Looking Through Lovely Libertarian Glasses

When I was a kid the big complain was the bizarro world painted by "socialist realism". The hyped and deeply false world view sold by the commies.

Today the world is pervaded by its bizarro world version of reality, the kool-aid of Ayn Rand, that worships the individual and ignores any gummy social cohesion or social obligation. It is every man for himself in the wonder world of the political right. No mushy leftist "it takes a village to raise a child" in the libertarian worldview.

Here is a bit from a NY Times op-ed by Paul Krugman that shows the application of this libertarian "individualist realism" to politics in the US:

Mr. Daniels first berated the president for his “constant disparagement of people in business,” which happens to be a complete fabrication. Mr. Obama has never done anything of the sort. He went on: “The late Steve Jobs — what a fitting name he had — created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the president borrowed and blew.”

...

A big report in The Times last Sunday laid out the facts. Although Apple is now America’s biggest U.S. corporation as measured by market value, it employs only 43,000 people in the United States, a tenth as many as General Motors employed when it was the largest American firm.

Apple does, however, indirectly employ around 700,000 people in its various suppliers. Unfortunately, almost none of those people are in America.

...

Germany remains a highly successful exporter even with workers who cost, on average, $44 an hour — much more than the average cost of American workers. And this success has a lot to do with the support its small and medium-sized companies — the famed Mittelstand — provide to each other via shared suppliers and the maintenance of a skilled work force.

The point is that successful companies — or, at any rate, companies that make a large contribution to a nation’s economy — don’t exist in isolation. Prosperity depends on the synergy between companies, on the cluster, not the individual entrepreneur.

But the current Republican worldview has no room for such considerations. From the G.O.P.’s perspective, it’s all about the heroic entrepreneur, the John Galt, I mean Steve Jobs-type “job creator” who showers benefits on the rest of us and who must, of course, be rewarded with tax rates lower than those paid by many middle-class workers.

...

So we should be grateful to Mr. Daniels for his remarks Tuesday. He got his facts wrong, but he did, unintentionally, manage to highlight an important philosophical difference between the parties. One side believes that economies succeed solely thanks to heroic entrepreneurs; the other has nothing against entrepreneurs, but believes that entrepreneurs need a supportive environment, and that sometimes government has to help create or sustain that supportive environment.

And the view that it takes more than business heroes is the one that fits the facts.

For some reason most people want a cartoon cut-out version of reality. They want a simplified story that consoles them with a happy ending. The real world, just like Nature, is totally indifferent to humans, their aspirations, their needs, or their ideological fantasies. The real world is "red in tooth and claw" because it is so different from the normal human social world of cooperation and empathy. Humans have the ability to create a safe harbour from the cruelties of the world. Sadly, right wing nuts want to destroy the paradise and replace it with a fantasy of "the big man" who creates and destroys for his own pleasure with indifference to others. That is a cruel reality that is offered up by the libertarians as a "better future". Nuts!

Defining Your Terms in a Debate

The Republican Rick Perry has shown his disregard for the dictionary and his careless contempt for history and institutions by confusing a Ponzi scheme with Social Security. The following diagram shows the overlap between the two...

Click to Enlarge
Figure taken from a Mother Jones article
Using Perry logic I can conclude that he is really a she-devil who underwent a sex change which successfully transferred the gender but unfortunately left the intelligence behind.

The State of American Politics

Here's a bit from an article entitled "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult". It is written by a Republican, Mike Lofgren, who retired on June 17 after 28 years as a Congressional staffer. He served 16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees:

Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill.

You really should go read the whole article. It is an cry of desperation from somebody who has been inside the sausage factory.

The Republicans are just plain crazy. Here's more from that article:

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

... Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

... By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. ... Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"

And here is the scary effect of all this political machinations of the Republicans:

This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.

In this article he points out the tricks that Republicans use to distort the vote in their favour:

Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students.

This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting.

And here is what the Republican machine feeds on:

The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is more complicated than that. Historical circumstances produced the raw material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle class - without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary; their standard of living is shrinking.

What do the Democrats offer these people? Essentially nothing. ...

While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.

How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme?

You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash.

There is so much more worth reading in this article. I can't urge you enough to go read the whole article.

Hypocrisy on the Political Right

This is wonderful. It demonstrates the hypocrisy of the political right and their use of "economics" to further their agenda. From Jonathan Chait's blog at The New Republic:

While researching an item from earlier this morning -- yes, I do research, I just try to avoid talking to people -- I came across a fascinating exchange about the concept of economic stimulus. In 2001, the economy was undergoing a mild slowdown. Liberals generally argued that the scale of the problem was small enough for the Federal Reserve to handle with monetary policy, and didn't require a Keynesian fiscal stimulus. Conservatives took the opposite position. Here's a great exchange at a 2001 hearing in Congress between Paul Ryan, AEI economist Kevin Hassett, and Bob Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

Mr. GREENSTEIN. If I could just comment on it. As I have said before, I think the economic benefits are being overstated. The economy has slowed right now. I don't see how, particularly given the pace of the Senate, the checks are going to go out much before next summer. The CBO forecast you are operating on shows that by 2002 we have a full scale recovery from the recession.

