.

The leading Republican contenders Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and John McCain eschew mandatory insurance plans, while seeking changes to the present system that would give health care consumers more power to look after their own needs. Among the proposed changes are an end to state regulations that block buying health insurance from providers in other states, such that there might be wider competition for customers and lower premiums. Also being called for by GOP contenders are enlarged health savings accounts that would make savings for future health needs and spending from these accounts to cover current medical expenses fully tax free. If HSAs were made flexible enough, the thinking goes, they could obviate the need for insurance benefits to cover any except the most catastrophic medical expenses.

oldstyleliberal finds it difficult to decide between the two general approaches. The Democrats' solutions would pretty much guarantee universal health insurance coverage at decent rates, with only a tiny percentage of Americans falling through the cracks — or, at least, in the case of the Obama proposal, universal health insurance access at fair premium rates. But it is not clear to oldstyleliberal how these relatively "liberal" approaches would hold down health care costs without relying on that dread word rationing, or else depending on taxes to cover costs.

From the point of view of an economist, prices depend on the relationship between supply and demand. In a totally free competitive market, when the quantity demanded of goods and services exactly matches the quantity offered by sellers, a price level is thereby determined, and the amount of sellers' commodities actually taken by buyers is also set. Should demand go up from there, sellers naturally raise prices to cover the extra costs of providing goods and services in greater quantities.

When people have health insurance with low copays and small up-front deductibles, they tend to require more doctor's appointments, more diagnostic tests, more medical procedures, and the like — more, that is, than they would seek if they were paying fees out of pocket or out of a health savings account, however tax-free the money is. Economically, that can't help but nudge the supply-and-demand balance point up to a higher overall price level.

To offset that, private or public insurance plans can ration care. One way to do that is simply not to cover certain types of care. Or, certain expenses can be only partly covered, such that the patient still owes money after the insurance plan pays its share. Consumers tend to require less of the types of care their insurance plans don't fully cover.

Another way to ration medical care is to limit the supply such that there develop long waiting lines. People who are confronted with long queues often forgo "unnecessary" care entirely. Or, there can be a form of triage involved, such that the neediest get advanced to the front of the line while those with supposedly less urgent needs wait and wait.

Would the Democrats' public health insurance plans accomplish the necessary rationing in a fair, politically feasible, economically realistic way? Depending on your point of view, one advantage of the current private system is that it's hard to call politicians and government bureaucracies on the carpet when health-care prices, insurance premiums, or quality and availability of care don't meet with our approval.

Another advantage to private health care financing is that there is no impetus to burden taxpayers with the costs of the medical benefits covered by a public insurance plan, as a way of sidestepping unpalatable rationing measures or for any other reason. Of course, federal taxpayers do pick up the tab for Medicare and Medicaid already, but would the Democratic candidates' health care plans cost the taxpayers yet more? oldstyleliberal is not entirely certain that either the Clinton or the Obama plan would pay for itself without taxpayer burdens and/or unacceptable rationing of health services.

Of course, there is a strong argument to be made in favor of doing just that: setting up a health care financing system that allows every American access to all of the medical care they need when sickness strikes, and hang the cost. The philosophy here is that we all stand at risk of catastrophic illness at some point in our lives, so we should all share the high costs of treating those who are sick now. The only question is, by what mechanism(s) ought the cost burden be shared?

When insurance payouts to beneficiaries and their health-services providers are entirely covered by premiums being paid in by policyholders, that's one way to share the cost burden. Another way is to cover some or all of the payouts using general revenues accrued from taxes paid in to the government. Yet another way is for, say, a hospital or clinic to fail to recover the costs of treating an uninsured patient and to pass those costs on to its paying customers in the form of higher bills.

However the cost burden gets shared, it does get shared, even today in the absence of universal access to a public health insurance plan. Few people who get catastrophically ill have a big enough nest egg to cover the huge costs on their own.

The costs that don't get shared are the ones that are never incurred. Chief among these are the costs of routine preventive care, prescription medications that head off (expensive) illnesses before they strike, and other items and services that the uninsured often go without. For example, diabetics need to self-monitor their blood sugar levels and get regular blood tests. If they shirk these necessities because they can't afford their high associated costs, they are liable to need even more expensive health services later on, when the diabetes takes its toll. Then, if they have a diabetes-related heart attack and wind up in the emergency room, those costs will likely be picked up indirectly by the hospital's paying customers.

But it would have been cheaper for society to pay for the preventive measures that would have avoided the heart attack in the first place, even if only by using tax monies to help defray the health-services outlays of a public insurance plan.

The current system, because it leaves so many Americans uninsured, tends to shift costs from (admittedly expensive) diagnostic services and preventive care to yet more expensive emergency services and procedures that might have been avoided with better medical care all along. So the burden of sharing these costs — whatever the mechanism of sharing — gets skewed away from preventive, prophylactic care. The result is that the total shared cost of health care in America is higher than it needs to be. It costs a lot more to amputate a diabetic's foot and rehabilitate the patient than it does to keep the patient's blood sugar levels in check right along.

Notice that there are at least two ways in which the current system inflates health care costs in America. One is to discourage the uninsured from getting routine screenings and preventive care, leading to exorbitant costs later on. Another is to encourage those who do have insurance to obtain a lot of less-than-crucial health services, to the extent these services are covered by insurance. As a result, while some people are lucky enough, because they have comprehensive health insurance, to get their tummy tucks and eye jobs galore for next to nothing, others have to do without the mammograms and colonoscopies that might save their lives.

If that seems unfair, then perhaps we need public, government-run health insurance plans, despite their possible burdens on taxpayers down the road, and despite the fact that they might force some form of rationing of health services on the American public.

The Candidates' Health Care Plans, Part 3

2007-12-14T11:28:00.000-05:00

In The Candidates' Health Care Plans, Part 2 oldstyleliberal looked at the health care proposals of two of the leading Democratic candidates for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. Both plans involve augmenting current private insurance plans by setting up a public, government-run insurance program from which individuals and families would be required to obtain health insurance — if, that is, they didn't buy private insurance on their own or get coverage from their employer. This mandate would apply to all uninsured Americans, in the Clinton plan, or to all uninsured children, in the Obama plan; in the Obama proposal, uninsured adults could continue to opt out of private plans and the public plan.

As he said before, oldstyleliberal worries that a "mandatory" health insurance system, government-run, would encroach too much on citizens' freedom of choice to make their own decisions about their own health care and insurance needs. That's why oldstyleliberal, though he is a Democrat, went looking to see what the various Republican candidates have to say about the issue.

This page gives a side-by-side analysis of the proposals made by Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, three of the current leaders in the GOP field.

These three candidates entirely avoid mandates requiring uninsured citizens to buy health insurance. They all want to change federal tax laws, particularly with respect to income taxes, to "incentivize" taxpayers to obtain health insurance privately. States would receive federal subsidies, block grants, or other encouragements to enroll the uninsured in voluntary public plans of their own, craft health reforms, etc. All these plans would expand private health savings accounts (HSAs), which in a more restrictive form have been available under federal law since January 2004, to make them more attractive to Americans as options to, or supplements for, privately purchased or employer-provided health insurance.

