America Dislocated

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

"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

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?

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!!!

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?

"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

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!

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

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

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

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 ...

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

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

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

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?