I think we do have a problem right now, and our best mechanism right now is interest rates. I hope the Federal Reserve lowers them further. I think that is going to have a much bigger effect than anything you do on taxes because I don't think -- it is not that tax policy can't have a stimulative effect. It is very unlikely even this year to occur in time to make much difference.

Dr. HASSETT. I would just like to add, Mr. Ryan, that the economists who studied this were quite surprised to find that fiscal policy in recessions was reasonably effective. It is just that folks tried a first punch that was too light and that generally we didn't get big measures until well into the recession. So the reason that in the past fiscal policy hasn't pushed us out of recession is that we delayed.

So I think that Mr. Greenstein agrees, and he is saying it is not likely that we would pass it soon but I would argue this is why we should.

Mr. RYAN. That is precisely my point. That is why I like my porridge hot. I think we ought to have this income tax cut fast, deeper, retroactive to January 1st, to make sure we get a good punch into the economy, juice the economy to make sure that we can avoid a hard landing.

The concern I have around here is that everybody is talking about let's wait and see, let's see if they materialize. Well, $1.5 trillion have already materialized in the surplus since then-Governor Bush proposed this tax cut in the first place. The economy has soured. The growth of the projections of the surpluses are higher. So we have waited and we do see, and it is my concern that if we keep waiting and seeing we won't give the economy the boost it needs right now.

Greenstein is taking the sensible position that the 2001 recession seems mild enough that Keynesian tax cuts will not be needed -- by the time their stimulative effect kicks in, the economy should be growing again. Hassett, the conservative, replies that Keynesian fiscal policy during recessions works, and the only problem is that it's usually too small. And Ryan agrees!

Ryan and Hassett, of course, fiercely opposed the concept of fiscal stimulus in 2009. I don't see how you can explain progressing from that position to opposing Keynesian stimulus during a severe liquidity trap, the worst economic crisis since the depression, except as a function of pure partisanship.

The force of gravity is not sometimes downwards and sometimes upwards. But for the political right, Keynesianism is sometimes valid economics (if it can be used to lower taxes) and sometimes is invalid economics (if it might be used by a sitting Democratic President to juice the economy and save his political future). All politicians are liars and cheat, except that Republicans make Democrats look like pikers. While Democrats retail in small lies and exaggerations, Republicans wholesale it and are willing to destroy the nation with their lies while pounding their chests declaring they are "true patriots!"

Exposing the Lie of Republican Hysteria over "the Debt"

Just 8 months ago Republicans were not worried enough about "the crippling effects of the debt" to stop an extension of the Bush tax cuts. Obama did try to stop this extension, but the Republican demanded that the cuts continue despite the deficit they would cause.

But now 8 momths later they are willing to stop government and force the US to default on its obligations because "the US has too much debt". What? Nothing significant changed in the last 8 months except the political game the Republicans are playing.

Here is a bit from a politically impartial Federal Reserve study:

the rise in the national debt from the 1970s through 2007 is entirely a consequence of the federal government’s increase of expenditures without an offsetting increase in revenues to pay for that additional spending.

That's right. There is no "debt" problem. There is a problem with legislators failing to accompany a new expenditure bill with appropriate legislation raising funds to pay for it. Bush fought two wars, created a huge new prescription drug planentitlement, and cut taxes twice while keeping this spending implication of these actions "off the books". No wonder debt has soared. And creating a bubble, the 2008 financial crisis, has created a terrible recession which has cut government revenues. A deficit is normal in this kind of situation. But the Republicans have gone crazy and want to destroy the good credit rating of the US because of "deficits".

This is a phony crisis created by the Republicans to try and force concessions. Obama should go before the American people, tell them about this scandalous right wing behaviour, and stop the madness of austerity in the midst of a serious recession.

An Honest Reassessment of the Singularity

Ideas inevitably backfire because our initial enthusiasm and rush to achieve them overlook the complexities, and the darker aspects of reality. The transhumanists for many years have been selling the snake oil of "the singularity" with a doctrinal purity that overlooks the grimy details of real world shortcomings and short circuits and darker motives.