Healthy
Competition
by Cannon
and Tanner

All of these moves are intended to shift market power toward patients, away from federal and state governments, away from employers, and away from insurance companies. They are in the spirit of the approach to health care of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. The book Healthy Competition: What's Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It, by Cato's Michael F. Cannon and Michael D. Tanner argues that the woes of the health care system today would diminish, if not vanish, with greater competition among health services providers for the dollars of consumers — i.e., the patients themselves.

On page 14 Cannon and Tanner state, "By hindering the competitive process, government actually makes it more difficult for the medically needy to obtain care." By that they mean that the present federal policy — not taxing employers' outlays in providing health insurance to their workers — blunts the employees' own market power. It keeps the workers, as health services consumers, from going to doctors and hospitals that are not part of the coverage plans/networks their employers sign up for, for example. That limits competition in providing health services, causes prices to be higher than they would otherwise be, and encourages consumers to obtain more services than they really need, since they are insulated from paying most of the fees themselves. It also fails to provide a market-oriented mechanism to weed out health services providers whose quality of care is substandard.

If consumers could bypass the current system and (for instance) set up their own unrestricted, tax-free health savings accounts, they could actively shop for the health services and providers that give them, in their own estimation, the best care for the least money.

At least, that is the theory. It is a theory that makes a lot of sense to oldstyleliberal. But he worries that it is no slam dunk that a fully market-based solution would let the "medically needy" among us be able to afford all of the care they need.

Stripped to bare essentials, the current health care financing system, imperfect as it is, is intended to allow American health care costs to be paid for by someone else — someone other than the person receiving the health care.

A couple of years ago when oldstyleliberal had to have heart surgery, the total tab, before his insurer adjusted the amounts originally charged by the service providers, was over $70,000. After adjustments of around $24,000, the tab was reduced to approximately $44,000, of which yours truly paid only a little under $3,900 out of pocket. The insurance covered over $40,000.

Translation: premiums paid in by other people in the same Blue Cross-Blue Shield insurance pool kept oldstyleliberal from having to shell out more than $40,000 of his own money.

Looked at another way, oldstyleliberal recouped (very roughly) 25 years worth of his own earlier premiums that he had paid into the health insurance system over time. But if he had not put that much into the kitty over the years, his benefits would have remained the same. It's more accurate to think of his expenses as having been picked up by other current premium payers.

Each one of those payers, if they live long enough and have enough of their own medical woes, can expect to see the favor returned someday. Still, it's a crap shoot whether any one person or any one family will ever recoup their accumulated premiums. Some people will put more money into the system than they take out, while others will take out more than they put in. The latter will go to their grave having had some portion of their lifetime medical expenses paid for by someone other than themselves.

Depending on how far market-based health care reforms are taken, it is entirely possible that few Americans will continue to have health insurance that pools their financial risk with that of many, many other people, so as to allow the medical expenses of Peter to be paid for, sometimes, by Paul.

According to this Wikipedia article about health savings accounts, for instance, increased reliance on of HSAs could cause "people who live healthy lives [to] leave insurance plans while people who chose to live unhealthily [would] avoid HSAs." Then the medically needy might find that the insurance plan they have (if any) ceases to be affordable, as canny lower-risk individuals switch to so-called "large HSAs" and leave behind those whose medical bills are chronically high. With payouts per person, on average, going higher, the insurance companies would be forced to raise premiums. Those who couldn't afford the steeper premiums and who lack HSAs might find themselves frozen out of the system entirely.

So it looks as if there is a tough choice to be made by voters. Do they want a health care reform package that sets up mandates to join a new, government-run insurance plan, if only as a last resort, in lieu of private insurance? If so, then one of the Democratic plans should fill the bill. But such a program would probably further distort today's health-services markets by blunting the market power of the individuals being served, further decoupling their choices as consumers from their own pocketbook exigencies, and increasing even further the market power of impersonal bureaucracies to make choices on their behalf.

Or, do voters want a system that allows people to shop more directly for their own medical services on the basis of quality and cost? That would put the burden on all of us to be canny consumers of "products" that — when we are sick, fearful, and in need of them the most, we don't like to think of as being in the same bargain-hunting category as computers and cleaning services.

(Cannon and Tanner talk of Americans who, needing heart surgery, chose to have it done in India where success rates were just as high but costs were much lower. But how many of us would even consider that possibility? oldstyleliberal, when he had a heart operation, would never have considered such an option, even if it had occurred to him at the time to do so.)

It is certainly possible to mix and match initiatives from today's two main styles of health reform proposals. There could be, for instance, a mandatory public health insurance plan set up for the currently uninsured, as long as they didn't set up "large HSAs" instead. Whether such a hybrid approach would make things better or simply cancel out one another's strong points is something oldstyleliberal would not care to speculate on. That's surely a job for Congress, which will have to pass upon the proposals of whatever candidate, from whichever party, takes the oath of office as president in January 2009.

The Candidates' Health Care Plans, Part 2

2007-12-11T16:36:00.000-05:00

In The Candidates' Health Care Plans, Part 1 I looked at the "single-payer" health care proposal of Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich and concluded it had little chance of becoming law. Though it is simpler to understand than most of the other candidates' proposals, since it basically extends Medicare to include all Americans, it is hated by the powerful insurance companies, whom it would mostly put out of business, and by conservatives who (erroneously) deem it the next thing to socialized medicine.

The other candidates from both major parties have alternative health proposals which do not set up the government as everybody's insurer. Many of the hopefuls claim their plans are, like the single-payer plan, "universal," in that all of the current 47 million who lack health insurance would acquire it.

Some, furthermore, are "mandatory" plans in which all individuals or families would be required to obtain health insurance. If they can't get it with the financial assistance of an employer — customary today, but far from universal — and even if they have pre-existing medical conditions which currently bar them from getting health insurance at all, they would be required to purchase insurance.

Those who simply cannot afford the premiums would be subsidized to one degree or another, in most of the plans. Typically, the subsidies would be accomplished via income tax adjustments.

Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the two leading Democratic hopefuls, each have non-single-payer plans that differ in details but nonetheless are both supposedly "universal" in their coverage. The Clinton plan is (according to this article from Fact Checker) intended to be a true "universal coverage" plan that calls for fully "mandatory" health coverage.

The Clinton plan, because it as not a true single-payer plan, would nevertheless fall slightly short of universal coverage, the Fact Checker article says: "The system proposed by Clinton is more analogous to the government-subsidized private insurance system in the Netherlands, where roughly one and a half per cent of the population is estimated to fall through the cracks."

The Obama plan is more of a "universal access" plan that does not actually mandate the purchase of insurance by adults, though it does make health insurance mandatory for children. Accordingly, there is reason to suspect that more Americans would remain uncovered with the Obama approach than with the Clinton approach.

Both Clinton and Obama would set up a government-run or "public" health insurance program to coexist with all the private plans run by insurance companies. The public plan (or plans) would be available to all citizens, but those who opt to stay with private insurers/employer-provided coverage could. In Clinton's proposal, those who have no private insurance whatever would be required to join the public plan. In Obama's, adults could opt out of health insurance coverage entirely — but their children would be required to have at least the public health plan.

The questions that most interest oldstyleliberal about such plans as Clinton's and Obama's concern two things: (1) Who receives what health services? and (2) Who pays for them?

