Semi-Daily Journal Archive

The Blogspot archive of the weblog of J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics and Chair of the PEIS major at U.C. Berkeley, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

How Close Are We to Full Employment?

General Glut argues--based on a chart of the employment-to-population ratio for the male noninstitutional population 25-64--that we are still far below any reasonable definition of full employment.

I agree. But I worry about early retirements--men in their late fifties and early sixties who really don't want to work anymore. So I prefer to look at the male non-institutional population 25-54:

MEtP

It took two full decades--from 1980 to 2000--for "full employment" for this group to drop from 91% to 89%. It strains credulity to argue that in the last five years "full employment" for this group has dropped down to 87%.

John Dickerson: "You Can't Have a Press That Works, or Functions, without Anonymous Sources"

Now comes Media Matters for America, bringing the following paragraph from Time of October 13, 2003, and asking why Time did not include something like the boldfaced sentence I have added to the end of the paragraph:

TIME Magazine Archive Article -- Leaking With A Vengeance: What shook up the intelligence community also roiled the capital and set in motion the now familiar chain of scapegoating and backstabbing that has poisoned the past two presidencies. Having fumbled around in the drawer for months looking for a weapon to use against Bush, the Democrats saw an opening. On top of a moody economy, a messy war, a swelling budget deficit and a deeply polarized electorate, the leak charges came as Bush's poll numbers had sunk to the lowest point in his tenure. Indeed, with the presidential election a little more than a year away, only 37% of Americans believe the country is on the right track, according to the latest New York Times/CBS poll. When word spread last week that the Department of Justice (DOJ) was launching a full criminal probe into who had leaked Plame's identity, Democrats immediately raised a public alarm: How could Justice credibly investigate so secretive an Administration, especially when the investigators are led by Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose former paid political consultant Karl Rove was initially accused by Wilson of being the man behind the leak? A TIME review of federal and state election records reveals that Ashcroft paid Rove's Texas firm $746,000 for direct-mail services in two gubernatorial campaigns and one Senate race from 1984 through 1994. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said accusations of Rove's peddling information are "ridiculous." Says McClellan: "There is simply no truth to that suggestion." But Time reporters have good reason to believe that McClellan's denials are not accurate.

The paragraph without the boldfaced sentence at the end--the paragraph, that is, that Time actually published--is, Media Matters asserts and I agree, misleading. At least three people who worked on the Time story--Michael Duffy, Matthew Cooper, John Dickerson, and quite possibly more--knew that McClellan's statement was false. Yet the words of the paragraph Time published don't say or hint that it was false.

Now comes Media Matters once again, giving us John Dickerson's attempt to explain to Al Franken why it would have been unethical for Time to set its readers straight by adding that last, boldfaced, sentence to the paragraph.

I think Dickerson's explanation is completely unsuccessful:

Media Matters:

FRANKEN: [T]here [were] things like quoting Scott McClellan saying the White House had nothing to do with this, that kind of thing, where you guys knew that he was not telling -- that what he was saying wasn't true. And that you allowed it to stand without saying, "We know this not to be true."... [T]here are some people a little peeved....

DICKERSON: Yes, there are some people peeved about that.... [T]he reason you can't just come out and say, "They're big liars, they're big liars," is because you end up giving up a source....

FRANKEN: Do you really give up the source, or do you just go, "They're big liars, they're big liars, but we won't say who"--

DICKERSON: Well, you can't do that, because you can't, for one of two reasons. One, you've got to show your proof, you can't just say "They're big liars, and we know something you don't, and that's--but we're not going to say any more." And if you say we do know they're liars, when they're talking about whether Karl Rove was involved or not, the only way--

FRANKEN: Well, wait a minute, wait a minute, why can't you say, "They're big liars, they're big liars," and not show your proof? Because you don't show your proof all the time.

DICKERSON: Well, but you can't, you can't say, in that instance, it's--if you say, "We're certain we know," there's only one way you could be, or in this case, when you're talking about Karl Rove, there are only ways, you know there's, if you know, you know it's Karl. I mean, you can't--

FRANKEN: Well, you're in an odd position, because you guys are--

DICKERSON: You are in an odd position, I guess, but the larger point is this: You have a source, and you make an agreement with that source not to blow their identity. That, you have to keep that agreement. And the reason you do that, even in a situation where some people may, for all those people who may hate Karl Rove and this White House and want them to be outed, you've got to remember that the same protections are the ones that protected the people who came forth about the NSA wiretapping. And people come forward about things all the time knowing their cover isn't going to get blown. Sometimes it's in an instance that people would like, because it uncovers an NSA wiretapping scheme that they don't think is appropriate, and in some cases it protects people that they hate and would like to see run out on a rail. But you can't pick and chose....

FRANKEN: Can't you just, like, hint--

DICKERSON: You can't have a, you can't have a, you can't have a situation, you can't have a press that works, or that functions, without anonymous sources.

FRANKEN: I understand.

DICKERSON: I mean, maybe in a perfect world, we'd like no anonymous sources ever--

FRANKEN: No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

DICKERSON: --and it's all, but you can't, if one person decides, well, I'm going to break this because in this instance it's compelled, now, of course, I mean, if it's a murder, or some other--situation, perhaps you have a situation where you're saving lives by breaking a confidence, that's another matter. But in this, but in, in order for the system to stay whole, you have to keep your promises.

Dickerson says that the system will break down if reporters don't keep their promises to confidential sources, and that those promises prohibit them from hinting that McClellan's false statements are in fact false. But it's not that easy. The system also breaks down when readers think reporters are misleading them.

In fact, I think the system has already broken down.

Can I ever read another article by Dickerson without a voice whispering in the back of my brain: "Is Dickerson's dance with his sources leading him to mislead me?"?

Fire Stuart Taylor, Jr. Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Do It Now.

Ah. Back in 2004 Stuart Taylor, Jr., was an enthusiastic endorser of the Bushies' deeds at Guantanamo, with phrases like "It's easy to sit in judgment on those assigned to deal with the threat of catastrophic terrorism.... Telling a prisoner that he or his family will be killed unless he talks is not torture.... Torture may be justified.... [D]efine "torture" narrowly enough on a case-by-case basis to leave considerable leeway for tough, coercive interrogation.... [U]ndue fastidiousness in interrogating terrorists could lead to the preventable murders of thousands of people..." Now Stuart Taylor Jr. says that he has "suspected for years" that the Bushies were up to no good in Guantanamo.

Feh.

When, in mid 2004, Erin Waters of the National Journal wrote me to ask why I had not resubscribed, I wrote back saying that I would never pay another cent to the National Journal as long as it employed ethically-challenged lawyers like Stuart Taylor Jr. who took America's major edge--that we are the Good Guys--and threw it in the trash. I had examples:

Why I Will Not Resubscribe to the National Journal:

Stuart Taylor: There is no evidence that the administration ever approved "torture" (which it has defined extremely narrowly) as a matter of policy. Justice did approve a number of highly coercive, still-classified interrogation methods, such as feigning suffocation and subjecting prisoners to sleep deprivation and "stress positions." Using such methods, the CIA squeezed valuable information out of Qaeda leaders...

