The Polite Liberal

Republicans on Crime and National Security

2007-07-02T18:34:00.000-07:00

Like clockwork, in every election the Republicans talk incessantly about how tough they are on crime. They bleat on about how only they can be trusted on National Security.

Once they have total power, what do we see? A Republican President commuting the sentence of a felon who helped cover up a crime that damaged our national security, and compromised our intelligence assets on Iran's nuclear program, for nothing more than partisan advantage.

It's clear now who can be trusted on crime, and on national security. It certainly isn't conservatives.

"If we leave, there will be chaos"

2007-06-07T23:12:00.000-07:00

The final Republican argument on the war seems to be that if Democrats finally manage to force a withdrawal, total chaos will ensue.

This is almost certainly true.

The problem is that it's akin to saying throwing a dozen eggs at someone and then saying that if they don't stand still and catch them all, there'll be a hell of a mess.

That's both true and irrelevant, and the correct move is to duck, not flail around trying to catch eggs.

The chaos is inevitable at this point. It was probably inevitable from the moment Bush made the decision to invade Iraq with a postwar plan that might as well have been drawn in crayon on a diner's kids menu. It was certainly inevitable when Bush treated the postwar period as a patronage opportunity for well-connected Republicans.

Trying to ensure peace and stability is honorable, but it's too late for that. Using our soldiers' lives to try to push the inevitable collapse onto some other President's watch is contemptible.

Bad Policies of Bush, Part I

2007-06-05T17:06:00.001-07:00

It's become somewhat difficult to discuss the Bush presidency. So many Bush policies have been wrongheadedly conceived, immoral, or simply disastrous in their effects that a lot of liberals tend to lapse into incoherent shrieking when the subject comes up. To try to organize my own thoughts, I thought I'd try to make an item by item list here over the next several days.

Any list like this has to start with our policy towards the military detainees. This is such a huge cluster of bad policies that it's hard to know where to begin:

(1) The US ought not use torture. It's barbaric, ineffective, and immediately demolishes any attempt to press other countries to stop abusing human rights. Frankly, I find it depressing and humiliating that this point even needs to be argued. Civilized countries ought not use torture! That's what makes them civilized countries!

Frankly, the decision to torture the detainees is so outrageous that it's impossible to come up with a reasonable argument for it.

(2) The US ought not detain people except as POWs, or as criminal defendants. Anyone using the phrase "illegal combatant" to claim that the government can hold people without charge or Geneva convention rights is playing legal Calvinball. Anyone who defends the practice and simultaneously claims to be for the "rule of law" is a liar or a fool.

(3) The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.--US Constitution, Article I, Section 9.

We have not been invaded. There is no rebellion. There is no cause to suspend the writ. "It has only been suspended for really bad people" is no defense--for one thing, without the writ of habeas corpus, how do you know that is true?

(4) Extraordinary rendition, obviously, is itself beyond the pale. See (1).

Why do these policies get any support at all from citizens of a previously-civilized, first-world nation? I can only guess. From the defenses I've seen attempted, it appears to stem from basic cowardice. "As long as I be kept safe," the argument seems to go, "what matter if a few really bad people suffer at the hands of the government?"

How do we know that these people are as bad as claimed? Because, say our government-distrusting conservatives, the government never makes mistakes about such things.

For me, torture trumps sex

2006-10-02T22:57:00.000-07:00

As I post this, the entire nation is obsessed with Mark Foley and his "page problems."

I'll stand aside. When we suspend habeas corpus and allow torture at the discretion of the President, I have trouble getting excited over sex scandals.
If this leads to the end of Republican control of the Congress, I'll be overjoyed. Other than that, though, I'll stick to the Constitution.

A foray into theology

2006-09-30T22:59:00.000-07:00

I'm not a religious man myself, but I'm an interested observer. The Bible contains some nuggets of genuine wisdom, like this one:

Romans 12:19-21

19Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.

20Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.

21Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

It's both astonishing and depressing to see the lengths to which self-proclaimed Christians will go to in their attempt to avoid that passage. The Web is littered with phantasmagorical ticking bombs built so that Christians may pretend that their entirely un-Christian desire for vengance is instead a noble attempt to save lives.

Everyone, stop it. You're only barely kidding yourselves. Do you really think that you're deceiving God?

From then to now

2006-09-29T14:18:00.000-07:00

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

--Declaration of Independence

In memoriam

2006-09-28T23:41:00.000-07:00

39. Nullus liber homo capiatur, vel imprisonetur, aut disseisiatur, aut utlagetur, aut exuletur, aut aliquo modo destruatur, nec super eum ibimus, nec super eum mittemus, nisi per legale judicium parium suorum vel per legem terre.

1215-2006. Requiescat in Pacem.

Becoming that which we were founded not to be

2006-04-25T15:37:00.000-07:00

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
---Declaration of Independence

While it's true that we're finally cracking down on human trafficking by our current crop of mercenaries, the question is still there: What on earth are we doing, given our history, hiring mercenaries in the first place? Remember, this has been going on for more than two years now.

Americans have always held an almost visceral revulsion for mercenaries. Even more than two hundred years later, we still remember the depredations committed by the Hessians sent by Britain to quell our rebellion. Now we're the ones hiring mercenaries, and then as now we can't control them adequately. What are we doing?

Rove speaks

2006-01-23T11:05:00.000-08:00

So, Rove has crawled out from under the taint of his links to the Plame leaks to accuse me and my political allies of disagreeing with this statement:

"Let me be as clear as I can: President Bush believes if al-Qaida is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they're calling and why,"

Of course it is. No-one---from the ACLU to the John Birch society---disagrees with this. We simply thing that Bush should be forced to prove to a FISA court that such a link exists and get a warrant. We don't even require that it be done ahead of time--the law just requires an after-the-fact warrant if there's a pressing need for speed.