Right now, people with no health insurance forgo a lot of non-emergency health services the rest of us take for granted. When the uninsured have medical problems, they may go to a free clinic or, more likely, visit a hospital emergency room, where those who have serious conditions may be admitted to the hospital for surgery or further treatment. The costs get passed along to the hospital's paying customers or their insurance companies. That may or may not be fair, but at least those services get paid for.

The forgone health services — routine checkups, screenings, preventive care — don't get paid for, because they never happen. But they do get paid for later, in the form of very expensive emergency services that might have been avoided with regular, cheaper care all along. For example, regular mammograms (cheap) head off last-ditch mastectomies (expensive).

Thus does the who-pays-today question (nobody) get turned first into the what-services-today question (none), then, later, the what-services-tomorrow question (expensive ones), and finally the who-pays-tomorrow question (whoever the costs of emergency services for the uninsured get passed along to). Meanwhile, the total health care financing burden that accumulates over the years is higher than it otherwise might be (too few mammograms now, too many mastectomies later).

Of course, when there are 47 million uninsured Americans, there are other hidden costs that don't have dollar signs in front of them. Many mastectomies come too late. As we debate these health plans, we should never forget that.

At least ideally, under the Clinton plan and the Obama plan, all Americans would have health insurance and thus get regular checkups, screenings, and other preventive care, which would be paid for mostly by the public fund or a private insurance fund. But the questions still arise: who puts how much money into the public fund, and who draws how much out?

The public fund would be stocked with money from (a) premiums paid in by the people who are insured by it and (b) contributions from their employers, where applicable. Any employers that do not provide "meaningful" private health coverage to their workers would have to contribute a percentage of their payroll to the public fund, under the Obama plan. Under the Clinton plan, only large businesses would face such mandates, but small businesses would be given tax incentives to contribute to the public fund or provide private insurance.

Notice that some of the money that individuals and families pay into the public fund as premiums is, in both plans, offset by tax breaks. Part of the answer to the who-pays question is, if only indirectly, the taxpayer whose taxes are higher because the tax liability of the recipient of the tax breaks gets reduced. Likewise, ordinary taxpayers indirectly foot the bill for tax incentives granted to employers.

Tapping into the public plan's fund of money, once it has been paid in, would disproportionately be those among the insured who need the most health services. Many who are young and "never get sick," if they had public coverage, would be paying in premiums that they would not recover until they are older and sicker.

If you are, say, 24 years old, healthy, unmarried, without children, without much in the way of savings, and without a job that pays for your health coverage, you might not want to fork over regular health insurance premiums that you might "never" recoup. Under the Clinton plan, you would have to. Under the Obama plan, you would not ... until you had a child. Then you would have to insure your child's health, but not necessarily your own.

Let's say Clinton gets elected and her health plan enacted. Imagine you, the healthy 24-year-old, never obtain private insurance and sail through the next 40 years with few medical bills. Then, at age 64, your health starts to deteriorate. Your medical expenses go up. In the form of insurance benefits from the public fund you've been paying premiums into for 40 years, you start drawing down the surplus funds you've built up. If you live long enough in compromised health, you may even be "lucky" enough to see all the dollars you paid into the kitty returned to you in the form of benefits. You may even be "very, very lucky" and over your declining years draw benefits in excess of what you had paid in ... because you're that sick and need that many health services to carry on for that long a time.

Or, you could die, with or without a long and drawn out descent into frailty, before you've recovered all your premium payments. If you get hit by a truck at age 63 just before the onset of your costly senescence, you lose big time. From a strictly dollars-and-cents point of view, the whole thing is a crap shoot, and the monetary "winners" are the ones with long and expensive periods of ill health, prior to the grave. Lucky them.

The biggest "winners" of all, still thinking along those lines, are those fortunate enough to have lifelong chronic illnesses and "pre-existing conditions" which now cause private insurers to turn them down for coverage. Under the Clinton plan, our hypothetical 24 year old who succumbs to a Mack truck attack at age 63 without having a sick day in her life will be footing the bill for an HIV/AIDS patient who is the same age and lives equally long, thanks to super-expensive cocktails of drugs taken daily for almost 40 years.

So, yes, there is a potentially wide cost-benefits disparity built into a "mandatory" plan such as Clinton's. The Obama plan, though it is mandatory only for children and not for adults, would also produce a disparity. Some adults who opt in will never recover their premiums; others will recover them in spades. Of course, the same thing can be said of any insurance plan. But to the extent that participation in them is optional, we get to pick our poison. With a mandatory plan, we have no choice.

Given that most Americans exhibit a preference for personal liberty and free choice, are universal health-insurance mandates, such as the Clinton plan, or limited mandates, such as the Obama plan, justified? That, oldstyleliberal believes, is the key question here.

How does our liberty to opt out of buying health insurance stack up against the liberty of other Americans to have access to good, timely medical care that they can afford only if somebody else subsidizes it — through, say, making premium payments that exceed the cost of benefits actually received by the premium payer?

If too many of the healthy ones opt out, the whole system goes kerflooey. The public plan would have to charge the sicker ones who want to opt in exorbitant premiums, which would drive them away, which would spell the demise of the plan. We seemingly would be back to square one.

Hence, an important question oldstyleliberal intends to address in future posts to this series is whether any of the presidential candidates are offering health care plans that are purely optional but would nonetheless work to provide affordable, good, timely medical care to all Americans.

The Candidates' Health Care Plans, Part 1

2007-12-11T09:05:00.000-05:00

oldstyleliberal has decided he needs to try to sort out the debate among the Republican and Democratic presidential hopefuls concerning health care coverage. The problem: a hefty number of Americans have no health insurance — reportedly, 47 million, or 16 percent of the population — which is considered a bad thing. Coupled with that is the high cost of health care itself and of health insurance premiums. The proposed solutions? Well, they vary with the candidate. More on that in a bit.

First off, though, oldstyleliberal applauds the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation for its online side-by-side analysis of the candidates' similarities and differences on health care proposals, accessible at this web page. oldstyleliberal also salutes the health care archive at Fact Checker, a compendium of the ways in which the candidates' statements about this and other issues are at variance with the facts. When a candidate fibs, Fact Checker hands out to him or her a dubious award it aptly calls the Pinocchio.

Before trying to sort out the tangled politics of health care today, oldstyleliberal would like to point out some of his biases and assumptions going into the process. First of all, he wonders why it is considered necessary for all Americans to have health insurance. Specifically, does a lack of insurance keep the uninsured 47 million from receiving the health services they need? And if they do get some or all of those services and don't have enough money to pay for them out of pocket, how do these services get paid for?

Based on something he read years and years ago in, he believes, Atlantic Monthly, oldstyleliberal is under the impression that those without insurance and without fat pocketbooks do in fact get at least some of the health services they require. When illness or emergency strikes, they go to free clinics or to hospital emergency rooms. If they are in a bad way, they can even be admitted to a hospital, where they can receive treatment or undergo surgery if need be. The cost of all that gets passed along to paying customers in the form of higher bills.

But that system of what amounts to informal "risk pooling" — without benefit of a formal insurance plan to manage and fairly distribute the pooled financial risk, that is — has many drawbacks, not the least of which is the failure of the uninsured to get the preventive care and chronic-disease treatment that would avert the emergency in the first place.