Stuart Taylor: Some of the attacks on the recently leaked Bush administration legal memoranda about the use of torture and lesser forms of coercion to extract information are a bit facile. It's easy to sit in judgment on those assigned to deal with the threat of catastrophic terrorism. It's much harder to provide morally or legally satisfying answers.... Telling a prisoner that he or his family will be killed unless he talks is not torture, for example, unless the threat is of "imminent" death...

Stuart Taylor: Torture may be justified in rare [cases].... [W]hat about the Qaeda member caught by Philippine intelligence agents in 1995 in a Manila bomb factory? Defiant through 67 days of savage torture -- most of his ribs broken, cigarettes burned into his private parts -- he finally cracked when threatened (falsely) with being turned over to Israel's Mossad. And he revealed the so-called "Bojinka" plot to crash 11 U.S. airliners and 4,000 passengers into the Pacific...

Stuart Taylor: The best way to minimize the conflict between the need for aggressive interrogation and the prohibitions of human-rights law may be to define "torture" narrowly enough on a case-by-case basis to leave considerable leeway for tough, coercive interrogation short of excessive brutality.... Coercive interrogation of suspected terrorists is arguably legal.... This view... seems right.... [U]ndue fastidiousness in interrogating terrorists could lead to the preventable murders of thousands of people...

Stuart Taylor: [I]t's clear... there should be no Miranda warnings or lawyers for suspected Qaeda terrorists.... The same logic holds to some extent even if the suspect is a U.S. citizen, and even if he is seized on U.S. soil, as in the case of the Brooklyn-born Padilla...

http://nationaljournal.com/members/buzz/2004/openingargument/070604.htm http://nationaljournal.com/members/buzz/2004/openingargument/061404.htm http://nationaljournal.com/members/buzz/2004/openingargument/051004.htm http://nationaljournal.com/members/buzz/2004/openingargument/051004.htm
http://nationaljournal.com/members/buzz/2003/openingargument/031003.htm

And, yes, now--many days late and many dollars short--Stuart Taylor, Jr. has changed his tune. Gary Farber points us to:

Stuart Taylor: Falsehoods About Guantanamo (02/06/2006): [C]ountless assertions by administration officials over the past four years that all -- or the vast majority -- of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are Qaeda terrorists or Taliban fighters captured on "the battlefield"... have been false.... [M]any of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo... were captured on Afghan battlefields or were terrorists... [but] many of us have suspected for years:

  • A high percentage, perhaps the majority, of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo were not captured on any battlefield...
  • Fewer than 20 percent of the Guantanamo detainees, the best available evidence suggests, have ever been Qaeda members.
  • Many scores... were innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants with no intention of joining the Qaeda campaign to murder Americans.
  • The majority were... handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability. These locals had strong incentives to tar as terrorists any and all Arabs they could get their hands on... including noncombatant teachers and humanitarian workers. And the Bush administration has apparently made very little effort to corroborate the plausible claims of innocence detailed by many of the men who were handed over....

The tribunal hearings, based largely on such guilt-by-association logic, have been travesties of unfairness. The detainees are presumed guilty unless they can prove their innocence -- without help from lawyers and without being permitted to know the details and sources of the evidence against them. This evidence is almost entirely hearsay from people without firsthand knowledge and statements from other detainees desperate to satisfy their brutally coercive interrogators. One file says, "Admitted to knowing Osama bin Laden," based on an interrogation in which the detainee -- while being pressed to "admit" this, despite his denials -- finally said in disgust, "OK, I knew him; whatever you want."... The administration's unspoken logic appears to be: Better to ruin the lives of 10 innocent men than to let one who might be a terrorist go free.

This logic would be understandable if the end of protecting American lives justified any and all means, including the wrecking of many more innocent non-American lives. So, too, would be the torture (or near-torture) in late 2002 of the above-mentioned al-Kahtani... interrogated for 18 to 20 hours a day for 48 of 54 days; he had water dripped on his head and was blasted with cold air-conditioning and loud music to keep him awake; his beard and head were shaved; he was forced to wear a bra and panties and to dance with a male jailer; he was hooded; he was menaced with a dog, told to bark like one and led around on a leash; he was pumped full of intravenous fluids and forced to urinate on himself; he was straddled by a female interrogator and stripped naked; and more -- all under a list of interrogation methods personally approved by Rumsfeld. Al-Kahtani may well have had valuable information. But it appears that many other detainees who had no information... have been put through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions" in a systematic effort to break their wills that is "tantamount to torture."...

Bush has... pledged that the Guantanamo detainees are treated "humanely." At the same time, he has stressed, "I know for certain... that these are bad people" -- all of them, he has implied.

If the president believes either of these assertions, he is a fool. If he does not, choose your own word for him.

Stuart Taylor Jr. Many days late. Many dollars short. And not a single sentence apologizing for his enthusiastic endorsements of the Bushies in the past.

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now. Impeach Richard Cheney. Fire Stuart Taylor too.

Physics and Iridescent Contract Theory

In biology, Intelligent Design. In linguistics, Wrathful Dispersionism. And now in physics, Iridescent Contract Theory.

In comments, Derek writes:

Wrathful Dispersionism: Meanwhile, physicists are trying to stop Iridescent Contract Theory from being a required part of the Optics syllabus. IC theory says that the complex colours of the rainbow cannot be explained by something as simple as refraction, but is more likely to be the record of an agreement made by some entity (nature unknown) with some other entity to do something. Critics of IC say it's just God's Covenant With Noah [about the rainbow] with the names crossed out...

Friday, February 10, 2006

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Him Now

Eric Umansky writes:

Eric Umansky: Because Car Safety = Communist: TNR on another fine presidential appointee: Nicole Nason will head the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. As TNR puts it, "that means Nason will be car-crash prevention czar in a country where around 50,000 people die annually in auto accidents":

So what are the 35-year-old Nason's qualifications? According to her official bio she's currently the Transportation Department's liason to Congress and other agencies, which is a largely political job; previously she did the same thing at the Customs Department. Before that she was a flack--a press aide to GOP Congressman Porter Goss and earlier still a spokesperson for the House GOP's Clinton impeachment operation. Not exactly Ralph Nader, is she? But to the extent that Nason is versed in some highway-safety issues, that might not be such a desirable thing. Per The Washington Post:

Nason, as assistant secretary of transportation, acted primarily as a lobbyist for the Bush administration in opposing safety proposals that the agency now has the responsibility to enforce...

The president's job is to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed," not to appoint subordinates who have no interest in executing the laws. Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Do it now.

We Need a Professional Linguist, Stat!

Yet another thing that is funny *because* it is so sad: it is very clear that we need a different word than "reporter" for people who write words that appear in the standard Washington DC press.