It's our refusal to trade our liberty for security that makes us Americans. We don't let the police kick down any door they might want to, unless they can present a reason to a judge, because Americans are secure in our homes. We don't let the government spy on our telephone conversations without due cause, because we are entitled to our privacy unless the government has cause to suspect us of a crime. What's key here? The government needs to put a case before our independent judicial branch before it gets to breach our privacy, even in pursuit of the worst of criminals.

If the administration thinks the current restrictions are too harsh, it should ask Congress that they be changed. If it thinks that any restrictions are too harsh and should be ignored for the good of all Americans, it should find some other country to run. We're not such cowards as that.

Torture?

2005-11-13T17:49:00.000-08:00

It's hard to find it anything other than unutterably depressing that we're having a serious national debate on whether we should torture people. Yes, yes, I know that many of them are terrorists--but c'mon. Torture?

Can any conservatives defend this? The Bush administration--perfectly willing to let the Republican congress spend us into oblivion without the faintest hint of a veto--is suddenly threatening to shoot down a defense appropriations bill in wartime unless a provision forbidding torture is removed?

Have we really slid this far? What comes next, a proposal to overturn the thirteenth amendment? (Yes, that's ludicrous--but is it that much more ludicrous than the fact that the administration is demanding the right to torture suspects?)

Calm... calm...

2005-09-02T18:31:00.000-07:00

OK, calmer now.

Today things finally seem to be moving, give or take. Today is what Wednesday should have looked like (with copters instead of trucks, given the state of the highways into the region).

diddley, Diddley...

2005-09-01T23:40:00.000-07:00

DING-DONG-DIDDLEY-CRAP!!! CAN'T YOU PEOPLE DO ANYTHING RIGHT??????

OK, politeness goes on vacation for a day. This has nothing to do with policy. This has to do with basic competence at making the government do what it's designed to do.

We're now five full days after the hurricane hit. People are dying of thirst and starvation in the very places they WERE TOLD TO GO IF THEY COULDN'T GET OUT OF NEW ORLEANS.

Remember five or six years ago, under Clinton, when FEMA could get the job done? You're telling me that in a week we couldn't get food and supplies in to these folks?

Remember after the tsunami? Remember all the snarking about how other countries never pony up to help us when we're in trouble?

Well, they're trying. Canada, Russia, and Israel have all offered assistance. The Bush administration, for whatever brilliant reasons they've come up with, WON'T COORDINATE WITH THEM. Louisiana had to cut a separate deal with Canada to get help in from Vancouver.

We're all donating to the Red Cross, but the Red Cross can't contain looting and get supplies to starving people without military help. Every online message from an Army pilot that I've read has them chomping at the bit, wondering when they'll flipping get the order to go do their jobs.

Again, this isn't policy. This is disastrous incompetence by the folks whose job it is to coordinate the response.

Politics has real effects

2005-09-01T12:06:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of talk lately about whether it's appropriate to "play politics" with the catastrophe in New Orleans.

Right now, probably not. There are bodies in the water, and there are people that'll turn into bodies if we don't get them out of there and into housing right quick. For right now, the thing to do is head over to the Red Cross and donate some money.

Once the immediate crisis is over, though, we really do need to assess blame. Politics isn't some sort of team sport where we try to get "our guys" into power and keep "their guys" out. Politics is the process by which we try to get people we trust into positions of power.

It isn't always abstract--politics can be quite concrete. In the case of infrastructure improvements, it's sometimes literally concrete. The vulnerability of New Orleans to this sort of disaster has been discussed for years. If levees haven't been maintained, some one or some group made a conscious decision not to maintain them. If the response is disorganized, then either someone hasn't been planning properly, or someone higher up failed to make the planning anyone's job.

For now, let's help those people. Once the crisis is over, though, let's not let people whose job it was to prevent just this tragedy get away with accusing us of playing politics when we ask them why things went wrong.

Secularism I -- Prayer in public schools

2005-08-09T21:25:00.000-07:00

The first amendment to the US constitution begins:

Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;...

The fourteenth amendment, ratified in 1868, broadened the reach of the first, in its second sentence:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States...

Since US Public schools are state institutions, they cannot abridge their students' first amendment rights. In Engel v. Vitale (1962), the Supreme Court ruled that official prayer in public schools violates the US Constitution.

Since this is a matter of straightforward constitutional law, there isn't much room for debate about what the law allows. A more interesting question is: Is this a good idea? Should the constitution rule out prayer in schools?

There are several reasons why the answer is "yes", of which two are the most important:

(1) The government simply can't enforce belief in this fashion. By this I don't mean that it's immoral; I simply mean that it doesn't work. Compare the level of religion in the US, where school prayer has been banned for more than forty years, to that in the UK, where it's still prevalent.

Think about the Pledge of Allegiance for a moment. Every schoolchild recites it every day. Is it anything but a ritual at this point? Does it do anything to create real patriotism? Do you really want religion to be like the pledge--words recited mindlessly by children counting the seconds until lunch?

(2) In regions where there's a majority religion--and particularly if the majority is overwhelming--there has historically been an overwhelming temptation to try to use school prayer to enforce that religion. In such regions, the prayer tends not to be generic (although even generic prayers can be offensive to some faiths or to atheists); the prayers are instead explicitly Christian, or Protestant, or even Evangelical. The more specific such a prayer becomes, the more it tends to alienate those of other faiths. This sort of thing led to bloody wars in Europe; in the US it tends to conflate religious belief and citizenship in a manner that we should avoid at all costs.

The problem is that it's hard to be asked to swear against you conscience. Ask an atheist child to swear "by God", or a Jewish child to swear that "Jesus is Lord", and you're putting them in an impossible position of either lying or visibly standing apart from their class's (and their teacher's) beliefs. That isn't the proper business of a school.

To be honest, I don't understand the argument for prayer in schools--I'm an athiest born a dozen years post-Vitale. Could anyone with a reasonable pro- arguement post it in the comments?

The term is "liberal Democrat"

2005-08-05T18:12:00.000-07:00

Time for a rant, and a break from policy. Apologies in advance.