Here is a nice post by Brad DeLong on his blog Grasping Reality with Both Hands that looks at the singularity and discovers that we've already had several experiences of it:

Charlie Stross does not fear (or anticipate) the Singularity:

Three arguments against the singularity: I periodically get email from folks who, having read "Accelerando", assume I am some kind of fire-breathing extropian zealot who believes in the imminence of the singularity, the uploading of the libertarians, and the rapture of the nerds. I find this mildly distressing, and so I think it's time to set the record straight and say what I really think....

First: super-intelligent AI is unlikely... you get there... by way of human-equivalent AI, and human-equivalent AI is unlikely.... [H]uman intelligence... an emergent phenomenon of human physiology... only survived the filtering effect of evolution by enhancing human survival fitness in some way. Enhancements to primate evolutionary fitness are not much use to a machine, or to people who want to extract useful payback (in the shape of work) from a machine.... We may want machines that can recognize and respond to our motivations and needs, but we're likely to leave out the annoying bits, like needing to sleep for roughly 30% of the time, being lazy or emotionally unstable, and having motivations of its own.... We want computers that recognize our language and motivations and can take hints, rather than requiring instructions enumerated in mind-numbingly tedious detail. But whether we want them to be conscious and volitional is another question entirely. I don't want my self-driving car to argue with me about where we want to go today. I don't want my robot housekeeper to spend all its time in front of the TV watching contact sports or music videos. And I certainly don't want to be sued for maintenance by an abandoned software development project....

Uploading... is not obviously impossible.... Our form of conscious intelligence emerged from our evolutionary heritage, which in turn was shaped by our biological environment. We are not evolved for existence as disembodied intelligences, as "brains in a vat", and we ignore E. O. Wilson's Biophilia Hypothesis at our peril; I strongly suspect that the hardest part of mind uploading won't be the mind part, but the body and its interactions with its surroundings.

Moving on to the Simulation Argument: I can't disprove that, either... it offers a deity-free afterlife, as long as the ethical issues... are ignored.... [I]t would make a good free-form framework for a postmodern high-tech religion. Unfortunately it seems to be unfalsifiable, at least by the inmates (us)....

This is my take on the singularity: we're not going to see a hard take-off, or a slow take-off, or any kind of AI-mediated exponential outburst. What we're going to see is increasingly solicitous machines defining our environment — machines that sense and respond to our needs "intelligently". But it will be the intelligence of the serving hand rather than the commanding brain, and we're only at risk of disaster if we harbour self-destructive impulses. We may eventually see mind uploading... but beyond giving us an opportunity to run Nozick's experience machine thought experiment for real, I'm not sure we'd be able to make effective use of it — our hard-wired biophilia will keep dragging us back to the real world, or to simulations indistinguishable from it. Finally, the simulation hypothesis... suggests that if we are already living in a cyberspatial history simulation (and not a philosopher's hedonic thought experiment) we might not be able to apprehend the underlying "true" reality.... Any way you cut these three ideas, they don't provide much in the way of referent points for building a good life... it's unwise to live on the assumption that they're coming down the pipeline within my lifetime.

I'm done with computational theology: I think I need a drink!

Me? I think about four moments:

1. Pre-linguistic homo sapiens, who: (a) knew about fifty people; (b) hunted, gathered, cooperated, fought, and raised children; and (c) learned stuff only by watching what others did and what happened to them.


2. Linguistic hunter-gatherer homo sapiens, who: (a) knew perhaps fifty people--but had heard stories about up to 500 more; (b) hunted, gathered, cooperated, fought, and raised children but also bargained, allied, and promised; and (c) learned a huge amount of what had happened outside of his or her sight and hearing by talking and listening--was an anthology intelligence with the memory and experience not of one but of a hundred.


3. Agricultural metal-working chariot-driving reading-and-writing homo sapiens--at least the upper classes, the Atreids and the Chryseids--who: (a) farmed, herded (or took stuff from the farmers and herders), wrote down stories, claimed to have special knowledge of gods, claimed to be descended from gods and have the right to rule, trained as technologically-advanced chariot-driving specialists not just in human-on-animal hunting violence but in coercive violence, kept track of accounts, built or ordered the construction of the Lion Gate at Mycenae, etc.


4. Modern post-industrial high-mass-consumption web-surfing humanity--or at least the first-world upper middle classes--whose lives we know very well.

All of these strike me as partial singularities: in each case, about three-quarters of life is more or less the same as it had been earlier--and one-quarter is transformed utterly.

I like DeLong's take on this, i.e. we've seen this movie before and it isn't the showstopper that the promoter promised. Sure it is exciting but not in a way that anybody passing through the portal of then to now would really appreciate.

The part that DeLong doesn't play with is how snake oil salesmen only talk about the revitalizing and curative powers of their potion in a bottle. They don't mention the side-effects. They never point out that to get the miracle cure your teeth will fall out, your face muscles will go slack, and you will drool.