The Washington Post's Jim VandeHei writes:

Lobbyist Told Reporter of Nearly a Dozen Contacts With Bush: President Bush met lobbyist Jack Abramoff almost a dozen times over the past five years and invited him to Crawford, Tex., in the summer of 2003, according to an e-mail Abramoff wrote to a reporter.... Bush "has one of the best memories of any politicians I have ever met," Abramoff wrote to Kim Eisler of Washingtonian magazine. "The guys saw me in almost a dozen settings, and joked with me about a bunch of things, including details of my kids."... Eisler confirmed the contents of the e-mail and said he recently provided portions of it to the liberal Web log ThinkProgress because he thought he was dealing with a fellow reporter. The blog posted the contents of the Abramoff-Eisler communication.

In the e-mail, Abramoff scoffs at Bush's public statements that he does not recall ever meeting the disgraced lobbyist and former top Bush fundraiser. "Of course he can't recall that he has a great memory!" Abramoff wrote. Eisler, an editor for Washingtonian, said in the interview that the lobbyist was the source of his exclusive report last month that at least five photographs of Bush with Abramoff exist. Abramoff showed him the pictures, Eisler said....

Bush has said he does not recall ever meeting Abramoff or posing for pictures with the Republican lobbyist at official events or parties. The White House has refused to release the pictures or detail Abramoff's contacts with top White House officials over the past five years. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said yesterday that "what the president said still stands."... McClellan said that... it would not be unusual for the president to not recall meeting Abramoff."Perhaps he has forgotten everything," Abramoff wrote in the e-mail. "Who knows?"

Eisler said Abramoff did not grant him permission to release the contents of their e-mail and Abramoff is upset that Eisler did. Eisler, who described himself as sympathetic to Abramoff's situation, was trying to show the ThinkProgress reporter that Abramoff was not exaggerating his relationship with Bush.... Eisler's wife, Judy Sarasohn, covers lobbying issues for The Washington Post.

So, let's summarize: Eisler showed the emails to the ThinkProgress reporter, and is now upset because the reporter reported on them. Eisler assumed--based on his past experience with reporters--that the ThinkProgress reporter would not report what he saw, but would at most hint and shade his paragraphs in a pro-Abramoff direction. Moreover, reporter Jim VandeHei does not find this at all strange--that Eisler and Abramoff feel betrayed because a reporter actually reported, and thus violated their expectations (based on lots of experience) that you can show something very interesting to a reporter and count on that reporter not reporting it.

I'm out of my depth here: we need a professional linguistic consultant immediately. Clearly we can't keep calling them "reporters" if the default expectation in their community is well-represented by Jim VandeHei. What should we call them?

But it is funny.

Fearless Freelance Intellectual John Podhoretz Speaks!

A correspondent writes: "Irony, thou art completely, completely dead." And she then points us to John Podhoretz, who writes:

The Corner on National Review Online: PUNDITS VS. CONSULTANTS [John Podhoretz]: It's a very good point, Jonah, about the cable nets improperly pairing off opinion journalists who stand on one side of the political divide and political consultants who actually work for the other side. Ten years ago I made a blanket rule that I would not appear on TV opposite professional Democrats because I am not a professional Republican but rather a working journalist. I don't speak for the GOP, even though my political and ideological views have placed me in close alignment with the Republican party. But a Democratic consultant does speak for his or her party for a paycheck, and viewers have no reason to know that there's a difference.

Wow.

Isn't it interesting how John Podhoretz's political and ideological views have changed over time? In 2000 Podhoretz thought it essential to maintain the federal budget in surplus; in 2006 Podhoretz thinks the large current and projected federal budget deficits aren't a very big problem. In 2000 Podhoretz thought that the Clinton administration had made a bad error in deploying U.S. troops in "nation building" exercises half the world away; in 2006 Podhoretz thinks that it would be a bad error not to deploy U.S. troops in "nation building" exercises half the world away. In 2000 Podhoretz thought that the federal government needed to be restrained lest it violate individual liberties; in 2006 Podhoretz thinks that individual liberties need to be restrained lest they hobble the federal government.

How fortunate is Podhoretz, working journalist, to have found a political party whose positions of the day change in exact synchrony with his own evolving views!

How in the Holy Name of the Lord has he managed it? I certainly have had no such luck.

Eddie Lazear Is About to Take on a Really Hard Job...

Eddie Lazear is taking his place in the hot seat as Chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisers--a job placed in the executive branch by the post-World War II Employment Act to make sure that economic expertise would always have a voice in White House decision making.

From what Max Sawicky reports of George W. Bush's recent speeches, Eddie will more than earn his pay:

MaxSpeak, You Listen!: THE SECOND GREATEST IDEA SINCE SLICED BREAD : George W. Bush

"One of the interesting things that I hope you realize when it comes to cutting taxes is this tax relief not only has helped our economy, but it's helped the federal budget. In 2004, tax revenues to the Treasury grew about 5.5 percent. That's kind of counter-intuitive, isn't it? At least it is for some in Washington. You cut [personal income] taxes and the tax revenues increase. See, some people are going to say, well, you cut taxes, you're going to have less revenue. No, that's not what happened. What happened was we cut taxes and in 2004, revenues increased 5.5 percent.... And the reason why is cutting taxes caused the economy to grow, and as the economy grows there is more revenue generated in the private sector, which yields more tax revenues."

Quoth Historical Tables, Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Year 2007, Table 2-1, "Receipts by Source," page 30: Individual Income Taxes: Fiscal Year 2003: $793,699 million. Fiscal Year 2004: $808,959 million.

By advanced fuzzy-mathematical techniques, year-over-year [nominal] rate of growth: 1.9 percent [a full percentage point lower than inflation plus labor force growth, and a full four percentage points lower than inflation plus labor force plus productivity growth].

Now to be fair, total receipts for '04 did increase by 5.5 percent, but these consisted in great part of taxes that were not cut, and of the shifting of tax liability in the corporate income tax due to the jive bonus depreciation shenanigans.

So here's my second greatest idea since sliced bread:

Since not cutting taxes other than the income tax caused total revenues to increase, not cutting the individual income tax as well ought to cause even bigger increases. Imagine, don't cut taxes, and revenues will go up.

[Applause] Thank you, thank you.

In Today's Mail: Books and Articles

Four books that arrived today to add to the pile. They are all well worth reading, IMHO at least:

  1. Tobias Buckell (2006), Crystal Rain (New York: Tor: 0765312271) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0765312271/braddelong00.
  2. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (2006), Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University: 0521855268) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0521855268/braddelong00.
  3. Chris Roush (2004), Show Me the Money (Lawrence Erlbaum: 0805849556) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0805849556/braddelong00.
  4. Edward Luttwak (1969), Coup d'Etat (New York: Knopf: 0674175476) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0674175476/braddelong00

And this morning's mail includes the recent collected reprints of Mark Roe: "Delaware's Politics" from HLR, "Regulatory Competition in Making Corporate Law" from the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, "Can Culture Constrain the Economic Model of Corporate Law" from UCLR, and two book chapters--"Institutions of Corporate Governance" and "On Sacrificing Profits in the Public Interest." And it includes next Monday's seminar paper: Alfonso Herranz-Loncan from the University of Barcelona on "Did Spain Gain so Much from the Railroads? The Contribution of Railroad Technology to Spanish Economic Growth 1848-1913."