Insurance companies are in the business, first and foremost, of pooling risk. Health insurers receive premiums from those who are covered — along with, usually, contributions from their employers — and they pay out to health care providers some significant portion of the insureds' accrued charges for services rendered. The majority of the insured actually receive fewer dollars in benefits than they pay in premiums each year ... until they get sick, that is.

The minority of the participants in the insurance risk pool who in any given year actually get treated for major illnesses (or for normal but high-cost rites of passage such as pregnancies) are the ones whose benefits-to-premiums ratios are high. Averaged over the entire risk pool, though, the total payouts by the insurance company in any given year are enough less than the total of premiums-plus-employer-contributions to leave a tidy profit for the company.

Most of us who have health insurance coverage depend on employer contributions to defray part of its cost — or, if we're retired, on insurance contributions that are part of our retirement packages. If employer contributions vanished, we might then receive the erstwhile contributions in fatter paychecks instead, but if health insurance was not somehow made mandatory for all of us, many of us would — let's admit it — squander the extra income on necessities like food and luxuries like cell phones and trips to Las Vegas. (That's why many of the current proposals are for "mandatory" programs.)

So the current system works pretty well for all but the 47 million citizens who lack any health coverage whatever. As oldstyleliberal understands the situation, the truly poor and chronically jobless can fall back on Medicaid and, if they're seniors, Medicare (which also covers middle-class retirees). The group without any health coverage at all are, in many cases, those who far enough above the poverty line not to qualify for Medicaid, but they do not have jobs with employers that will pick up "their share" of the tab for health insurance coverage. These uninsured can't afford the steep premiums on their own, so they do without.

Another portion of uninsured Americans have been turned down for coverage because of high risk factors like pre-existing medical conditions. oldstyleliberal does not fully understand why insurers cannot accept those with dicey health conditions into the risk pool, and raise premiums for one and all so as to keep the high costs associated with the new, high-risk members from draining the pool. But that apparently does not make good business sense, presumably because if one company did it, all its low-risk customers would flock to other insurance companies whose premiums remained low.

Furthermore, some "economically uninsured" who lack jobs that provide health coverage are in fact the same people as in the high-risk, poor-health group whom insurers spurn, since the relatively poor tend to have more pre-existing conditions than the well-off among us, who have better access to preventive care.

Now for some of the solutions offered by the presidential candidates.

Democrat Dennis Kucinich proposes a system of the "single-payer" type which at one time oldstyleliberal was in favor of. A single-payer system would basically be like Medicare, but for all citizens, not just those over a certain age. (Medicare and Medicaid would be folded into it.) As oldstyleliberal understands it, the government would run the system, but health-care providers who are eligible for cost reimbursement would remain private. There would be no premiums or employer contributions. Instead, according to this rundown of the Kucinich proposal:

The plan would be financed through a federal payroll tax increase from 1.45 percent to 4.75 percent for both employee and employer; stock transfer tax of 0.25 percent on both buyer and seller; income tax surcharge of 5 percent on annual income between $184,000 and $279,999 and surcharge of 10 percent on annual income of $280,000 or more; and repeal of the 2001 and 2002 Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

Such a system would ostensibly cover 100 percent of the population. By making the risk pool as large as possible, it would allow one and all to be insured without excessively nicking the healthy to pay for the sick. It would hold down overall health care costs by blocking unnecessary, or unnecessarily pricey, procedures. There would also be savings, supporters say, due to consolidating the numerous current insurance companies' high overheads into those of one, supposedly efficient single bureaucracy. (The current insurance companies could still offer supplemental coverage, however, to those willing to pay for it privately.)

Critics say such a publicly financed system would fail to live up to its promises to reduce costs, though, because government bureaucracies are inherently wasteful. They also say similar systems tried in countries like Canada do not have consistently good results in terms of improving the quality of health care. Opponents of single-payer systems claim further that eliminating market forces in the health-care industry would make things worse instead of better.

Some critics even say a single-payer system is tantamount to "socialized medicine" in which the government actually tells citizens what health-care providers they can use and what services they can have. oldstyleliberal thinks that charge is completely bogus. Patients would still be able to choose their doctors and hospitals and get the care they feel they need.

Perhaps the biggest liability of single-payer proposals is that they have only a small base of political support. They have been raised and rejected in the past without attracting major support in Congress or among politicians in general. Naturally, the health insurance companies hate the proposals, since they would lose the bulk of their business, so lobbying against such schemes is intense. If somehow Mr. Kucinich managed to become the Democratic nominee and win the general election — and it would take a miracle for that to happen — he would face insurmountable obstacles in getting his proposal enacted.

Meanwhile, not of the other Democratic and Republican candidates, to oldstyleliberal's knowledge, favor a single-payer system. More on their alternatives in the next post in this series.

Checking Back In As a Libertarian

2007-12-09T10:55:00.000-05:00

It's been since July 2007 that this blog has been in abeyance — shame on oldstyleliberal!

The 2008 presidential election run-up is leaving oldstyleliberal significantly underwhelmed. He tends to support Democrats, not Republicans, and he finds the present crop of Democratic front-runners less than inspiring. (The Republicans are worse.) Asking himself what the matter could possibly be, he mentions to himself that there is a vast dearth of two desirable characteristics in the present lineup of presidential hopefuls: leadership, and an absence of hypocrisy.

oldstyleliberal defines leadership as the ability to change people's minds by appealing to their reason, thus bringing about a national consensus on issues of importance. But what we are actually getting is a sophisticated version of hypocrisy, in which the candidates' positions on things like the war in Iraq are so mush-mouthed, so qualified, so contorted, they seem to match our own positions without necessarily really doing so.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, for instance, wants to have it all ways on the Iraq war, according to this post on The Fact Checker blog at The Washington Post. Although her campaign literature says

Hillary will begin immediate phased withdrawal [from Iraq] with a definite timetable to bring our troops home

her actual position does not actually commit her "to pulling all U.S. troops out of Iraq [even] by the end of a second presidential term." The Post adds:

Clinton has made a flat promise that the United States will "get out of Iraq" while she is president. She says she has a plan to "end the war" and "a definite timetable to bring our troops home." On closer examination, it turns out that all these promises are so carefully hedged as to be virtually meaningless. There is no "definite timetable" to bring the troops home or end the war. She has said she "wants" to begin troop withdrawals in the first 60 days of her presidency-but has also talked about leaving a "vastly reduced residual force" in the country for "a limited period of time."

Clinton's pledge to "end the war" contains so much fine print that it is hardly a pledge at all, more a general aspiration. She has described several "vital U.S. national security interests" in that country, including fighting al-Qaeda, protecting the U.S. embassy, training Iraqi troops, protecting the Kurds, and countering the influence of Iran.

Barack Obama is only a little better, this Fact Checker post shows. He supposedly will flatly remove "all combat troops" from Iraq if he becomes president. But he also leaves open sending troops "back into the country to fight al Qaeda and 'stop genocidal violence.' " Per The Post:

It is more difficult to find obvious contradictions in Obama's speeches on Iraq than in the statements of his Democratic rivals. The weakest chink in his rhetorical armor is his claim that he will withdraw all combat troops from Iraq "within 16 months" of taking office — but "continue to strike at al Qaeda in Iraq." He has acknowledged that these will be "combat missions."