The message is simple: the future will be a lot like now. And if there are some benefits to be had, the rich and the powerful, the criminal and the impatient, will beat you to it and open Pandora's box and discover the surprises within. If it is truly better, then they will pull a Clarence Thomas, climb up through the singularity, and pull up the ladder after them leaving us to watch as they take the mothership to a place far beyond where we in our miserable grubby lives will ever go.

I don't know how the future will unfold, but I know it will be more complex, more nuanced, more surprising, and more disappointing than any hawker of singularity has ever presented.

The View from the Left

Here is an interesting video from the left looking at US politics. I especially enjoy the "trip down memory lane" from minutes 7:00 to 13:00 which reviews Obama's campaign promises. It is a long litany of broken promises. Sad. The video from 50:00 to 53:00 reviews Obama's actions while in office. This is a long list of actions exactly contrary to what candidate Obama promised. Tragedy!

Watch this video:



Listening to Obama on election night saying "Change has come to America" is like a stab through the heart. Where is the change? I don't see it. Obama is a "kinder, gentler version of Bush and the Republicans, but I don't see a fundamental change to bring prosperity back to pjavascript:void(0)eople instead of the banks and the ultra-rich".

I love the bit at 37:00 where Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont talks about "a war within America" where those who have so much want "more and more weath, more and more power".

Obama Declares Victory!

This graph from the Calculated Risk blog shows you why Obama's "cool indifference" to horrible economic performance has gotten the Republican party so excited. They smell blood in the water and are now closing in for a 2012 kill...

Click to Enlarge
I'm amazed that Obama failed to learn the lesson of 1992 when Clinton astutely used the magic "open sesame" to winning the presidency: "it's the economy, stupid".

Obama has consistently, stupidly, obstinately claimed since Spring 2009 that his stimulus bill has "done the job" and was "what was needed" and "saved the country". If FDR behaved the way Obama does, then in April 1942 after the Doolittle raid on Tokyo, he would have declared "victory" over Japan and brought all the troops home.

Sizing Up the Other Fellow

Here's a nice piece by Dean Baker pointing out the oddity of the political right in the US which loves to claim that public sector workers get "too much" but then are blind to the choke-a-horse excesses in certain sectors of the private economy, e.g. Wall Street:

The Washington Post told readers that the battle over pay for public sector employees, "comes down to a matter of perception over what qualifies as modest and what is too much."

This is not true. Many of the people who are advocating cuts in compensation for public employees support much larger pay packages in other contexts. For example, the overwhelming majority of public employees earn less than $100,000 and can only start collecting full pensions after 30 years of work.

By contrast, many Wall Street executives earn well over a million a year and can often walk away with multi-million dollar packages while still in their 50s or even 40s. Few of the people who have been at the forefront in protesting generous pay packages for public sector workers have been complaining about Wall Street pay. They have not even been bothered by high pay at banks that get government subsidies in the form of "too big to fail" insurance.

For another example, the economists at the IMF can often retire with 6-figure pensions in their early 50s. The IMF has been at the forefront in demanding that governments raise their retirement ages and reduce the generosity of benefits.

The question is absolutely not "what qualifies as modest and what is too much." This is entirely a question of how much mid-level and lower level public sector employees should earn relative to other actors in the economy. Many of those who earn far more than these public sector employees want to see their pay cut.

Go read the original to get the embedded links.

How Media Poisons the Well of Politics

Dean Baker has a post in his Beat the Press blog that is funny and very pointed. It makes clear that media has a role in the sour, divisional, partisan politics in the US because media doesn't bother to convey the necessary facts to allow the electorate to make sound political judgements:

The NYT somehow thinks that it's good journalism not to point out that people who say that the earth is flat are wrong. How else can one explain the fact that it reports on Representative Paul Ryan's presidential ambitions (or lack thereof) and notes in passing that he has different views on how to constrain health care costs and promote growth than President Obama.

Representative Ryan's views on both topics have been tested and shown to be wrong. The government run Medicare program is far more effective in constraining costs than the private sector. This is why the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that adopting Representative Ryan's plan would add $30 trillion to the cost of buying Medicare equivalent plans over Medicare's 75-year planning horizon.

This is not the sum transferred from the government to beneficiaries. It is the increase in total costs -- waste to the government, income to insurers and health care providers. This $30 trillion figure is approximately 6 times the size of the projected Social Security shortfall. It comes to almost $100,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country.

We also have had ample opportunity to test Representative Ryan's other main theme, that lower taxes are necessary to boost growth. President Reagan had large tax cuts in the 80s. This was the worst decade for growth in the post-war period until the last decade when President Bush had another big round of tax cuts. This is why CBO projects that tax cuts do not pay for themselves and will lead to deficits that will be a drag on growth.