And Eudora has singled out an email message telling me to go read Greg Ip's lecture, "The Enigma of Alan Greenspan" http://journalism.wlu.edu/Reynolds/ip.html.

It's a very good thing that I like to read...

Berkeley Economic History Seminar: Economics 211: Spring 2006

BERKELEY ECONOMIC HISTORY SEMINAR, SPRING 2006

ECONOMICS 211

Meetings in Evans 639, 2-3:30, Mondays, unless otherwise noted

January 23: Organizational Meeting

January 30: Job Market Seminar: Tavneet Suri, "Selection and Comparative Advantage in Technology Adoption" 608-7 4-5:30

February 8 (Wed): Orley Ashenfelter (Departmental Seminar, Evans 608-7, 4-5:30)

February 13: Alfonso Herranz-Loncan (Davis), "Did Spain Gain So Much from the Railroads? The Contribution of the Railroad Technology to Spanish Economic Growth (1850-1914)"

February 22 (Wed): Francois Bouguignon (Departmental Seminar, Evans 608-7, 4-5:30)

February 27: 4 PM: IES Seminar Room (Moses Hall): Michael North (Greifswald), "Cultural Consumption and Identity in Eighteenth Century Germany

March 8 (Wed): Richard Thaler (Departmental Seminar, Evans 608-7, 4-5:30)

March 13: FREE

March 22 (Wed): Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti (Berkeley) (Departmental Seminar, Evans 608-7, 4-5:30)

April 5 (Wed): William Easterly (Departmental Seminar, Evans 608-7, 4-5:30)

April 10: Ian McLean (Adelaide), "Might Australia Have Failed?"

Aprl 12 (Wed): Jonas Scherner (Mannheim and Yale), "The End of a Myth: Albert Speer and the So-Called Armaments Miracle" (IES Seminar Room, Moses Hall, 4-5:30)

April 17: Marty Weitzman (Departmental Seminar, Evans 608-7, 4-5:30)

April 24: Raj Arunachalam and Trevon Logan (Berkeley and Ohio State), "Dowry: Bequest or Price?"

May 1: Elise Andrea Couper (Berkeley), "The Dissolution of the Monasteries in the City of York"

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Another Decade of Development Failure

Dani Rodrik looks back on a decade of failure--not of the failure of economic development, for worldwide the past fifteen or so years have been unbelievably wonderful ones for world development, but of the failure of economists to give useful and helpful development advice:

Life used to be relatively simple for the peddlers of policy advice in the tropics. Observing the endless list of policy follies to which poor nations had succumbed, any well trained and well-intentioned economist could feel justified in uttering the obvious truths of the profession: get your macro balances in order, take the state out of business, give markets free rein. “Stabilize, privatize, and liberalize” became the mantra of a generation of technocrats who cut their teeth in the developing world, and of the political leaders they counseled.

Codified in John Williamson’s (1990) well-known "Washington Consensus," this advice inspired a wave of reforms in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa which fundamentally transformed the policy landscape in these developing areas. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, former socialist countries similarly made a bold leap towards markets. There was more privatization, deregulation and trade liberalization in Latin America and Eastern Europe than probably anywhere else at any point in economic history. In Sub-Saharan Africa governments moved with less conviction and speed, but there too a substantial portion of the new policy agenda was adopted: state marketing boards were dismantled, inflation reduced, trade opened up, and significant amounts of privatization undertaken.

Such was the enthusiasm for reform in many of these countries that Williamson’s original list of do’s and don’ts came to look remarkably tame and innocuous by comparison. In particular, financial liberalization and opening up to international capital flows went much farther than what Williamson had anticipated (or thought prudent) from the vantage point of the late 1980s. Williamson’s (2000) protestations notwithstanding, the reform agenda eventually came to be perceived, at least by its critics, as an overtly ideological effort to impose “neoliberalism” and “market fundamentalism” on developing nations.

The one thing that is generally agreed on about the consequences of these reforms is that things have not quite worked out the way they were intended. Even their most ardent supporters now concede that growth has been below expectations in Latin America (and the “transition crisis” deeper and more sustained than expected in former socialist economies). Not only were success stories in Sub-Saharan Africa few and far in between, but the market-oriented reforms of the 1990s proved ill-suited to deal with the growing public health emergency in which the continent became embroiled. The critics, meanwhile, feel that the disappointing outcomes have vindicated their concerns about the inappropriateness of the standard reform agenda. While the lessons drawn by proponents and skeptics differ, it is fair to say that nobody really believes in the "Washington Consensus" anymore. The question now is not whether the "Washington Consensus" is dead or alive; it is what will replace it...

Gosh! We Democrats Sure Are Powerful!

Daniel Gross reads the best comics page in America today:

Daniel Gross: February 05, 2006 - February 11, 2006 Archives : ALL POWERFUL DEMOCRATS: Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, desperately seeking to spin the absurd budget proposal, engages in tremendous contortions to focus the blame for the deficit and fiscal profligacy where it really belong: on the Democrats. Never mind that Republicans have controlled the White House for the past five years, and that they've essentially controlled Congress for the past five years, they can't really be blamed for continuing to pass laws that don't align receipts with outlays.

The only thing worse than Mr. Bush's spending record is the clucking on Capitol Hill deploring it. The Members have voted to spend every dime, and Democrats especially have resisted every attempt to restrain spending growth. Only last week, not one Democrats in the House voted for a bill to slow entitlement spending by a mere $40 billion over five years.

You see, Democrats don't play any actual role in taxing or spending decisions. But they're responsible for them anyway...

Yet Another Thing to Add to the Travel Bag

Ah. Yet another thing to add to the travel bag. From tidbits.com:

Adam wrote from the friendly skies...

Hmm. Maybe I should start traveling with a power strip purely so I can use - and then share with my fellow power-hungry travelers - any outlet I can find. If I'm arrested for theft of services, promise you'll all send me cookies in prison.

I started carrying an extension cord with multiple connections after one airport experience in which another traveler got snotty about needing BOTH plugs at an outlet.

But it's a two-prong extension cord, which I realized was a problem on my last trip, since I fairly recently started using the PowerBook's adapter with the three-prong cord attached, instead of the little two-prong block. Guess I should start carrying the two-prong block for emergencies.

A small grounded power strip would be a good idea; I think we have some of those at work. But I should keep the extension cord in my bag for the occasions when I happen upon a two-prong outlet.

Much of the problem is that most airports were designed 10-50 years ago with the power needs of the occasional vacuum cleaner in mind, not the relatively recent explosion of recharging needs of the traveling public. Most of the gate areas of the airport buildings are little more than metal and glass walls, so there's no place to add an outlet, and no wiring in the relevant places to add it to. Retrofitting them would be a non-trivial task, but as new facilities are built and old ones are renovated, there are almost always more outlets being added.