On my way home from work today, a substitute anchor on a liberal radio show was describing liberalism by some ludicrous, contrived term along the lines of "progressive individual-liberty promoters".

The term is "liberal", folks. Remember us? We're the ones that took the ruins of a country that unrestrained plutocracy had run into the ground and forged a superpower. We destroyed fascism and pinned communism down for forty years. We ended segregation. In California, we built the aquaduct, the universities, and the freeways.

Yes, we got complacent after too long in power. Yes, our wingnuts started trying to enforce ludicrous speech codes on campuses and were absurdly forgiving of left-wing dictatorships. For all that, I'll be damned before I abandon the proud term "liberalism" because the same nitwits that wrecked the country in the twenties have decided that it'd be fun to spit "Liberal" as though it were an insult.

So don't call me something nuts like "self-libertizing progressive." I'm a liberal Democrat.

Disaster

2005-08-02T08:45:00.000-07:00

Mr. Bush has just stated that he believes that the theory of Intelligent Design should be taught in science classes alognside evolution.

In case anyone hasn't been following this issue, the theory of evolution is the basic framework of modern biology--it's the theory that life on has evolved and differentiated over many millions of years from common ancestors. Intelligent Design, by contrast, is a crackpot theory supported by a small handful of scientists (generally working outside their fields), which basically recapitulates the original argument from incredulity of the ninteenth century. It does so as follows:

(1) It defines the concept of "irreducible complexity"--a structure that could not have evolved (usually the argument is that the structure has no purpose if any piece were altered, and so could not have evolved).
(2) It points to specific structures and claims, without proof, that those structures are irreducibly complex, and so could not have evolved.
(3) It argues that therefore the structure must have been created by an intelligent designer (carefully left unspecified to avoid the obvious argument that this is simply religious creationism).

The problematic step, of course, is (2). Whenever any specific strucutre is shown (as has happened repeatedly since Intelligent Design was first formulated) to have a perfectly reasonable evolutionary path from simpler structures, the old infinite regression game begins: "Aha! But those pieces are irreducibly complex!"

The fact that the President of the United States is advocating abandoning our leadership in biology at this time (and that is exactly what he is proposing--intelligent design is useless as a scientific tool, doesn't itself meet the standard of a scientific theory, and has led to no results to date, despite years of work) is a disaster. Technological leadership is a cornerstone of our superpower status, which Mr. Bush seems bound and determined to destroy.

Could we actually fight terrorists?

2005-06-28T15:28:00.000-07:00

I'm getting more than a little tired of the perpetual charges from the right that liberals are "soft on terrorism."

Liberals (as distinct from leftists) were all in favor of actually fighting terrorism--that's why there was no meaningful opposition to the war in Afghanistan. (Remember, a grand total of one Democratic congressperson in either house voted against that war.) What we objected to was shifting focus away from Afghanistan to a much larger, much messier, much less obviously needful war in Iraq. We objected even more to lumping the two wars together--the Afghan war was obviously justified by 9/11, while the Iraq war was only connected by being in roughly the same part of the world.

We'll see tonight if Mr. Bush has any serious plans to deal with the situation that he's created. Remember, given the Army's recruitment problems, "staying the course" isn't a serious option short of some plan to provide the necessary soldiers (whether by increasing compensation, resuming the draft, or by some other means). Given this administration's tendency to simply ignore opposition, though, I'm not overly optimistic.

Isn't the problem Guantanamo itself?

2005-05-17T19:59:00.000-07:00

In the middle of this furor over the recent Newsweek article and retraction, I have to ask: Is the problem one badly-sourced paragraph in a news report, or the fact that we're running a detention facility under almost bizarre secrecy at which we're loudly proclaiming that we're not obliged to honor the Geneva Conventions?

We've been hearing reports of questionable practices at Guantanamo Bay for more than two years now. The place is an abomination--not a POW camp, nor a jail, but something undefined with all the rules of Calvinball.

I know folks on the right object to treating the "war on terror" as though it were a criminal matter, but could we at least consistently treat it as though it were a war? This "9/11 justifies damn near anything" mindset is dangerous--as we're now seeing.

I agree with Scalia? Agaist Stevens?

2005-05-16T16:41:00.000-07:00

This may be one of the signs of the apocalypse, but the Supreme Court has just issued an
opinion on which I agree with Kennedy and Scalia, and against Stevens. Granted, unless you live over here in California, this ruling's probably not crucial to you, but it's been a sore point for some time.

If you live in one of those states where it's abruptly legal to order wine directly from California, you might want to take the opportunity to discover that along with left-of-center political opinion, my heavily-populated home state makes an enormous amount of really, really good wine. If you're over twenty-one and have neither anywhere to drive nor heavy machinery to operate, check out Meeker, Rabbit Ridge, and the rest of California's collection of small wineries.

Sorry for the home-state boosterism, folks--sometimes I just can't resist.

Thanks, Boxer, Feinstein, and Lee

2005-04-14T18:18:00.000-07:00

Now that the utterly wrongheaded "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act" has passed both the House and Senate, I'd like to take a moment to thank the folks that represent me in Congress for at least trying to oppose it. Thank you, Senators Boxer and Feinstein, and thank you Congresswoman Lee.

I'm gathering from the comment below and from comments on other blogs that conservatives aren't happy with that particular piece of legislation either. The difference here is that my representatives actually voted against the thing. Why didn't yours? Why didn't even a single Republican House member vote against a law that will deeply hurt many of their constituents?

Party of personal responsibility?

2005-04-05T11:17:00.000-07:00

I missed this story when it happened: a Republican state representative in North Dakota proposed a bill in January allowing students to withdraw from classes with a refund if they couldn't understand their professor's or TA's accent.

Now, I've been a student for a long, long time (I went back to graduate school around the time my son was born). Ever since I was an undergraduate I've been hearing students whinge on and on about not being able to understand their instructors. Almost uniformly, it's been a pile of horsedung.