Given the overwhelming weight of the evidence, the NYT is misleading readers when it reports that:

"And Mr. Ryan is making a counter case — tax cuts are needed to stir economic growth, and Medicare is on an unsustainable path — as he travels through towns like North Prairie, Delavan and Clinton, population 2,162."

The reporter should know that Mr. Ryan's case does not make sense and should not imply to readers that it does.

Go read the original to get the embedded links.

In the future, people will back at the Tea Party and be amazed that such strange views took root as a populist movement. But sadly they won't have access to the "environment" that the media creates by selectively filtering fact out and passing fiction on as if it were fact. They will have no idea how media has poisoned politics in America.

Truth in Media

Dean Baker posts an article on his blog Beat the Press to point out how truth is whittled down and dressed up in the media:

Medicare Costs More Under Ryan Plan and the Iraq War Costs More Than a Hamburger

The NYT produced its entry in the understatement of the year contest telling readers that:

"A Congressional Budget Office review of the Ryan proposal predicted that retirees would pay more for their health care under it than they would under traditional Medicare."

Yes, this is true. But this is not a question of spending a few extra dollars a month for health care under the Ryan plan. The CBO projections show that under the Ryan plan, seniors would soon be spending more than half of their income to buy a Medicare equivalent plan. This is both due to the cost shifting from the government to individuals, but even more importantly CBO projects that Ryan's plan will lead to much higher health care expenses since it will be less effective in containing costs than the traditional Medicare program.

The CBO projections imply that Ryan's plan would add more than $30 trillion to the cost of providing Medicare equivalent policies over the program's 75-year planning period. The additional cost under the Ryan plan is an amount that is approximately equal to $100,000 for every person in the country or 6 times the size of the projected Social Security shortfall. This sum is the pure waste, it does not count the costs shifted from the government to seniors.

Yep, the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan is a boat that is bigger than a bathtub. Oh, and the Empire State Building has more floors than my bungalow. All true statements. All can be "honestly" reported by the media. But they leave out a je ne sais quoi, an essence, a hint of the truth... the one is so much bigger than the other that it is implicitly a lie to talk of them as being in the same category.

Those retirees expecting to pay "more" on their medical care are going to be surprised big time when they discover it requires half their income to cover the missing dollars. Won't that be a surprise! Won't the Republicans have a knee slappin' good old time about that fast one they pulled?

Greenhouse Gas

Here is a nice article from the Financial Post that lays out the case that the debate over global warming has been hijacked by hysteria:

Let's be perfectly clear. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and other things being equal, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the warmer the planet. Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet. But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much.

Most scientists, on both sides, also agree on how much a given increase in the level of carbon dioxide raises the planet's temperature, if just the extra carbon dioxide is considered. These calculations come from laboratory experiments; the basic physics have been well known for a century.

The disagreement comes about what happens next.

The planet reacts to that extra carbon dioxide, which changes everything. Most critically, the extra warmth causes more water to evaporate from the oceans. But does the water hang around and increase the height of moist air in the atmosphere, or does it simply create more clouds and rain? Back in 1980, when the carbon dioxide theory started, no one knew. The alarmists guessed that it would increase the height of moist air around the planet, which would warm the planet even further, because the moist air is also a greenhouse gas.

This is the core idea of every official climate model: For each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three -so two-thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors); only one-third is due to extra carbon dioxide.

That's the core of the issue. All the disagreements and misunderstandings spring from this. The alarmist case is based on this guess about moisture in the atmosphere, and there is simply no evidence for the amplification that is at the core of their alarmism.

Go read the whole article to get the details of how the climate science went off the rails.

Here's his take on the political efforts to reduce CO2 emissions:

Even if we stopped emitting all carbon dioxide tomorrow, completely shut up shop and went back to the Stone Age, according to the official government climate models it would be cooler in 2050 by about 0.015 degrees. But their models exaggerate 10-fold -in fact our sacrifices would make the planet in 2050 a mere 0.0015 degrees cooler!

What worries me is that a proper cost-benefit analysis has not been done. The effort of the "global warming" crowd is to reduce CO2 with no regard for its effect on the economy. If I were convinced that there were a real problem, then I would grit my teeth and support CO2 reduction. But I just don't see the "science" that justifies the draconian claims of the "global warming" types.

How Politics Bends, Twists, and Distorts

Just six months ago Christina Romer was the Chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisors and played along with the "the Goldilocks story of a just right stimulus and everything is going tickety-boo. Now that she is outside of the distortion field known as "politics" where up is down, and right is left, and yes means no, she is suddenly telling a different story.