Who Are You and What Have You Done with Chris Matthews?

Who are you and what have you done with Chris Matthews of Hardball? Something very strange has happened--replacement by hive-mind aliens is the most likely possibility, I'm just sayin':

Antonia Zerbisias - Toronto Star Blog: Sow's Purse:

MATTHEWS: Do you think Iraq was a threat to the United States?

CLARKE: I do. Because we live if a world in which individuals, not massive armies, navies, air forces, individual can do great catastrophic harm and there are different players in that world and Iraq was one of the centerpieces of destabilization, of mixing and mingling with terrorists of all sizes and shapes.

They had demonstrated their ability and desire to use weapons of mass destruction in the past, they had demonstrated their intent. It was the right decision at the time. But back to your question.

MATTHEWS: I have heard this argument so long and I think that argument, at the time, could have been used against Pakistan, it could be used against Saudi Arabia.

There are so many governments in that part of the world who do us harm by the way they let their children be educated, by the kind of culture they instill in people, the hatred that they allow, not just against Israel but against the west.

There‘s so many forces out there. Former Soviet engineers with a tremendous capability to sell, out of economic desperation, weaponry that can be used by terrorists. I think Iraq would have been the least likely source of nuclear technology for someone who wanted to get their hands on it. Least likely source, and I don‘t hear the argument to the contrary.

All the arguments about W.M.D. have been shot down. No evidence of an African deal, no evidence involving aluminum tubes. All the arguments that your side put up to get us into this war have been shot down, especially the argument that we were going to be received by people who are going to be happy to see us. They are fighting us. They are not happy to see us. That the oil in America was going to be cheaper. That the oil was going to pay for the war itself.

You‘re crowd made every argument in the world to get us in that war, and then they all quit. What I can‘t understand is how an administration packed with hawks, they are all gone. Scooter is facing jail. Wolfowitz is gone. I don‘t know what else is gone, but all the hawks seem to be gone now.

You‘re not there now backing the war.

CLARKE: Eighteen things in that two minute rant. So let‘s address a few pieces of it. Let‘s address a few important pieces of this and let‘s go back to the original point about public support. But let‘s go back to what happened.

Colossal, humongous, terrible Intel failure. Now, you can change your opinion now. You can say those arguments don‘t hold up now, but back then the debate was not about whether or not they had weapons of mass destruction. It was what to do about it.

MATTHEWS: The casualties are real. The hatred against us around the world for going to war are real. All the arguments to get us in the war have been shot down Torie.

CLARKE: No.

MATTHEWS: It was a great sales job. And it worked and we got into the war. And people now know that the arguments used to get us in the war, the carrot and the stick, were not true.

CLARKE: No, I disagree completely.

MATTHEWS: Where was I wrong in my rant?

Grand Opera

Is there a better passage in the classical opera repertoire than "Signore, ascolta!"-"Non piangere, Liu"-"Per l'ultima volta!" in Puccini's "Turandot"?

Wrathful Dispersionism

"Intelligent Designers" invade the Linguistics curriculum:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/q_pheevr/33337.html Linguists here in Canada have been following closely, with a mixture of amusement, bemusement, and, it must be admitted, a little trepidation, the deliberations of our neighbours to the south, who are currently considering, in a courtroom in Pennsylvania, whether "Wrathful Dispersion Theory," as it is called, should be taught in the public schools alongside evolutionary theories of historical linguistics.

It is an emotionally charged question, for linguistics is widely and justifiably seen as the centrepiece of the high-school science curriculum--a hard science, but not a difficult one to do in the classroom; an area of study that teaches students the essentials of scientific reasoning, but that at the same time touches on the spiritual essence of what it means to be human, for it is of course language that separates us from our cousins the apes.

The opponents of Wrathful Dispersion maintain that it is really just Babelism, rechristened so that it might fly under the radar of those who insist that religion has no place in the state-funded classroom. Babelism was clearly rooted in the Judeo-Christian story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1-9); it held that the whole array of modern languages was created by God at a single stroke, for the immediate purpose of disrupting humanity's hubristic attempt to build a tower that would reach to heaven: "Let us go down," God says to Himself, "and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech."

Wrathful Dispersion is couched in more cautiously neutral language; rather than tying linguistic diversity to a specific biblical event, it merely argues that the differences among modern languages are too perverse to have arisen spontaneously, and must therefore be the work of some wrathful (and powerful) disperser who deliberately set out to accomplish a confusion of tongues.

That "Analytical Perspectives" Volume Will Trip You Up Every Time...

Max Sawicky notes that the White House's political appointees were unable to read the Analytical Pespectives volume of the budget, hence they failed to vet it. Probably fell asleep in the preface, poor sods:

MaxSpeak, You Listen!: COGNITIVE DISSONANCE WATCH : The Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Years 2007-2016, main volume, Expanding Economic Opportunity, p. 7:

We are also seeing the sustained job growth expected from a strong economy. Employment is up by 4.6 million jobs since May of 2003. The unemployment rate, which peaked at 6.3 percent in June of 2003, fell to 4.9 percent by the end of 2005, a level consistent with strong growth and low inflation. This unemployment rate is lower than the average unemployment rates of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and it is significantly lower than the unemployment rates of many of our major trading partners...

The Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Years 2007-2016, Analytical Perspectives, p. 171:

The extraordinary fall-off in labor force participation, from 67.1 percent of the U.S. population in 1997-2000 to 66.0 percent in 2000-2005, appears to be at least partly cyclical in nature, and most forecasters are assuming some rebound in labor force participation as the expansion continues. Since the official unemployment rate does not include workers who have left the labor force, the conventional measures of potential GDP, incomes, and Government receipts understate the extent to which potential work hours have been under-utilized in the current expansion to date because of the decline in labor force participation.

Virtual Blogroll Post of the Week

If you want to understand the Valerie Plame Wilson affair--well, not to understand it, but to have your not-understanding of it be at a sophisticated and subtle level--so foul and fair a mystery I have not seen--then you need to read three and only three sources. Our virtual blogroll post of the week is thus composed of these three Wyrd Sisters--actually, the metaphor breaks down quickly and doesn't make any sense in the first place--of:

  1. Tom "Minuteman" Maguire: http://justoneminute.typepad.com/ "I come, Greymalkin!"
  2. firedoglake: http://firedoglake.blogspot.com/ "Paddock calls!"
  3. Murray Waas: http://whateveralready.blogspot.com/ "Anon!"

"Fair is foul and foul is fair! Hover through the fog and filthy air!"

Covering the Economy: Budget: What Do You Do When Officials Lie?

What can a working journalist do when official sources and documents tell lies? That was, we all thought on Wednesday, a difficult part of what those journalists covering the budget this year had to do.