Most science and engineering students were the "smart kid" at their high schools. Often, they slid through their last few years of high school without putting much work in. It's usually shocking to them when they get to college and suddenly aren't being fawned over anymore--and aren't even remotely the best anymore.

Most of us get over it. A few, though, start looking for excuses, and a professor that speaks with an accent is a wonderful excuse. Since most people don't do that much math, science, and engineering in school, they don't usually spit back the obvious rejoinder: "Couldn't you just have read the damn book? It didn't have an accent, did it? Or just listened a bit harder?"

My main question here is this: given the Republican Party's endless yammering about personal responsibility, what on earth are they doing aiding and abetting this sort of whinging? Aren't they even slightly embarrassed sponsoring a bill which gets defended like this (from a North Dakota senator):

Mr. Hacker says he has taken several classes where the instructor's accented English was difficult to comprehend. "There were days when I would go home and have to study the material that they had taught, for the simple reason that I couldn't understand the things that came out of their mouth," he says. "It's one thing to go home and study a concept, another not to understand what the professor was saying."--from the Chronicle of Higher Education

Gee, he had to study, too? What a terrible shame.

American technical dominance didn't just happen: it resulted from a combination of a huge public commitment to education and generous treatment of technically skilled immigrants. I'm deeply worried that we seem to be weakening both.

The trouble with Larry

2005-03-07T20:26:00.000-08:00

In my own perch in the lower bowels of the ivory tower, there's been a lot of blasting back and forth over the President of Harvard's recent speech in which he suggested that the reason that relatively few women get tenure in top-flight institutions in math and science could have something to do with innate differences in mathematical ability.

Liberals blasted that it was absurd and insulting to even consider innate differences. Conservatives piously wondered what had happened to free speech in academia.

To my mind, there were two key problems with his speech, and neither was the consideration of innate differences.

The first is simply that he ordered his list of potential reasons in precisely the order that left him least culpable for the problem. Quite apart from the merits of the arguments, one ought to be immediately suspicious of an argument that runs (stripped to its fundamentals) "There are many possible reasons for this problem. The most likely by far is that it's not our fault and we can't do anything about it. It's also possible (but much less probable) that it's entirely our fault, for at least seven reasons."

The bigger problem, though, is that his argument assumes as a matter of course that what gets you onto a science faculty is raw, native ability, and that top-notch professors were simply born with vastly more ability than everyone else. Some math and science types like this idea, because it makes them sound a bit like Michael Jordan (despite having no other obvious similarities). Since Mr. Summers in an economist (a field that tends to throw around a lot of math), I suspect he doesn't mind thinking of himself as six standard deviations out from the mean in ability.

The problem is that you already see vastly fewer women in math and science as graduate students or even undergraduates. Take it from me--you don't have to be a math god to be a graduate student in math. You just have to be reasonably good and put a lot of work in.

That's where the "native ability" idea gets pernicious. Math is honestly hard. So's physics. You have to do a lot of work to get good at it. If you think it's all native ability, then there's a temptation not to do the work---after all, if you find it tough, you must not have been born with the "math gene," so why bother?

Did Mr. Summers have any right to make a speech like that? Of course he did! We all have an inalienable right to make fools of ourselves--or to point it out when others have done so.

Can someone explain this?

2005-03-04T08:12:00.000-08:00

I really, really try not to be cynical. I tend to think that a cynical pose is both unhelpful and unfairly dismissive of other points of view.

That said, can anyone please explain to me why it's good public policy to block chapter 7 bankruptcy protection for people bankrupted by medical expenses? We're not talking about people going berserk with plastic, here--we're talking "that heart surgury just wasn't covered by your insurance policy." That sort of situation seems to me to be exactly why we have chapter 7 bankruptcy protection in the first place, but apparently every singe Republican senator and a handful of Democrats disagree--they shot down an amendment that would have protected homeowners who get wiped out by medical debt.

How can this possibly be good public policy? For that matter, how can this possibly be morally right?

Of Computers and Quals

2005-03-02T21:24:00.000-08:00

If you've been wondering, I'm still alive.

My backup computer (which I used for my last post) lasted exactly a week before its six-year-old hard drive decided that it had had just about enough of all that spinning in its old age and packed it in. That left me with no computer except at my office, and I have this strange feeling that I should be... y'know, working or something when I'm there. I'll be replacing the computer later this month, finally (money gets in really short supply when you return to graduate school in your thirties with children).

The other thing that's putting a crimp in my blogging style is my upcoming Qualifying Exam. For those who haven't taken a shot at a Ph.D. before, most schools have two great chances to toss you out on your ear: a Preliminary Exam (typically a written exam) in your first year and a Qualifying Exam (typically an oral exam in front of a committee of professors) by the end of your second year. I'm just finishing my second year, so the Qual is looming.

In a math Qual at my university, faculty members grill you for 2-3 hours on topics that you select ahead of time. Just to be clear, there's no notes or reference to books---you just stand there with a bit of chalk and try to handle what's thrown at you. If you do so to the satisfaction of your committee, you get to stay in university for another three years or so and write a thesis. If not, you get a second chance; if you fail that one you're handed a nice, shiny MS and told to go find a job.

The really depressing thing is that I already passed one of these wretched things back when I was a Physics student in the late '90s; starting in math has rewound the clock.

Basically, I have to memorize the greatest hits of six textbooks. My posting here will be a bit thin until I pass the sucker.

Back

2005-01-07T05:47:00.000-08:00

Phew!

Sorry for the month-long silence, everyone. It turns out that dropping notebooks really isn't good for them. On the plus side, LCD screens are oddly pretty when they shatter.

I'll be back later today with a real post.

The Ownership Society

2004-11-29T06:54:00.000-08:00

Coming back from Thanksgiving, we found a nice little missive from our HMO. Apparently, I committed a heinous sin this year: I turned 30. The penalty for this crime? $1260 per year in incerased health care costs. Heaven help me if I have the bad judgement to turn 65; at that point insurance will cost about four times what it does now.