The Obama campaign has tried to square the circle by insisting that Obama will withdraw all 20 combat brigades presently in Iraq. "A different force will be constituted," said Obama spokesman Bill Burton, in an e-mail. "This would not be a brigade engaged in sustained combat. Rather, it would be a strike force that could take targeted action against specific al Qaeda assets."

In other words, the vaunted Obama "withdrawal" might not truly get U.S. troops out of harm's way after all.

(One of oldstyleliberal's best friends, also a Democrat, has pointed out to him that none of the candidates' television ads run nationally. They're tailored to Iowa or New Hampshire or wherever, or to individual localities therein, the better to tell the potential voters in the various states and communities what they want to hear. Again, it's the exact opposite of exerting steady, uniform leadership to forge a general consensus among U.S. citizens.)

So oldstyleliberal feels he is up the creek without a paddle when it comes to figuring out who to vote for.

oldstyleliberal realizes that there is one true "peace candidate" in the Democratic field, Dennis Kucinich, but he's a guy who claims to have seen a UFO. Thank you very much, but, no. Few if any of the other major Democratic or Republican aspirants, meanwhile, have a clear, firm commitment to getting out of Iraq.

oldstyleliberal does feel strangely attracted, oddly enough, to the candidacy of Republican Ron Paul, known mainly as a libertarian, whose political positions are summarized here. Paul opposes the Iraq war without ifs, ands, or buts, at least as far as oldstyleliberal can tell. Yet it is hard for oldstyleliberal to admit, even to himself, that he is in sympathy with those libertarian ideological principles of Paul's that don't exactly qualify the man as a liberal.

For example, Paul wants "secure borders and legal immigration," which sounds to oldstyleliberal like code talk for something which goes against true libertarian sentiments. Libertarians want a small governmental footprint, but apparently in Paul's mind that hands-off posture stops at the border with Mexico. Mexicans and others who sneak into this country illegally in search of a better way of life aren't to be considered as free to pursue happiness as anyone who is here legally.

Now, it may well be that the U.S.-Mexico border can and should be secured. (If it can't be secured, it doesn't matter whether it should be secured.) But oldstyleliberal has somehow gotten the idea that the best way to keep Mexicans at home in Mexico would be to stop subsidizing U.S. farms. The U.S. government keeps the price of, say, American corn low in Mexican marketplaces by making up the difference with a price support or a subsidy to American growers. Mexican corn growers, not getting a similar subsidy, can't compete even in their own home market. Mexican farm workers, either out of work or working for peanuts, migrate north, often illegally, looking for more income.

If our government were as small as Ron Paul, as a libertarian, would like it to be, perhaps the U.S. farm subsidies would vanish, Mexican farms could compete on an equal basis, and Mexican agricultural workers would make enough money to keep them at home with their families, where they'd rather be.

Or, take education. Columnist George F. Will has this op-ed piece in this Sunday's Post. It says, "No Child Left Behind, supposedly an antidote to the 'soft bigotry of low expectations,' has instead spawned lowered standards." NCLB legislation was passed by Congress in 2001 and signed into law on January 8, 2002, by President Bush.

Ostensibly intended to force states and their local school systems to show measurably higher results in the education of America's children, NCLB has, according to Will, done just the opposite:

NCLB requires states to identify, by criteria they devise, "persistently dangerous schools." But what state wants that embarrassment? The Post recently reported that last year, of America's approximately 94,000 public schools, the "persistently dangerous" numbered 46. There were none among the 9,000 schools in amazingly tranquil California.

NCLB's crucial provisions concern testing to measure yearly progress toward the goal of "universal proficiency" in math and reading by 2014. This goal is America's version of Soviet grain quotas, solemnly avowed but not seriously constraining. Most states retain the low standards they had before; some have defined proficiency down.

Per Will, a report called "The Proficiency Illusion" from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which studies education reform, claims:

The rationale for standards-based reform was that expectations would become more rigorous and uniform, but states' proficiency tests vary "wildly" in difficulty, "with 'passing scores' ranging from the 6th percentile to the 77th." Indeed, "half of the reported improvement in reading, and 70 percent of the reported improvement in mathematics, appear idiosyncratic to the state test." In some states, tests have become more demanding; but in twice as many states, the tests in at least two grades have become easier.

Again, it looks to oldstyleliberal as if a government program, however well-motivated, has failed to make things better and in some ways made things worse. The states get more money from Uncle Sam if schools and pupils pass standardized tests, so guess what? It's truly amazing how few schools and pupils flunk the state-devised tests. 6th percentile, indeed!

oldstyleliberal has never heard George Will say he is a libertarian, but he proudly owns to being an old-style conservative, which is nearly the same thing. Will regularly lambastes President Bush and his crowd for not being real conservatives who stick like glue to the U.S. Constitution's limits on their powers of office. They prosecute foreign military interventions without getting Congress to declare war. They usurp civil liberties and privacy rights. They run up huge deficits, albeit with congressional approval — Will is just as scathing about Congress's abdication of its own constitutional responsibilities.

Now that Congress is led by oldstyleliberal's own party, the Democrats, he ought to be pleased ... but he's not. The front page headline in today's Post, "Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002," leads off an article revealing that Nancy Pelosi, now Speaker of the House, was among the four or eight Democratic and Republican members of Congress briefed in 2002 and 2003 about the means then being used to coerce detainees in the war against terrorism to talk, including the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding. Pelosi and the others, almost without exception, let out not a peep of protest — even though some of the Democrats who were in on the briefing today roundly excoriate the Bush administration for having sanctioned such tactics of torture. More hypocrisy.

So oldstyleliberal is interested in supporting a candidate who will be absolutely straight with the American people without adding pages and pages of fine print to every pledge. He is interested in supporting a candidate who will say the same things to all the people all the time. He is interested in a candidate who does not substitute firmness of tone and pugnacity of mien for true leadership. He is interested in a candidate who will exert that leadership to bring us together, rather than merely finessing our differences with rhetoric that doesn't really mean what it appears to mean. And oldstyleliberal now believes that the only way a candidate can stop being a mush-mouth today is to stop promising us the world and instead promise to shrink the government's much-too-huge footprint.

Laundry-List Politics, Begone!

2007-07-29T14:31:00.000-04:00

In this Sunday's Washington Post, professor of psychology Drew Westen writes, in Dems, You Gotta Have Heart:

The philosopher David Hume had it right: Reason is the slave to the passions, not the other way around. Recognizing the primacy of passion in everything we do has profound implications for politics. Reason is the middle manager in decision making, not the CEO. Policies are nothing but the frontmen for values. You listen to the middleman's "pitch," but you go straight to the top when it's time to choose. You go, in other words, to your emotions — particularly your moral emotions — when you pull a lever in the voting booth.

Yet for the last 40 years virtually every Democratic candidate for president — Bill Clinton is the notable exception here — has solicited popular support based on laundry lists of issues and positions. Their basic assumption: people who take voting seriously "choose candidates by examining their positions on the issues and coolly calculating their relative costs and benefits." This is the "dispassionate vision" of the voter's mind, and Westen says it's dead wrong.

Meanwhile, a raft of successful Republican campaigns have been based on the competing, "passionate vision" of the electoral mentality: "voters are moved by the feelings that candidates and parties elicit in them and are guided by their shared values and goals."