We have this same question coming up in another context: Daniel Froomkin writes:

The Captive President: Media Matters, the liberal media watchdog Web site, raises an interesting point about Time Magazine's coverage of the Valerie Plame affair. Back in this October 2003 story, the magazine reported: "White House spokesman Scott McClellan said accusations of Rove's peddling information are 'ridiculous.' Says McClellan: 'There is simply no truth to that suggestion.'" It is now clear that several reporters and editors at Time knew very well that McClellan's statement was false.... Is there any excuse for a news organization to print a statement that they know is untrue, without at least trying to clue their readers into the truth? That seems to defeat the central purpose of journalism. So what should Time have done?...

Here's Time reporter Michael Duffy's paragraph in context:

[T]he Democrats saw an opening.... Democrats immediately raised a public alarm: How could Justice credibly investigate so secretive an Administration, especially when the investigators are led by Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose former paid political consultant Karl Rove was initially accused by Wilson of being the man behind the leak?.... White House spokesman Scott McClellan said accusations of Rove's peddling information are "ridiculous." Says McClellan: "There is simply no truth to that suggestion." Recalling the torture inflicted on Bush's predecessor by a squad of special prosecutors, congressional Democrats demanded that a special counsel be appointed in this case. By Wednesday some had christened the scandal Intimigate and were trying to link it to every political issue in sight...

So I called Michael Duffy, who strongly disagrees. He thinks that it would have been unprofessional of him to send any signal in that story that McClellan's statements were false. He had a duty to his readers. He had a duty to Time's confidential sources to protect their identity. And the duty to the sources trumps. Sending a signal that Time knew that McClellan was wrong when he said that Rove was involved--"remember, he still has not been charged," Duffy said--would have revealed that Rove was one of Time's confidential sources.

There is, I think, a certain tension and inconsistency in Duffy's position. On the one hand, Duffy points to all the pictures of Karl Rove in the issue of Time and talks about how Rove's involvement was an open secret, talks about how everyone knows how limited is the truth value of statements from the White House podium. "This wasn't the first story about Plame we had written." He is sure that Time's readers were definitely not misled by McClellan's denials.

But if that is so, how can Time be protecting Rove's confidential status>

On the other hand, Duffy says that Time will go all the way up to the Supreme Court, at great expense, to protect the confidentiality of its sources.

But if that is so, how can Time justify all the big pictures of Karl Rove that Duffy implies--"look at the images in that issue? What's on the spread?"--said nudge nudge, wink wink, we all know that most of what Scott McClellan says is so is not in fact so?

Not that it's bad that there's a certain tension and inconsistency in Michael Duffy's position. There is extraordinary tension in Duffy's situation. I think that the tension should be diminished by a greater willingness to blow sources sky-high when the alternative is to mislead your readers and the stakes get high enough. Source confidentiality is a tool to be used to better inform your readers, not a value in itself that conflicts with it.

Michael Duffy thinks not.

I suspect that the most important element of this mishegass is that Time believes that its readers know more of the "open secrets" of the Washington insider political journalistic community than they (or, indeed, I) in fact do.

Covering the Economy: Budget: What Do You Do When Officials Lie?

What can a working journalist do when official sources and documents tell lies? That was, we all thought on Wednesday, a difficult part of what those journalists covering the budget this year had to do.

We have this same question coming up in another context: Daniel Froomkin writes:

The Captive President: Media Matters, the liberal media watchdog Web site, raises an interesting point about Time Magazine's coverage of the Valerie Plame affair. Back in this October 2003 story, the magazine reported: "White House spokesman Scott McClellan said accusations of Rove's peddling information are 'ridiculous.' Says McClellan: 'There is simply no truth to that suggestion.'" It is now clear that several reporters and editors at Time knew very well that McClellan's statement was false.... Is there any excuse for a news organization to print a statement that they know is untrue, without at least trying to clue their readers into the truth? That seems to defeat the central purpose of journalism. So what should Time have done?...

Here's Time reporter Michael Duffy's paragraph in context:

[T]he Democrats saw an opening.... Democrats immediately raised a public alarm: How could Justice credibly investigate so secretive an Administration, especially when the investigators are led by Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose former paid political consultant Karl Rove was initially accused by Wilson of being the man behind the leak?.... White House spokesman Scott McClellan said accusations of Rove's peddling information are "ridiculous." Says McClellan: "There is simply no truth to that suggestion." Recalling the torture inflicted on Bush's predecessor by a squad of special prosecutors, congressional Democrats demanded that a special counsel be appointed in this case. By Wednesday some had christened the scandal Intimigate and were trying to link it to every political issue in sight...

So I called Michael Duffy, who strongly disagrees. He thinks that it would have been unprofessional of him to send any signal in that story that McClellan's statements were false. He had a duty to his readers. He had a duty to Time's confidential sources to protect their identity. And the duty to the sources trumps. Sending a signal that Time knew that McClellan was wrong when he said that Rove was involved--"remember, he still has not been charged," Duffy said--would have revealed that Rove was one of Time's confidential sources.

There is, I think, a certain tension and inconsistency in Duffy's position. On the one hand, Duffy points to all the pictures of Karl Rove in the issue of Time and talks about how Rove's involvement was an open secret, talks about how everyone knows how limited is the truth value of statements from the White House podium. "This wasn't the first story about Plame we had written." He is sure that Time's readers were definitely not misled by McClellan's denials.

But if that is so, how can Time be protecting Rove's confidential status>

On the other hand, Duffy says that Time will go all the way up to the Supreme Court, at great expense, to protect the confidentiality of its sources.

But if that is so, how can Time justify all the big pictures of Karl Rove that Duffy implies--"look at the images in that issue? What's on the spread?"--said nudge nudge, wink wink, we all know that most of what Scott McClellan says is so is not in fact so?

Not that it's bad that there's a certain tension and inconsistency in Michael Duffy's position. There is extraordinary tension in Duffy's situation. I think that the tension should be diminished by a greater willingness to blow sources sky-high when the alternative is to mislead your readers and the stakes get high enough. Michael Duffy thinks not.

I suspect that the most important element of this mishegass is that Time believes that its readers know more of the "open secrets" of the Washington insider political journalistic community than they (or, indeed, I) in fact do.

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

China's Leadership Cadre

Blood and Treasure points us to interesting stuff:

Blood & Treasure: after Hu : Willy Lam on the next generation of CCP leaders:

In general, however, the two Lis as well as other Hu protégés have conformed to the CCP tradition of quietly waiting in the wings and keeping a low profile so as not to be seen as upstaging their superiors in the Politburo Standing Committee. Diplomatic analysts agree that it is almost a foregone conclusion that Hu will largely achieve his objectives at the 17th Congress. After all, the other major faction in CCP politics, the so-called Shanghai Clique once led by ex-president Jiang, has been fading fast since the latter’s retirement from his last significant position of commander-in-chief in 2004. Moreover, Hu has been adept at building bridges to other important factions such as the “gang of princelings”—-a reference to the offspring of party elders or retired generals—by elevating a significant number of these high-born cadres to senior party, government and military slots.