The health care system in the US is, in a word, nightmarish. I'm not talking about the doctors and hospitals, which are generally excellent. I'm speaking instead of the hopeless system that we've contrived to pay for health care. In the economic boom that followed World War II, it made some sense for employers to provide health care--it gave them a competitive advantage, and in an era of lifetime employment it even provided health care for retirees.

In today's world, that system is falling to pieces. First of all, most jobs simply don't last more than a decade at the outside; it's no longer considered even slightly unreasonable to lay off employees at the first sign of economic distress. "Taking care of your people," isn't considered a virtue in the business world just now. Worse, the advent of low-cost businesses like Wal-Mart has put many businesses in a hopeless position--they can either stop providing health care to their employees or lock themselves into a position where they get ground under by companies that simply don't need to spend as much per employee as they do.

The conservative solution to this appears to be (if any conservatives would like to correct me, I'd be more than pleased) to encourage people to pay for their own health care plans through tax incentives. There are a few basic problems here. First,
health care is quite expensive: for my family (two of us around thirty, one two-year-old) it's about $500 per month. For us, that's barely plausible; for lower-income families it's not even remotely possible. Worse, it gets progressively harder to afford health care as we get older; it's only by insuring twentysomethings at inflated rates that businesses could afford to insure their older empolyees.

The liberal solution to this is, of course, to raise taxes and move to either a "single-payer" system (that is, the government becomes the health-insurance provider for most Americans), or a nationalized system (whereby the government runs health care directly). Since the majority of hospitals and doctors are outstanding, most liberals are pragmatic enough to prefer the former.

A few quick responses to obvous questions:

"But won't increasing taxes cripple the economy?"

Not if the higher taxes are replacing a current cost. My taxes would have to increased by $6000 per year before I'd lose money on the deal. Moreover, the government would be in a much better position to bargain for prices than I am by myself! It would also remove a frightful burden from businesses, and remove probably the single most contentious issue from labor negotiations. (Do businesspeople really like being in the position of having to announce to their employees that they have to discontinue health care for their employees? Does that really help morale?)

"Won't this lead to rationed health care?"

Certainly, but that happens now with HMOs! (That's the entire point to HMOs--they ration care to keep their prices down.) The wealthy will still be able to purchase supplemental plans to pay costs beyond what the government is willing to provide.

"Why should I support health care for people too lazy to work?"

There are three basic answers here. First, many people without health care are working; they just don't make enough to pay premiums. Secondly, life is uncertain--anyone may be laid off at any moment, any small business may fail if times abruptly become tough, and anyone may suddenly become seriously ill. A smug assurance that one will never need such a system is foolish pride, not wisdom. Finally, a serious outbreak of an infectious disease will hurt everyone, not just those unfortunate enough not to have health care. An outbreak of whooping cough (for example) will not politely respect social lines, but will endanger everyone (that immunization you had as a child no longer protects you, by the way; we're all protected from whooping cough by the fact that most children are immunized). A drug-resistant TB outbreak would quickly become terrifying for everyone.

Comments are welcome, as always!

Thanksgiving Day

2004-11-24T22:03:00.000-08:00

Well, my absolutely favorite holiday of all has come: Thanksgiving. No real mythology to speak of, no-one insisting that you focus on the real meaning of the day--just family, food, and gratitude that we live in a wonderful place.

Have fun, everyone!

How to make chopped liver (in case there are still a few cubic millimeters of space in your stomach unaccounted for):

Hard boil two eggs.

Chop a couple of onions. Glaze in butter (well, properly speaking schmaltz--rendered chicken fat--but butter'll do in a pinch).

Add the liver to the pan. Cook in the butter.

Pour liver and onions into a wooden bowl. Add the eggs. Chop until your arm falls off (or until things are looking yummy).
Spice with paprika, garlic, and pepper to taste.

Chill and serve.

We'll get back to politics on Monday, after we're all just that much more spherical.

Guns and the Deep Blue

2004-11-24T14:55:00.000-08:00

Gun control is one issue that has reached the absurd point where the people on each side are speaking only amongst themselves. Part of the problem is that each side is unwilling to recognize that the role of guns is very different in rural areas compared to urban areas.

To see the problem, let's look at the deepest blue regions in the country. Instead of looking by state (which is very misleading; much of California by area is red, while there are deep blue pockets throughout the South.) Let's take a few representative areas:

Massachusetts (62% for Kerry), Rhode Island (59% for Kerry), New York City (72% for Kerry), Los Angeles County, CA (63% for Kerry), San Francisco City&County, CA (83% for Kerry), Alameda County, CA (75% for Kerry), Contra Costa County, CA (62% for Kerry), Marin County, CA (74% for Kerry), San Mateo County, CA (70% for Kerry), Santa Clara County, CA (64% for Kerry), Santa Cruz County, CA (73% for Kerry), Monterey County, CA (60% for Kerry), Sonoma County, CA (67% for Kerry), Napa County, CA (60% for Kerry), Washington, DC (90% for Kerry), and Cook County, IL (59% for Kerry).

The first thing you'd have to note is that these areas are geographically tiny; if you shaded them blue on a map you'd have to look hard to notice that anything (outside California) was even shaded.

The second thing you'd have to notice is that these areas have an enormous population density. All told, the above geographical smidge is the home of some 38,481,933 people. That's about the same as the populations of Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas combined.

What does this mean? It means that residents of the deep blue don't generally think about rabid wild animals as a serious concern--they have urban animal-control departments to deal with such problems. Their police protection is typically a civic police department that's close at hand, not a small, underfunded rural sherrif's department patrolling a huge area. While crime is certainly a serious problem in the deep blue, isolation isn't a factor in it.