That passionate vision is exactly what drew oldstyleliberal to John F. Kennedy in 1960, the winner of the first presidential race your blogger was old enough to follow. JFK, a Democrat, defeated Richard Nixon primarily because voters tapped into his clear vision, values, and goals, while the future that Nixon would lead us into remained inscrutable (mainly because the perspiring Republican standard bearer appeared ill-at-ease, even mendacious, when caught in the harsh glare of the lights at the historic Kennedy-Nixon TV debate).

So oldstyleliberal, who favors Democrats, passionately hopes the likes of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and the others vying for the Oval Office in 2008 will pay close heed to Westen's insight.

Five Lies from Bush on Iraq War

2007-07-11T07:39:00.000-04:00

The lead story in today's Baltimore Sun is Bush urges lawmakers to be patient on Iraq war. It deserves close attention, because it demonstrates the essential dishonesty and cynicism — if not the total delusionality — of this president.

The truth is what the Senate's top Democrat, Majority Leader Harry Reid is quoted as saying by the Sun: "... the troop escalation has been under way for six months and [in Reid's own words] 'is not working'."

• Lie number one by the president (as quoted directly from the Sun article):

The new troops "just showed up and they're now beginning operations in full, and in Washington you got people saying stop," said Bush, whose remarks about the war drew silence from an otherwise enthusiastic Cleveland audience.

As the article itself says, the troop escalation or "surge" has been at full strength since the last installment of new U.S. fighters arrived "weeks ago." The president's prefixing "weeks ago" with "only" is intentionally deceptive and misleading.

• Lie number two:

[Bush] said Congress should give the commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, "a chance to fully implement his operations" and wait for his progress report in September.

General Petraeus has been taking advantage of the chance to "fully implement operations" for several months. As oldstyleliberal pointed out recently in Congress Needs To Impose an Endgame in Iraq, Petraeus and the military he commands are down to what is essentially a rear-guard mission. According to the Washington Post recently (see that earlier blog post):

For its part, the [U.S.] military has calculated that a veto-proof congressional majority is unlikely to demand a full, immediate withdrawal. But however long the troops remain, and in whatever number, [a] military intelligence official said [under condition of anonymity], they see a clear mission ahead. "We're going to get it as stable as we can, with the troops we have, and in the time available. And then, we'll back out as carefully as we can," the official said.

Preparing to "back out as carefully as we can" after "getting it as stable as we can ... in the time available" is a definition, not of victory, but of minimizing our losses. The president is lying to us to suggest that we can still, at this late date, achieve more than that.

• Lie number three by Bush:

In advance of an interim White House report on Iraq, to be released this week, Bush acknowledged that "the Iraqis have got to do more work."

As the Post coverage shows, there is now zero chance, barring a miracle from God, that "doing more work" will produce a breakthrough:

According to several senior officials who agreed to discuss the situation in Iraq only on the condition of anonymity, the political goals that seemed achievable earlier this year remain hostage to the security situation. If the extreme violence were to decline, Iraq's political paralysis might eventually subside. "If they are arguing, accusing, gridlocking," one official said, "none of that would mean the country is falling apart if it was against the backdrop of a stabilizing security situation."

From a military perspective, however, the political stalemate is hampering security. "The security progress we're making is real," said a senior military intelligence official in Baghdad. "But it's only in part of the country, and there's not enough political progress to get us over the line in September."

In other words, the situation is gridlocked. A political stalemate in Iraq feeds the ongoing extreme violence and lack of security. Yet Iraq's political progress "remains hostage to the security situation." It's a classic catch-22. Again, the president is lying to us by suggesting it isn't.

• Lie number four from Bush:

Bush spoke in broad terms about a new strategy, saying he'd be "glad to discuss different options," based on what military commanders tell him. The White House and the Congress "can work together on a way forward" after Petraeus reports in September, he said.

Bush has never, ever been "glad to discuss different options" concerning Iraq. Never, ever.

• Lie number five:

The president warned of the threat posed by al-Qaida in Iraq, describing it repeatedly as part of the organization behind the Sept. 11 attacks, a linkage that anti-terrorism experts say is inaccurate and misleading. ...

"The same people that attacked us on Sept. 11 is the crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children" in Iraq, Bush said.

As the article itself shows, "al-Qaida in Iraq" — which is the name of the organization — did not even exist at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks. In fact, it exists as a direct result of the Bush war in Iraq:

The terrorist group led by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida in Iraq "are not the same," said Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University terrorism specialist, who called Bush's statement "inaccurate, if not misleading."

Today's al-Qaida in Iraq fighters "are patently not the same people who attacked us on 9/11," Hoffman wrote [to the Sun] in an e-mail response. U.S. military authorities in Iraq believe al-Qaida in Iraq is made up of 90 percent Iraqis and 10 percent foreign fighters, he said.

Insurgents in Iraq and the al-Qaida cell responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks "are only in the very loosest sense part of the same organization," Hoffman said.

Al-Qaida in Iraq is a Sunni group organized by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who declared allegiance to al-Qaida in 2004. Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike in June 2006.

If it weren't for our invasion of Iraq, it's doubtful al-Qaida in Iraq would have gotten off the ground.

Will the Real Conservatives Please Stand Up?

2007-07-09T08:23:00.001-04:00

The real trouble behind the failed war in Iraq, oldstyleliberal believes, is the neo-cons.

The term, which is short for "neo-conservatives," applies to those whose politics derive from something that happened in the 1960s and '70s. In the later '60s, many on the American Left turned into radical revolutionaries, and near-chaos broke out in the wake of the Vietnam war.

Many former leftists, some of whom were once communists of one stripe or another, then felt "mugged by reality" and shifted their sentiments to an obdurate form of anti-communism. These former liberals called themselves "neo-conservatives."

Later, when the Cold War ended, neo-cons congratulated themselves on a worldview which held that America's first duty is to use any means possible to eliminate unfriendly, anti-democratic regimes around the world.

The Bush Administration has always been neo-con friendly, what with Dick Cheney being the Vice President and Donald Rumsfeld being the original Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld's underlings included the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, one of the leading neo-con thinkers.

In the post-Cold War world, the neo-cons saw a need to project American power, military and otherwise, into other arenas. It the post-9/11 world, Wolfowitz and those like him saw an opportunity to do what Wolfowitz had longed to do since the 1980s, when he broke from the official line of the Reagan Administration by denouncing Saddam Hussein at a time when Donald Rumsfeld, acting as Reagan's official envoy, was offering the dictator support in his conflict with Iran. Namely, Wolfowitz and his fellow neo-cons wanted to use U.S. military might to topple Saddam Hussein.

Neo-cons are not real conservatives. They are true believers who have become a power elite, while real conservatives believe power elites need to to be held in check by keeping government small.

Neo-cons are quite comfortable with other power elites — particularly money elites. In fact, many neo-cons are in the money elite. This is why a neo-con administration like Bush's is unfailingly pro-big oil, pro-big business, and pro-multinational corporation.

Let us not forget that Dick Cheney, when he wasn't in government, worked for Halliburton Energy Services, a multinational corporation with operations in over 120 countries. Halliburton's middle name is now "energy," but used to be just plain "oil." President George H. W. Bush, the current president's father, once worked for a corporation that is now part of Halliburton, Dresser Industries ... as did George H. W. Bush's father, the former Connecticut senator Prescott Bush, who when he was not in government was a Wall Street executive banker.