The Shanghai Faction. The Gang of Princelings. God, I love this stuff. But then I’m a China politics geek. Anyway, here’s a bit of Kremlinology. Chinese leaders usually summarise their opinions or policies in lists, like human powerpoint presentations. As the “third generation” of the CPC leadership, Jiang Zemin used to summarise in threes -- with the three represents, for instance. Hu Jintao puts everything in fours, because he’s the fourth generation. So if you see some modest looking fellow speaking in fives, then there’s your future main geezer.

Time for the Washington Post to Retire Robert Samuelson (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?)

People at the Washington Post periodically ask me why I don't presume that the employees of the Washington Post are people of good will, trying hard, who occasionally make mistakes.

Here's one reason why: Robert Samuelson this morning regurgitates a piece of mendacious Republican spin that I'm tired of. I've finally had enough.

He needs to be retired, and the sooner the better:

Getting Past Budget Blab: It's the Bill Clinton Delusion: that the Democrats are now the party of "fiscal responsibility," because Clinton engineered the first budget surpluses (1998-2001) since 1969. The reality is that those surpluses stemmed more from good luck than from Clinton's policies.... [F]ederal spending as a share of GDP dropped from 22.1 percent in 1992 to 18.5 percent in 2001. How can anyone doubt Clinton's achievement? Easy. He didn't plan or predict those surpluses. They resulted mostly from an unanticipated surge in taxes flowing from the economic boom -- something that Clinton didn't create. As for lower spending, that mainly stemmed from the ending of the Cold War -- something else Clinton didn't cause. From 1992 to 2001 defense outlays dropped from 4.8 percent of GDP to 3 percent. Once budget surpluses occurred, interest payments fell from 3 percent of GDP in 1996 to 2 percent in 2001. Elsewhere in the budget, there was little spending restraint. Indeed, Clinton didn't originally promise to balance the budget. In his early years, he merely pledged "deficit reduction" -- Bush's present policy...

The best way to do the math is to start out with the fact that the federal budget was in deficit of 4.7% of GDP in 1992, and projected (as of April 1993) to rise to a deficit of 5.5% of GDP by 2000. Instead, it swung to a surplus of 2.4% in 2000--a swing of 7.9 percentage points. Of this:

  1. Approximately 2.0% is due to a booming economy.
  2. An extra 1.0% to the high value of capital gains taxes paid in 2000 because of the high value of the stock market.
  3. 3.0% to the effects of the Clinton-Mitchell-Foley 1993 deficit-reduction package.
  4. 1.8% to the effects of the 1990 Bush-Mitchell-Foley deficit reduction package (overwhelmingly the effects of the 1990 discretionary spending caps on defense spending).

Some proportion of the booming economy was the result of good fiscal policy: deficit reduction allowed the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates lower than otherwise, and enabled businesses to more easily undertake the high-tech investments that produced so much American productivity growth in the 1990s.

Note that Samuelson is careful not to talk about how Clinton policies deserve credit for the reductions in the deficit that came from higher taxes. He is careful not to give credit to Clinton policies for reductions in the deficit that came from the fact that earlier deficit reduction reduced the outstanding debt on which interest had to be paid. He is careful not to give credit to Clinton policies for the effects of sane fiscal policy that allowed for lower interest rates and thus lower interest payments on outstanding debt. He is careful not to give credit to Clinton policies for deficit reduction produced by the caps on domestic discretionary spending.

Note Samuelson's phrase: those surpluses [of the 1990s] stemmed more from good luck than from Clinton's policies. That's "truthiness": without the stock market bubble and the economic boom, the U.S. would probably have had a trivial deficit in 2000. In that sense, that there were surpluses--rather than small deficits--is "mostly" from the economic boom. But that's not the truth: Clinton did a great deal of heavy lifting to massively improve America's fiscal situation in the 1990s. Whatever else you think of Clinton, this was a real accomplishment for which Clinton deserves credit.

Note that Samuelson doesn't quite say Clinton policies had little to do with the improvement in America's fiscal balance in the 1990s. But that's what he wants his readers to think: that Clinton policies did little.

Why? I don't know why he wants to misrepresent fiscal policy in the 1990s. I can't even call Robert Samuelson a right-wing hack. The real right-wingers I know openly and aggressively say that Clinton's fiscal policies were vastly, vastly preferable to Bush's. Republican hack? Establishment hack? Tell me what I should call Samuelson, and why he is doing what he is doing.

I do know that if the Washington Post wants to reduce its reputation as a swamp of mendacious Republican-biased spin, retiring Robert Samuelson would be a good start.

Ken Macleod on the Liberalism of Fools

Crooked Timber directs us to Ken Macleod's (why isn't the "L" capitalized?) thoughts on the Liberalism of Fools:

The Early Days of a Better Nation : Anti-semitism, said Bebel and Engels, is the socialism of fools. The rage of the small property holder - the peasant, the artisan, the stall-keeper - against his inexorable ruin by the competition of bigger capital is given a face and a race to hate: a physical particularity that stands in thought for the abstractions of 'finance' and 'the market' and 'the banks'. 'The Jew' becomes the concrete embodiment (in fantasy) of exchange value. So goes the Marxist tale, anyway, though it has many more subtle twists than that.

Is there another hatred that might be called 'the liberalism of fools'? The progressivism of fools? The libertarianism of fools? If anti-semitism is, in an important aspect, a rage against the machine, against progress, is there an opposite rage: a rage against reaction, a fury at the recalcitrance of the concrete and the stubbornness of tradition? A rage against what is sacred and refuses to be profaned, against what is solid and doesn't melt into air, against ways of life that resist commodification, against use-value that refuses to become exchange-value? And might that rage too need a fantasy object?

In the 1930s and 40s, a number of progressive intellectuals found that object in the Roman Catholic Church. Granted all the good reasons there were, in that age of the dictators, for identifying the RC Church with militant reaction, the fury seems oddly disproportionate. H. G. Wells's wartime Penguin Special Crux Ansata starts with the cry 'Bomb Rome!' and goes on from there.... [T]here it was: a religion identified with reaction, and progressives with a blind spot about a powerful state that they saw as that religion's most formidable foe....

[A]nti-Catholicism is gone as a burning-glass of progressive rage. One wonders what new lens might focus that rage now. Is there some religion or people that has come to represent all that is backward in the world, and in need of a sound and salutary thrashing from the forces of progress? Orthodoxy, perhaps? Zoroastrianism? Tibetan Buddhism? Hinduism? None of them seem to quite fit the bill. There must be one out there somewhere. Because the rage still burns.

Bruce Bartlett's New Book Is Out

Daniel Gross has a copy:

Daniel Gross: February 05, 2006 - February 11, 2006 Archives : Bruce Bartlett's new book, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, has arrived. There's not a lot of new material in here, but it's quite good nonetheless. Bartlett, a former official in the Reagan and Bush I administrations, coherently synthesizes the profligacy, incompetence, and mendacity of the last five years of fiscal and economic policy. The interesting wrinkle is that he does so by quoting almost exclusively from critics on the right. George Will is cited in the index seven times; Paul Krugman, once. You may not agree with his solutions to the problems Bush has created--a VAT--but you have to give him credit for speaking truth to power. The National Center for Policy Analysis, where he worked for six years, fired him for writing the book.