By the same token, rural folks don't usually stop to think through the implications of having more people than live in the state of Virginia jammed into Los Angeles County (and roughly the population of Alabama living in the city proper). In Los Angeles, 118 people were treated at one hospital in Los Angeles in the years 1985-1992 for injuries due to falling bullets--that is, bullets fired into the air to celebrate holidays falling again and hitting people. 38 of those people died. A bullet fired completely at random in an area like Los Angeles has a really, really good chance of hitting someone by blind chance. A gun in the hands of someone who can't hit a target in Los Angeles is a terrifying thing.

Can we have a middle ground here? No-one in their right minds would advocate keeping rural residents from owning guns---they need them to protect their families and (in the case of farmers) livestock from feral animals and from criminals. By the same token, completely unregulated gun ownership in major cities is a recipe for disaster.

The path forward might come from the first thirteen words of the second amendment: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..." Militias were a sort of military equivalent to the volunteer fire departments that one frequently finds in rural areas. In a militia, most male residents of an area were required to provide themselves with a firearm, register for the local militia, and drill periodically. They weren't out of the control of the government--they were part of it. A hothead could be "drummed out" of the militia (for brandishing his weapon during a bar brawl, for example).

What would the modern equivalent of that be? Local governments could issue firearms licenses (that would be the equivalent of militia membership). Those licenses could be revoked permanently with cause (that would be the equivalent of being "drummed out"). The licenses could require a certain degree of marksmanship and gun safety knowlege (that would be the equivalent of the drills that were required.) If we want to preserve the fundamentally local quality of the old militias, we could require that the local registration files not be centralized beyond the state level (that should answer the usual worries of conservatives that the licenses would serve as a prelude to seizing weapons). That would also allow different regions to regulate weapons in a manner appropriate to local conditions (you'd want tighter controls in LA County than would be necessary in Alpine county, for example).

Red/Blue silliness

2004-11-18T19:43:00.000-08:00

Let's take a quick break from policy.

Catherine Seipp, in an article on the National Review Online, has created one of the sillier arguments to hit the Web this week. In her first paragraph, she argues that Blue-Staters don't understand Red-Staters, but that, "small-town red staters are exposed to big-city blue-state values every time they turn on the TV."

Is she serious? Is she really trying to argue that what Hollywood is producing is an accurate reflection of blue-state values?(Well, more correctly urban values, as is clear from any look at a county-by-county map.)

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the bluest areas of the country. Kerry carried my county by more than a fifty-point margin---and that wasn't the biggest margin up here. Strangely enough, life here doesn't resemble the sort of television fare I assume she's referring to. What exactly is she talking about?

This strange notion that blue-staters are living some sort of alternate, amoral lifestyle is terribly destructive. It feeds this new tendency to speak as though the two (enormously artificial) regions are separate countries forced together by an accident of history. The only real difference between the regions is population density. About as many people voted in my county, for example, as live in Wyoming. More people voted in Los Angeles county than live in Arkansas. More people live in Los Angeles county than in the state of Virginia. "Values," though? Do folks in the South actually imagine that life in San Francisco is one long episode of Charmed, minus the witchcraft?

I can see why you'd be disturbed (and a tad jealous), but for better or worse that's not how it is.

The Complexity of Simplification

2004-11-18T15:46:00.000-08:00

Tax simplification sounds terrific--none of us likes the long, tedious hunt through old receipts at tax time. There are two huge drawbacks, though, that you have to watch for:

Most of the complications are deductions and credits

Once you know your adjusted income, computing your tax is trivial (flat or not)--you look up your income in the table, and enter your tax. Simplifying the tax code almost has to mean eliminating deductions. Thus, unless you simultaneously cut tax rates, you're actually increasing taxes as you simplify the code.
(The big exception here is the AMT, which I'll discuss in a future post.)

The tax code is complex precisely in an effort to make it fair. If you're a freelancer, for example, some of your expenses are related to your business. Properly speaking, the government taxes profits on businesses, not revenue, so those expenses ought to be deducted from your income. Removing the deduction but dropping rates would have somewhat ludicrous effects on small business owners--for example, people selling cheaper products would get taxed at a lower rate than people selling more expensive ones.

"But," you might say, "we wouldn't lose those deductions!"

You're almost certainly right. But then the tax code remains complex, and you don't get to throw away your CPA's business card.

The law of unintended consequences

Recently, the current administration floated a proposal to remove the deduction for businesses that pay for their employee's health benefits.
That would certainly simplify computing taxes for businesses. It would also remove a major incentive for them to provide health benefits.

Yes, this would help the federal government's bottom line. If it increased the number of uninsured, though, it would dramatically hurt the states financially. Lower federal taxes in return for higher state taxes doesn't sound like nearly as good a deal.

Secularism

2004-11-17T19:58:00.000-08:00

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen, and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
--Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli, signed 1796, ratified 1797.

The Democratic Party of the United States has recently come under attack by a number of pundits as a "secular" party--one that derives much of its support from folks that don't go to church much (if at all), and one that tends to run candidates that don't discuss their faith openly. I (along with most liberals) don't find this trend disturbing--indeed, we find it entirely in accord with America's long tradition of separation of church and state.

To understand why we have such a tradition, it's important to remember that the founding fathers were Englishmen, with a rich sense of the debacle that state control of religion had created during the reign of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs. Moreover, the Union was to be of states with a variety of religious traditions: Puritan Massachusetts, Catholic Maryland, and so forth. The first amendment allowed the states to unite without a messy, destructive fight over which faith would become the "official" doctrine.

Have two hundred years of official governmental neutrality on religion crippled American Christianity? If anything, the opposite is true. America is easily the most religious first-world nation. Indeed, this is true even after forty years in which the first amendment has been interpreted more strictly than ever before (for much of our history, many individual states used the school system to teach a sort of generic Protestantism--this was the origin of the outstanding system of Catholic private schools in this country.)

Official secularism is no threat to religion in this country. Instead, it leaves religion free to persuade (judging by the results, religion can be very persuasive indeed).