From Ben Smith's blog at Politico.com:

President Obama’s former top economic advisor sharply criticized the federal government for failing to take more aggressive action against unemployment.

“I frankly don’t understand why policy makers aren’t more worried about the suffering of real families,” former Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer, who left the Administration last fall, said during a discussion at Vanderbilt University in Nashville Tuesday. “I think there are tools we have tools we have that we can use, and I think it’s shameful that we’re not using them.”

Romer had been a voice inside the Obama Administration pressing for a larger ecnomic stimulus and more aggressive government action from the early days of the Administration, and she’s continued to make that case from the outside in a New York Times column.

But the sharpness of her criticism reflected deep concern among many Democratic economists about a political consensus that the federal government has to rein in expensive attempts to restart the economy even as rising oil prices again put a damper on growth.

“We need to realize that there is still a lot of devastation out there,” Romer said, calling the 8.9% unemployment rate "an absolute crisis."

“If I have a complaint about policy these days, it’s that we’re not doing enough," she said. "That goes all the way up to the Federal Reserve, [which] could be taking more aggressive action. It goes to the Congress and the Administration – there are fiscal policy actions they could be taking.”

“And don’t tell me you can’t [take those actions] because of the deificit because I think there are fiscally responsible ways,” she said.

Romer suggested that extending the payroll tax break to the empoyer side of the payroll tax could spur the economy; she suggested that Congress simultaneously pass a comprehensive, long-term plan for reducing the deficit.

I'm always amazed that when people have power they make terrible decisions. But once out of power, the scales fall from their eyes and they suddenly see the light and know exactly what they should have done. Fat good that does. They needed to do the right thing while in power. It does no good to call for those in power to do the right thing if you can't do the right thing when you are in power!

Hollywood as Your Moral Compass

This raises some interesting questions about letting Hollywood stars define your "political issues" for you...

Robert Redford:


James Cameron:


From the UK's Independent newspaper, here's the key bit:

For years, they've preached green living while travelling the world in SUVs, limousines and private jets. But now Hollywood's foremost tree-huggers face the prospect of being exposed as eco-hypocrites – in the very medium that finances their extravagant carbon footprints in the first place.

Robert Redford became the latest movie star to have his environmental credentials publicly ridiculed on film this week, when a hostile documentary was released in which he stood accused of failing to practise the environmentalism that he so vehemently preaches.

The short film, Robert Redford: Hypocrite, was released on Friday, via YouTube, to coincide with the closing days of his Sundance Film Festival. Depending on your point of view, it represented either a cheap hatchet-job or a stunning evisceration of a pioneering green activist who was once lauded on Time Magazine's list of environmental "superheroes".

According to the film, Redford recently sold a dozen plots of land near to the Sundance ski resort in Utah, which he owns, to developers seeking to build luxury homes there. The revelation is especially contentious because each of the sites sits on an undeveloped ridge, in what was previously wilderness. Ironically, Redford recently stuck his head above the parapet to lobby against a similar project in California's Napa Valley, where he keeps a home. Mind you, the film points out, the nimby-ish actor did not stand to profit from the Napa development. The plots of land near Sundance, by contrast, fetched him around $2m each.

"It's the hypocrisy that gets me," said the film's Irish director, Phelim McAleer. "He's taking a lovely virgin ridge and building McMansions on it. Granted, they're nice, lefty, eco-McMansions. But they're McMansions all the same. At the same time, he's trying to stop other people from building houses in a nice spot." The film also points out that Redford, 74, has often called for the world to reduce its carbon footprint, while simultaneously accepting the shilling of United Airlines, for which he performed voiceovers in aTV advert proclaiming that "it's time to fly"

For more, read the whole article.

A Man After My Own Heart

Here is Satoshi Kanazawa at his Psychology Today blog, The Scientific Fundamentalist, printing his righteous interpretation of the US's Second Amendment:

The Second Amendment Right to Keep and Bear Nuclear Weapons

The Second Amendment has nothing specifically to do with guns

The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees the right of every American citizen to own and operate their own nuclear weapons.

The Second Amendment in its entirety reads:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The Founding Fathers wanted to guarantee individuals’ right to keep and bear arms in the Constitution, so that they can defend their states from the unlawful infringements of the Federal government. If the Federal government decides to invade and take over a state, its citizens should be able to defend themselves with their own weapons.

Notice that the Second Amendment does not specifically mention guns at all, only arms. It gave people the right to own guns, because that’s what the soldiers of the Federal government had. If the soldiers of the Federal government invade a state with their guns blazing, then the citizens of the state should be able to return fire with their own guns.

But that was a long time ago – 1791, to be exact – and the hardware of the soldiers of the US Armed Forces has considerably advanced since then. Now the US Armed Forces have bombs, supersonic fighter jets, tanks, aircraft carriers, submarines, laser-guided missiles, and, yes, nuclear bombs.