So when opponents of the current president and his war in Iraq wonder whether Bush went wrong out of a firm ideological commitment to neo-conservatism or out of personal loyalty to this country's entrenched power-money elites, the class into which he was born and raised, the correct answer is ... both!

We are rapidly approaching a make-or-break moment concerning the immediate future of the war in Iraq, as oldstyleliberal tried to convey in Congress Needs To Impose an Endgame in Iraq. The recent "surge" in troop strength has failed to turn the tide. Come next spring, the pressure of ongoing troop rotations will force us to reduce our military footprint in Iraq. Military sources, speaking to the news media on condition of anonymity, are saying things like that until then, "We're going to get it as stable as we can, with the troops we have, and in the time available. And then, we'll back out as carefully as we can."

It's fair to say that that's now the best-case scenario. There's no longer talk of victory of any sort, by any definition, in Iraq.

Fir that reason, real conservatives in Congress have to step up to the plate and break with the neo-con power-money elites. They need to take their rightful place in a veto-proof majority that will require a shift in policy in Iraq on the part of President Bush — specifically, a commitment to an endgame or exit strategy that will marshal our remaining military and diplomatic options in the interest of leaving the country we invaded in as stable a situation as we can manage.

Congress Needs To Impose an Endgame in Iraq

2007-07-09T08:22:00.000-04:00

Today's Washington Post has two articles, White House Shaving Yardstick for Iraq Gains and Bombings Kill at Least 170 in Iraq, that together tell oldstyleliberal that Congress needs to stop shilly-shallying and impose an endgame in Iraq on an unwilling President Bush.

The first article says, in effect, that no one in the know thinks the troop "surge" Bush called for in January is meeting the benchmarks set for it by him and added to by Congress as a condition for paying for it. Though the final report on its success or failure will not be due until September, an interim report due next week will admit only minor progress has been made.

Meanwhile, the optimistic claim that sectarian killings in Iraq were in fact down in June, after a particularly bloody May, is offset by the second article, documenting at least 170 Iraqi deaths in one 18-hour period. The article says 8 U.S. troops died in the same period of less than a day.

In another article, Special Report: Congress's War Over the War, the Post describes the difficulties four U.S. House members and senators, from both sides of the aisle, are having deciding on an appropriate course of action in Iraq. One of them, Rep. Johnny Isakson, a conservative Republican from Georgia loyal to the president, says the most persuasive argument he hears from the war's opponents is, "There needs to be an endgame."

"I agree fully," oldstyleliberal would like to tell Congressman Isakson. "There needs to be an endgame, and the president doesn't have one. That's why Congress has to take the bit in its teeth and impose one."

It seems like all the experts are saying the same thing: the window within which the U.S. will hold much sway at all in Iraq is shutting rapidly, no matter what Washington does. By early next spring, the pressure of ongoing troop rotations will force us to reduce our military footprint in Iraq, willy-nilly.

Many pundits have been calling for some form of "soft partition" in Iraq, with semi-autonomous Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd sectors. The Post coverage seems to indicate that kind of thing may be evolving in de facto fashion, anyway.

The Post's informants don't think Iran or any other regional power will absolutely control any of these sectors. Still, they will exert influence that is presently unwelcome in Washington.

This is true in part because Iraq's government and political system are now deadlocked, paralyzed. It might be different if U.S. and Iraqi forces were able to dampen the sectarian violence, country-wide ... but they're not strong enough to do so. What would make them get strong enough? Well, if the Iraqi government got more resolute, then just maybe ... but, alas, the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is weak and corrupt. The Iraqi army and security forces, with their sectarian allegiances, are accordingly as much a part of the problem as they are a part of the solution.

In other words, each component of the two-prong solution the president hopes for is blocked by ... the other component. An increase in governmental staunchness is blocked by how ineffectual the Iraqi armed forces currently are, but any improvement there is forestalled by the weakness of the government. It's crazy to expect such a government to command the loyal devotion of its army, no?

Meanwhile, the time window is closing. The hourglass is running out of sand.

Here's the current bottom line, according to the Post coverage:

For its part, the [U.S.] military has calculated that a veto-proof congressional majority is unlikely to demand a full, immediate withdrawal. But however long the troops remain, and in whatever number, [a] military intelligence official said [under condition of anonymity], they see a clear mission ahead. "We're going to get it as stable as we can, with the troops we have, and in the time available. And then, we'll back out as carefully as we can," the official said.

The problem there, as oldstyleliberal sees it, is that the "we" spoken of by the military intelligence official includes only the military. It doesn't include the State Department or the diplomats. It doesn't include Washington, really.

That's a recipe for disaster. If the war in Iraq to date has proven anything, it's that nothing good happens unless U.S. military and civilian decision-makers are on the same page, acting in concert, with a common strategy and set of goals. That happened, albeit to a grudging, limited extent, earlier this year when Congress joined with President Bush to sanction the "surge" — and there was, as a result, less sectarian violence in June.

Now Congress has to step up to the plate again. It has to impose, by a veto-proof majority, an endgame that will salvage as much as possible in Iraq before we have to "back out," as the military intelligence official put it. By "as much as possible" is meant just this: some vestige of stability and order in Iraq, some ability for the Iraqi people, with the assistance of their admittedly less-than-disinterested neighbors in the region, to avert a bloodbath when we leave. No more, or less, than that.

Code Red for Liberty?

2007-07-07T08:07:00.000-04:00

Today's The Baltimore Sun contains an article, Challenge to NSA spy program is rejected, which makes oldstyleliberal even more paranoid about the way things are going in America today.

A panel of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, by a 2-1 margin, overruled District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, among others. The plaintiffs alleged the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens is unconstitutional. Judge Taylor found for the plaintiffs, after which the Justice Department appealed the case to the 6th Circuit on grounds that the complainants lacked legal standing:

Justice Department attorney Gregory Garre argued that the plaintiffs, including the [ACLU], had alleged only "speculative" harm done to them, which would be insufficient to grant them standing to sue. The only way the plaintiffs could find out whether they had been the targets of wiretapping, he said, was if they obtained information about the surveillance program — in violation of the "state secrets" privilege.

Talk about a catch-22! If the 6th Circuit ruling stands, the Terrorist Surveillance Program, as NSA's post-9/11 warrantless eavesdropping initiative is called, is deemed legal until someone with standing successfully challenges it in court. To demonstrate standing, however, the challengers first have to show they've been wiretapped ... which can never happen, since that information is protected by the government's "state secrets" privilege.

So the neo-cons in charge win another one. Note that Judges Alice M. Batchelder and Julia Smith Gibbons of the 6th Circuit — the two judges that sided with the government in the NSA case — are both Republican appointees. Anyone see a pattern here?

Impeach Bush, Cheney!

2007-07-06T17:22:00.000-04:00

It took President Bush's commutation of "Scooter" Libby's sentence for lying to a grand jury to break this camel's back! oldstyleliberal now thinks the president deserves to be impeached.