Where do secularism and religion collide? I can think of four main issues: prayer in public schools, religious displays on public land, abortion, and homosexuality ("blue laws"--laws enforcing public morality--would once have been a fifth, but I believe a general consensus has emerged against these). I'll talk about each specifically in future posts. In general, though, liberals believe that preventing religion from entering the public sphere protects its ability to work privately.

On flat taxes

2004-11-16T09:48:00.000-08:00

The federal tax structure is, as I've said in a previous post, progressive. This means that the wealthy are taxed at higher rates than the poor. This structure, perhaps of the greatest liberal triumphs of the last century, attempts to tax people according to their ability to pay. Progressive taxes attempt to take into account the fact that the fraction of a person's income that they can afford to pay in taxes gradually increases with income---that is, taxing someone making $30,000 at 20% (leaving them with $24,000) is in effect a much harsher tax than taxing someone making $300,000 at 20% (leaving them with $240,000).

This structure strikes many conservatives as unfair. They see it as contributing to the overwhelming complexity of the tax code (which it does--consider the simplicity of paying the flat social security tax in contrast). They also complain that it punishes hard work by increasing taxes on higher-income Americans. To fix these problems, they frequently propose replacing the graduated income tax with a single, flat tax rate (frequently coupled with an exemption for some initial amount of income, as with the current tax code).

What's wrong with flat taxes? Let's look at 2001 tax information (the most recent complete information that I could readily find) to see:

In 2001, Americans with the highest 1% of incomes (that is, with incomes over $238,000 in 2001 dollars) paid an effective tax rate of 24.5% (that is, once deductions were accounted for, they paid on average 24.5% of their income in taxes). Because their incomes were very high, they paid about 30.3% of income taxes in that year.

If we were to flatten taxes, we could do it in one of two ways. We could either flatten taxes at the 24.5% they paid (which would ammount to a huge tax increase for most Americans), or, more likely, we'd flatten it below that level. If we flattened it below that level, we'd immediately reduce the government's revenue by a sizable amount (remember, this income group pays almost a third of all income taxes!) To make up the lost revenue, we'd have to either increase taxes on lower wage groups (which would hurt the economy badly--remember, it's consumer spending that's currently driving the economy, and consumer spending doesn't rise linearly with income), or go further into debt.

I simply don't see how to resolve this without a tax hike on most other Americans. (The tax rate I've seen bandied about on conservative sites is 17%, with most deductions eliminated. This would be, on average, a tax cut for people earning $80,300 or more, and a tax hike for everyone else. Remember that your average rate isn't your "bracket"--see the post below--but the amount you actually pay in taxes as a fraction of your income.)

Comments from conservatives on how this could work are certainly welcome.

Figures in this report are from Effective Federal Tax Rates, 1979-2001 by the Congressional Budget Office.

Update: The income figures in this article aren't family incomes, they're "adjusted incomes." To find yours, take your family's income and divide it by the square root of the number of people in your household. Thus, if your family income is $70,000 and there are three of you, your adjusted income is about $40,415. For a family of four to be in the highest 1% of incomes, that family must make at least $476,000.

On Impugning Motives

2004-11-14T10:12:00.000-08:00

I'm going to take a break from arguing policy for the moment to talk about politeness.

I'd long resisted creating a blog myself. I finally decided to create The Polite Liberal because I was worried about the tone that political discourse in this country was sinking to. The most obvious problem is the hurled insults--it's hard to talk about policy when conservatives and liberals are simply seeing who can scream about "liberal elites" or "redneck racists" the loudest. There's a second problem, though, which is at once more subtle and more damaging.

The problem is that neither side is willing to assume that the other side is being honest about its motives. This leads liberals to screech that the war in Iraq is an excuse to grab that nation's oil, or conservatives to suggest that gun control is a prelude to seizing all guns in the country and imposing tyranny. It led a previous commenter on this site to write, in the middle of an otherwise reasonable disagreement with my last post:

"Is it possible that they are using my hard earned money to buy votes, to create a class of citizens dependent on the federal government? "

This sort of thing makes honest debate impossible. If we really want to debate policy, we have to assume that both sides are acting honestly, and are genuinely trying to create a better United States of America. We strongly disagree as to the means, but very, very few of us (on either side) are acting dishonestly. You can argue that welfare doesn't help the poor (this was in fact the thrust of the aforementioned comment), but not that liberals don't intend it to. These are all matters about which good people may in good conscience disagree.

Those of us on my side are political liberals, not the fifth column of the Red Army. Those of you on the other side are political conservatives, not aspiring brownshirts or corporate shills. We are all of us Americans, here. Let's act like it.

Federal Taxes

2004-11-12T20:36:00.000-08:00

Author's Note--There's much too much to say about taxes to put into one post, so I'll break this up into several related posts. I'll start today with the basic idea of progressive taxation; tomorrow I'll discuss conservative proposals to simplify the tax system, then go on to social security

If there's one thing that liberals have been beaten about the head and ears with in election after election, it's that we're the philosophy of high taxes. As with all good insults, there's a grain of truth there--but not as much as is commonly assumed.

First of all, there's a key quesion which isn't commonly addressed--"as opposed to what?" That is, if you aren't in favor of raising taxes in the current situation, what are you in favor of? The usual conservative response is "cutting the size of government," but we haven't seen any sign of the current government doing that, despite nominal conservatives controlling both houses of Congress and the presidency. If you're in favor of increasing the deficit instead (which is what's happened so far under the tax cuts favored by Mr. Bush), how do you forsee returning the budget to balance? Or do you forsee doing so? (The current plan for "cutting the defict in half" requires that Congress not make the most recent tax cuts permanent. Since that doesn't seem to be what the President intends, what is the alternate plan?)

The federal government is principally financed through two taxes: the federal income tax, which is progressive (that is, tax rates increase with income), and a Social Security Tax (also called the "self-employment tax" when freelancers pay it) which is flat (it's the same rate no matter your income).