When Barack Obama decides to send his Socialist Muslim Army down south to invade South Carolina, how are the good people of South Carolina going to defend themselves with automatic pistols and high-power rifles? Obama has his finger on the button. He has access to a large nuclear arsenal as well as efficient means to deliver it. The Francis Marion of the 21st century will need much more than automatic pistols and high-power rifles, let alone muskets, in order to keep South Carolina a free state.

If the invading army has nuclear bombs, and the Stealth Bombers and nuclear submarines to deliver them, why shouldn’t the citizens of South Carolina (and every other state) have the right to own and deploy nuclear weapons to defend themselves and to keep their state free? (We’ll return later to the thorny problem of how the good people of Colorado can keep their submarines.) If the soldiers of the Federal Armed Forces have upgraded their hardware in the last 200 years, so must citizens of the United States, in order to fight them.

We the United States needed nuclear weapons because the Soviet Union had them, so that we could deter them and keep them from invading us. Now that the US Armed Forces have nuclear weapons, every citizen of the United States must have them as well to deter the Federal government from usurping our freedom and invading our states. It is essential “to the security of a free State.”

Thus, the logic of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States stipulates that the right of the people to keep and bear nuclear weapons, supersonic fighter jets, laser-guided missiles and nuclear submarines shall not be infringed.

Or, alternatively, what Seth Meyers said

Since I'm in Canada, I don't get to see what Seth Meyers said on SNL [something about the US's interest in keeping Canada the land of the pure and the innocent, unexposed to greedy commercial interests sited in the US, you know, "copyright"], but I'm sure Seth argued the right of Americans to own pulse cannons, Varon-T disruptors, Thalaron radiation, and Chroniton torpedoes (more details here). What self-respecting American would have an armamentarium with less than these cutting edge weapons?

I don't want to hear about school shootouts anymore. I want to hear how a kid brought a gravimetric torpedo to school and obliterated the school and all its occupants. Now that would be newsworthy! And that would show that Americans are serious about their right to bear arms!

Inflation and Rising Food Prices

There is a lot of chatter about inflation and how food prices are out of control and how speculators are driving up prices. I suspect speculators are adding to prices, but the chatter over food prices is premature and exaggerated. Here are some graphs from an economics research team at the Bank of Montreal:


That makes it clear that this isn't the "food crisis" of 2008. This is much smaller in scale. They also point out that:

Though market fundamentals differ by commodity, the increase in food prices overall is not likely to be as large as during 2007-08. First, while farm prices have generally risen, the increase is not as broad-based, partly because global stocks of key commodities are expected to be adequate. For instance, prices of wheat, corn, soybean and rice, adjusted for inflation, are still well below their 2008 peaks (Chart 3). Second, whereas a broad global inflationary climate helped to fuel agricultural price gains during 2007-08, the current substantial excess capacity in developed nations should contain prices. The fact that the price of crude oil—closely correlated with farm prices through the bioenergy link—is unlikely to return to 2008 levels also points to a more limited rally.

What should be obvious is that food prices are very volatile, and given the crop failures you would expect prices to jump. But assuming a return to more normal crop conditions, prices should ease back in line over the next couple of years:


So I plan to not get sucked into the gloom-and-doom crowd's excitement about yet another disaster that they see impending. The truth is, food prices are volatile and we just had some bad luck with weather. But there is no reason to extrapolate that into an end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it scenario.

An Inconvenient Truthiness

Warren Meyer runs the website climate-skeptic.com and has made an interesting and informative video on "global warming". This is an excellent anti-dote to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. It comes in 9 parts:

Part 1:


Part 2:


Part 3:


Part 4:


Part 5:


Part 6:


Part 7:


Part 8:


Part 9:

Putting Honey Bees Into Proper Perspective

There are a lot of people who make careers as gloom prognosticators of "our end" caused by (pick one) spiritual apathy, CO2 gas, exhausted resource, over-population, greed, HIV, peak oil, right wing Christian militias, teenage sexual promiscuity, this generation's moral decadence, rock & roll, etc.

Here's a post by my favourite ant researcher, Alex Wild, who normally quietly spends his time photographing ants and entertaining his blog readers with endless details about ants. But some mis-guided "green" who is worried that CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) means the end of all bees, has got him riled up:

Honey bees are lovely creatures. I’m rather fond of them, and for that reason I keep a couple hives and teach a beekeeping class at the University.

But I’m not so fond that I can stomach this sort of meaningless new-agey crap:

Bees are not just commercial pollinators. They are intrinsic to the ever-unfolding miracle of nature. Sometimes in the summer I go out to the blackberry patch in our front yard, and watch the bees. They remain endlessly fascinating to me. And yet, if CCD isn’t halted, nobody will be going out to watch bees. A massive die-off will change the face of nature, and will be one more devastating insult to the global biosphere.