So does Vice President Dick Cheney, what with all this bunkum about the Vice Presidency being a fourth branch of government, accountable to no one.
While we're at it, if it is possible to impeach Supreme Court justices, today's "conservative majority" has to go. oldstyleliberal doesn't know which of their decisions this term is the most egregious: the gutting of school desegregation programs under Brown v. Board of Education (see here and here); the gutting of long-settled law prohibiting makers of consumer goods from price-fixing with retailers (see here, with critical article here); the setting of an all-too-short deadline after which employees charging employers with sex discrimination cannot sue (see here); or what. Add to that upholding the partial-birth abortion ban (with which oldstyleliberal happens to agree) and you have a clear picture of a Roberts court that has veered sharply to the right.

Seriously, folks ... what is happening now is truly scary. All the stuff happening abroad: secret prisons, endless detentions without trial. And all the stuff happening at home: warrantless wiretaps, various other kinds of government snooping, the suspension of habeas corpus rights. oldstyleliberal could go on and on, but the list is already familiar to everyone not in a coma since 2001.

oldstyleliberal has made an honest effort during the Bush presidency to be moderate in his criticism, and to seek ways in which we non-conservatives could look on the bright side. No more! All it once it becomes clear to oldstyleliberal that the neo-cons are playing for keeps. The guess here is that the hard right realizes that, come January 2009, they will be swept out of power in the White House, as the Democrats further solidify the hold over Congress they gained in the 2006 elections.

oldstyleliberal will even go so far as to say that these radicals who are running things in the Executive Branch are bent on bringing down the whole edifice of "liberal" policies of the recent (and not so recent) past, while there's still time for them to work their evil intentions. One of the prime beneficiaries, obviously, will be corporate America.

In other words, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has been right about the Bush Administration all along ... and oldstyleliberal hereby takes back everything bad he has ever said about him.

Back to the Nuclear Power Future?

2007-05-22T08:54:00.000-04:00

"Fight two big threats with one energy plan," reads the headline of a recent op-ed piece by former National Security Council member Daniel Poneman, published in The Baltimore Sun on May 14, 2007. The column proposes that we in this increasingly "global" world need to create new policy by which to monitor and control a much-needed proliferation of nuclear power generating plants around the planet.

(Since the column at the Sun website will cost money to retrieve after 14 days, check it out at the Forum for International Policy website by clicking on the title or the leadoff hotlink of this post.)

Why are nuclear reactors the way to go today, energy-wise, despite the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in the recent past? Two words: global warming.

Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans in recent decades that is projected to continue in the foreseeable future. If the planet's atmosphere and oceans warm too much for too long, sea levels will rise and inundate coastlines as polar icecaps melt. There will be undesirable changes in the amount and pattern of precipitation, possibly with unprecedented floods and droughts. There may also be changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events like hurricanes. Other effects may include changes in agricultural yields, glacier retreat, reduced summer stream flows, species extinctions, and increases in the ranges of disease vectors, exposing more of us to killer infectious diseases.

In other words, if we allow global warming to go on unchecked, many scientists think we are playing with fire.

Conservatives accuse such "liberal" scientists of inventing the global-warming scare out of shoddy evidence, overplaying it, and/or falsely attributing it to human activity, particularly the burning of carbon-based fuels that spew "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere. oldstyleliberal thinks the conservatives are wrong to make light of this threat. He believes global warming needs to be taken seriously — which means we need to find alternatives to carbon-based energy.

Such as, for instance, a reinvigorated nuclear power program, on a global scale.

We also need to get on board with the idea of a "carbon tax." Libertarian-minded Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman recently weighed in on the issue with "Saving the Earth sensibly," a column in which he preferred taxing carbon emissions to "a lot of command-and-control programs that micromanage various industries on the assumption that the government knows best" — an assumption he finds especially ludicrous with respect to environmental protection initiatives.

A carbon tax is is a tax on energy sources which emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, since CO₂ is the principal greenhouse-gas culprit in man-made global climate change. It would consist of a levy on the burning of fossil fuels — coal, petroleum products such as gasoline and aviation fuel, and natural gas — in proportion to their carbon content. Since coal has more carbon by weight than petroleum or natural gas, the tax on coal would be higher than than on the other two. Economic forces would then move us away from coal, and to a lesser extent away from oil and gas, toward alternative sources of energy.

Such as, again, nuclear power.

The Poneman article points out the dangers here, the principal one being the proliferation of nuclear arms.

You cannot engage in nuclear power generation without the creation of highly enriched uranium to serve as fuel for the reactors, and later of plutonium that is destined to be separated out of the spent fuel and reprocessed. Both can be diverted into the making of bombs.

The enriched uranium in nuclear fuel is not itself concentrated enough to build a practical nuclear bomb, but the same plants and technology used to enrich uranium for power generation can be used to make the highly enriched uranium needed to build a bomb.

Moreover, the plutonium produced in power-generating reactors, if concentrated through reprocessing, can be used for a bomb, or, if a reactor is operated on very short fueling cycles, bomb-grade plutonium can be produced by the reactor itself.

We currently fear North Korea, Iran, and other countries intend to develop a nuclear-weapons capability, under the cover of fostering a "peaceful" nuclear power industry. "How can we preserve the ability of nuclear energy to reduce global warming," asks Poneman, "without sparking a nuclear arms race?"

There are basically two approaches, Poneman indicates: the one he opposes, and the one he proposes.

The one he rejects is to continue to rely on individual governments' unilateral "ability to cut off nuclear fuel services on political grounds, such as human rights abuses or other valid concerns about another government's conduct."

He says that

[U]ranium enrichment and plutonium separation technologies are complex and expensive. So nations that seek nuclear energy but not weapons may opt to buy or lease nuclear fuel rather than building their own plants, just as most have opted to buy or lease (rather than build) their own commercial airliners.

Such "nuclear fuel services" represent a pipeline, not for oil but for nuclear fuel, whose "tap" may at present be cut off by, say, the United States government acting unilaterally. If Iran or North Korea misbehave, turn off the tap. That kind of thing.

Poneman opposes that sort of policy-waging on the grounds that it only forces the more antisocial regimes on the world scene to go it alone. That would be counterproductive. Better, Poneman says, to put the matter in the hands of the International Atomic Energy Agency: "guarantees could be backed by the [IAEA], which can serve as the supplier of last resort as well as the appropriate authority to judge whether a material breach has occurred."

The IAEA would thus guarantee that, say, Country X, absent "a material breach of their nonproliferation obligations," would have a reliable supply of nuclear fuel for its civilian reactors. If individual countries such as the U.S. try to cut X off, nuclearly speaking, IAEA would undertake to fill the gap — again, absent "a material breach" of X's "nonproliferation obligations."

Who would serve as "the appropriate authority to judge whether a material breach has occurred"? Again, the IAEA.

Some might react to Poneman's proposal as internationalism run amok. oldstyleliberal thinks it might work ... particularly if the U.S. can sign on the dotted line along with the United Kingdom, the European Union, Russia, China, and other global bigshots. It's destabilizing to keep on with the present order of things, in which, when a country like Iran seems (maybe) bent on diverting civilian nuclear materials/technology into a weapons program, policy wonks in the U.S. start talking about bombing the hell out of the country as a prophylactic gesture.

Better to encourage countries that are truly committed to peaceable nuclear power uses to tap into the global pipeline in full confidence that as long as they stay peaceable, the valve will not be shut off.