The progressive nature of the federal income tax is frequently misunderstood. Income is taxed at different rates depending how much income a person makes--the first seven thousand dollars that a single person made in 2003 was taxed at 10%, the next $21,400 at 15%, then 25% up to $68,800, 28% up to $143,500, and so forth. The problem is that people tend to speak as though they were in the tax brackets--so a person getting a raise from $68,000 to $69,000 often will say, "I'm in the 28% bracket now," as though they previously paid 25% on their entire income (that is, 25% of $68,000) and now pay 28% of $69,000.

That's not how the tax code works. At $68,000 of taxable income, you pay 10% of $7,000 ($700), 15% of $21,400 ($3,210), and 25% of $39,600 ($9,900), for a total tax bill of $13,810 (I'm neglecting exemptions and deductions here, for simplicity). This would be an overall tax rate of 20.3% (again, neglecting deductions and exemptions). At $69,000, you pay an extra $800 at 25% ($200) and an extra $200 at 28% ($56), for a total tax bill of $14,066, and an overall tax rate of 20.4%.

Conservatives frequently attack the progressive tax structure as "unfair," becuase it taxes higher-income people at a higher rate than lower-income people. Liberals (this author included) tend to favor progressive taxation, on the theory that it correctly reflects how much a person can afford to pay taxes. The first portion of anyone's income--rich or poor--can be thought of as going to essentials--food, clothing, and shelter. The difference between $17,000 and $18,000 in income is how many meals a family can afford to eat. The difference between $68,000 and $69,000 is a certain amount of comfort. The difference between $300,000 and $301,000 is nearly irrelevant.

Are there problems with progressive taxation? Yes--there are three. First, if a person holds a lot of different jobs, witholding the correct amount of money from a paycheck becomes tricky; unless one is organized it's easy to withold too little. Secondly, it tends to lead some people to treat the wealthy as an endless conucopia of tax money. This can lead to a lack of concern for what government programs cost, which in turn leads to bad policy. Finally, it tends to lead to a complex system of taxation, which gives rise to a lot of "gamesmanship" by people and corporations.

Veterans Day

2004-11-11T21:06:00.000-08:00

Today was Veterans Day. We honor their service.

Deficit Spending

2004-11-10T21:08:00.000-08:00

Let's start this off with a subject of considerable current import: deficit spending.

There was a time in the not-to-distant past when the Democratic Party was considered the party of deficit spending. We were, after all, the party most commited to Keynsian economics--the idea that recessions should be handled by having the government pump money into the economy by spending more than it recovered in taxes, then keeping the economy in check in good times by raising taxes.

Since Mr. Clinton's presidency, most liberals have more or less abandoned Keynsian economic theories. Under Mr. Clinton, the budget came into balance as the economy boomed; by 2000 the government was running a considerable surplus and beginning to pay down long-term debt. Keynsian economics had two practical problems. First, the US government moves very slowly by design, so by the time the deficit spending designed to fight a recession began, the recession was often over. Worse, it's much easier for the US government to begin deficit spending than to end it--tax cuts and new services are almost universally popular, while service cuts and tax hikes are almost universally unpopular.

What's wrong with the government running in deficit, as it has done throughout Mr. Bush's presidency? If deficits are small and for specific, nonrecurring purposes (to fight the Iraq War, for example), deficit spending makes some sense; it allows the government to pay for crisis over a long period of time. Unfortunately, the bulk of the recent deficits have been caused by the tax cuts Mr. Bush has implemented. This means that the government is running a structural deficit--that is, it would be in deficit even if we weren't fighting a war. Structural deficits, if they aren't addressed, eventually make bond investors wary; to protect their investment they may begin to demand higher interest rates. At that point we have a serious problem--either consumer interest rates go up (making life very difficult for homeowners with adjustable-rate mortgages and for anyone with a lot of credit-card debt) and the deficit gets much worse (because the cost of "servicing the debt"--paying interest on the existing debt--increases), or the government simply prints a lot more money, causing sharp inflation.

Note that this is one issue on which libertarians and liberals actually have more in common with one another than with conservatives. Libertarians generally want a very small government indeed, paid for by small (but adequate for the task) tax rates. Liberals generally want a larger government, financed by taxes more like those we had in the 1990s. Conservatives want the larger government as well (judging by their actions since they won effective control over the government in 2002), but want lower taxes; they theorize that these lower taxes will cause an economic boom that will actually increase tax receipts. Sometimes this works (it did under Mr. Reagan, although the government grew faster at the time than did tax receipts), but so far it hasn't under Mr. Bush.

It is, broadly speaking, the liberal position that increasing interest rates are a much greater threat to the economy than taxes at 1990s levels were. Moreover, it the tax cuts were aimed at boosting the economy in the short term, they weren't structured well. The problem here is philosophical--if you want to pump up a faltering economy, should you aim tax relief primarily at families that earn $30,000-$100,000 per year, in hopes of boosting spending, or at families earning above $200,000 in hopes of boosting investment. Mr. Bush's administration has opted for the latter course, with predictable results; the stock market has been booming, but working families are struggling. Liberals would have opted for the former course.

Welcome to the Polite Liberal

2004-11-09T19:01:00.000-08:00

In the aftermath of the 2004 election, it's become clear that many people have simply never heard a straightforward, polite explanation of a liberal political position. I'm hoping to remedy that here.

A few ground rules:

(1) For the most part, I'll focus on policy and not politics. There are many, many other blogs that follow the mechanics of our country's incessant political campaigning better than I ever could (or would want to).

(2) I'll adopt an unusual convention and always refer to political figures formally: Mr. Bush, Ms. Clinton, and so forth. I'm hoping that this will force a slighly formal tone on the site, and avoid name-calling.

(3) Because the Democratic Party is enormously fragmented, I'm sure many liberals will disagree with my depiction of a "typical liberal viewpoint." So be it; where disagreements occur I'll try to mention them.

(4) Rude emails and comments will be periodically mocked. Positions won't be.

I'll start tomorrow.