If gloom-and-doom commentators are correct, the Americas must once have looked like this:


An artist's depiction of the American landscape, prior to the introduction of European honey bees in 1622.

The honey bee was brought to our continent by European settlers in the 1600′s. Before then, our ecosystems functioned with several thousand species of native bees. Many of which are still around. You might know them as bumble bees, mining bees, leafcutting bees, and others.

Colony Collapse Disorder -- which affects only honey bees -- is a serious problem. Many fruit & nut crops depend on honey bee pollination. But the loss of a third of honey bee colonies is primarily a concern for agricultural interests. Our ecosystems are not going to unravel just because a single imported species gets less common.

I'm convinced that the decline of educational standards and the abysmal ignorance of science in the US is creating the popularity of doom-and-gloom charlatans. A little historical knowledge, a little science, and a good dose of common sense will usually dispell the gloom that one of these snake-oil salesmen is trying to seduce you with.

The Real Story behind Socialist Obama's Trillion Dollar Deficits

Here's a bit from a NY Times op-ed by Paul Krugman trying to set the record straight:

Here’s the narrative you hear everywhere: President Obama has presided over a huge expansion of government, but unemployment has remained high. And this proves that government spending can’t create jobs.

Here’s what you need to know: The whole story is a myth. There never was a big expansion of government spending. In fact, that has been the key problem with economic policy in the Obama years: we never had the kind of fiscal expansion that might have created the millions of jobs we need.

Ask yourself: What major new federal programs have started up since Mr. Obama took office? Health care reform, for the most part, hasn’t kicked in yet, so that can’t be it. So are there giant infrastructure projects under way? No. Are there huge new benefits for low-income workers or the poor? No. Where’s all that spending we keep hearing about? It never happened.

To be fair, spending on safety-net programs, mainly unemployment insurance and Medicaid, has risen — because, in case you haven’t noticed, there has been a surge in the number of Americans without jobs and badly in need of help. And there were also substantial outlays to rescue troubled financial institutions, although it appears that the government will get most of its money back. But when people denounce big government, they usually have in mind the creation of big bureaucracies and major new programs. And that just hasn’t taken place.

Consider, in particular, one fact that might surprise you: The total number of government workers in America has been falling, not rising, under Mr. Obama. A small increase in federal employment was swamped by sharp declines at the state and local level — most notably, by layoffs of schoolteachers. Total government payrolls have fallen by more than 350,000 since January 2009.

There's more. Go read the whole op-ed to get all the gory details.

So the truth is one thing but the propaganda is another. You wonder why the President can't counter the lies. Where is the leadership from Obama? Here's Krugman's assessment:

The answer to the second question — why there’s a widespread perception that government spending has surged, when it hasn’t — is that there has been a disinformation campaign from the right, based on the usual combination of fact-free assertions and cooked numbers. And this campaign has been effective in part because the Obama administration hasn’t offered an effective reply.

Actually, the administration has had a messaging problem on economic policy ever since its first months in office, when it went for a stimulus plan that many of us warned from the beginning was inadequate given the size of the economy’s troubles. You can argue that Mr. Obama got all he could — that a larger plan wouldn’t have made it through Congress (which is questionable), and that an inadequate stimulus was much better than none at all (which it was). But that’s not an argument the administration ever made. Instead, it has insisted throughout that its original plan was just right, a position that has become increasingly awkward as the recovery stalls.

And a side consequence of this awkward positioning is that officials can’t easily offer the obvious rebuttal to claims that big spending failed to fix the economy — namely, that thanks to the inadequate scale of the Recovery Act, big spending never happened in the first place.

But if they won’t say it, I will: if job-creating government spending has failed to bring down unemployment in the Obama era, it’s not because it doesn’t work; it’s because it wasn’t tried.

The tragedy is that Americans will go to the polls in a few weeks and toss out Democrats because Obama has been completely inept in leading the country. He hasn't had a "message". He hasn't put a clear program out to get the country "back to work". He hasn't even sounded all that concerned that unemployment is the highest it has been in 80 years and that millions have lost and continue to lose their houses! What kind of leadership is that?

Religious Tolerance

All the fake outrage in the US over a mosque "at Ground Zero" is disgusting. Here's a clip from Keith Olbermann to give some context and some rationality:



Instead of confrontation, maybe accomodation is the answer. Here's the Canadian approach.

I think the Canadian approach will have the more positive consequences in the long run. But Canada doesn't have the political fanatics manipulating the media that the poor American unfortunately has to put up with.