Our New Majority Leader

Ah. Our new majority leader:

First Draft: Nice reform-oriented Majority Leader you got yourselves there, Republicans [via Kos]. "Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, who was elected House majority leader last week, is renting his Capitol Hill apartment from a veteran lobbyist whose clients have direct stakes in legislation Boehner has co-written and that he has overseen as chairman of the Education and the Workforce Committee."

Covering the Economy: Federal Budget Proposals: February 8, 2006

For Wednesday February 8 class:

Jonathan Weisman's Tuesday budget story at the Washington Post: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/02/jonathan_weisma.html
Stan Collender's Wednesday budget story at the National Journal: http://nationaljournal.com/collender.htm
National Journal 2007 budget proposal special report: http://nationaljournal.com/members/pubfeatures/pdf/2006/budget07/
David Sanger's Tuesday budget story for the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/politics/07budget.html

There are three kinds of federal budget proposals: (a) those that describe the policies that a powerful president expects to get through congress this year; (b) those that describe a weaker president's opening bid, that is to say what he hopes but does not expect to get through congress; and (c) those that are not policy but political documents, crafted to get the maximum amount of favorable press by leaving out things like, say, additional expenditures for the war in Iraq and the costs of fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax.

A good budget story should--Brad says--do all of the following:

  1. Tell readers what the government is doing on their behalf.
  2. Tell readers how the president wants to change policies in order to make the government do something different from what it has been or is projected to be doing.
  3. Tell readers how congress is likely to alter the president's budget proposals.
  4. Tell readers what kind of budget--a, b, or c--the president has submitted.

How well do each of these perform these four missions? Are these the missions that a budget story should perform? What alternative missions or goals would you suggest for a budget story?

Stupidest Man Alive: Special "Truthiness" Edition

I confess that I have misjudged Jonah Goldberg. I did not think he had the mojo to make a *serious* play for the Stupidest Man AliveTM crown. But he does.

We all know why Jonah claimed that America's Great Plains used to be a great forest until the American Indians burned it down. At some point, Jonah Goldberg dozed through an American history lecture, part of which was on Changes in the Land--a book about the ecology of New England in the centuries before my Pilgrim and Puritan ancestors arrived. The lecturer said that the Massachusetts tribes set fires to reduce underbrush and to create more meadows where deer could feed. But in poor Jonah Goldberg's brain, Wampanoag = Souix, Massasoit = Sitting Bull, coastal Massachusetts = South Dakota, and so the statement that Massachusetts tribes set fires to create more meadows where deer could live turned inside Jonah's brain into the statement that the Indians burnt the giant forest of the Great Plains to the ground to hunt buffalo--all Injuns looking alike to Jonah.

It's quite funny. It's somewhat sad. But the claim that the Indians turned the Giant Forest into the Great Plains is not something that anyone would dare in the light of day defend, is it?

Surprise, surprise, Jonah Goldberg does, and so digs himself in deeper:

The Corner on National Review Online : As for... "The great plains used to be a giant forest. The Indians burnt it to the ground to hunt buffalo"... it's a basically sound point.... I suggest DeLong pick up a copy of The Ecological Indian, Myth and History by Shepard Krech. He writes, "The evidence that Indians lit fires that then were allowed to burn destructively and without regard to ecological consequences is abundant." He has a whole chapter simply called "Fire." "By the time Europeans arrived, North American was a manipulated continent," Krech continues. "Indians had long since altered the landscape by burning or clearing woodland for farming and fuel. Despite European images of an untouched Eden, this nature was cultural not virgin, anthropogenic not primeval, and nowhere is this more evident than in the Indian use of fire."

Well, I have Shepard Krech III of Brown University right here in email. He writes:

Brad, The best source for me is The Ecological Indian, pp. 101-22 [chapter on fire]. The plains and prairies are discussed in several places, especially pp 115-16. The following are excerpts:

Prior to the suppression of fires in the nineteenth century, many of North America's forest and grassland ecosystems were fire-succession ecosystems; that is, fires produced and maintained them. Forest and fire ecologists appreciate the association between regular fire and ecological types and successions in ponderosa pine, chaparral, longleaf pine, and grassland habitats. Native people, keen observers of the environment, surely understood the associations long before. Not only were these ecosystems pyrogenic (produced by fire) but they were anthropogenic (produced by man) to the degree that the fires which ran through them were also. Through their fires, North American Indians probably played some role in the creation of, and more certainly maintained, a number of fire-succession ecosystems....[113]

Some assert that with their fires, Indians were responsible for the formation of the vast grasslands ecosystem of the Great Plains, others that they did not form it but probably helped maintain it, and still others that they did neither because their technology could not possibly have played such a formative role in an ecosystem so large. Whatever the influence of Indian fires, there are strong climatic and environmental reasons for doubting that fires were the only or even the major formative one. In the central and western Plains, compared to eastern portions, there is less moisture from rain and snow, lower humidity, higher winds, and more periodic drought. Singly or in combination, these conditions prevent forest formation and growth and would lead to extensive grasslands without help from fire. Yet increased precipitation as one moves east makes tree growth far more a reality in the eastern and northern high-grass portions of the Plains, where fire played a greater role maintaining grasslands: for centuries observers remarked on the charred stumps or extensive root systems of mature trees ravaged by regular fires, their remnants enhancing deep grassland soils. In the east and north, fires--some lightning-caused, others anthropogenic--were important in checking natural succession of grassland by forest. When fires were checked, aspens, oaks, and willows proliferated. In the north aspen groves expanded, and in the east oak openings closed as groves of trees broke up the grasslands and in places, forest eventually consumed them.

The effect of grassland fires depends on the same factors as elsewhere: the season of the burn, time of the last burn, heat of the fire, wind, temperature, terrain, soil, moisture, and so on. Grassland fires move with extraordinary speed when grasses are dry and wind is up, but they also move irregularly over uneven terrain, sometimes skip over areas, and rarely consume plants so completely that their roots are burned. After the fires pass, burned areas cool quickly. Productivity often increases following grassland fires because surface litter is removed. Tall-grass prairie needs at least three years to return to its pre-burn state, though grazing animals like buffalo return immediately to tender young plants growing after the burn. But not all grassland fires are benign and restorative. When they are too frequent or hot, when moisture is low, or when heavy rains follow fires and cause erosion, plants may not easily recover....[115-16]

I also discuss the Willamette Valley grasslands. The endnotes are extensive. You can easily arrive at your own conclusions from my text. Needless to say, many whose politics range across the spectrum misread the book.

best,

shep krech

Funny how Shepard Krech's "whatever the influence of Indian fires [on the Great Plains], there are strong climatic and environmental reasons for doubting that fires were the only or even the major formative [cause]" doesn't make it into Goldberg's summary, isn't it? Goldberg claims he wants people to read The Ecological Indian, but I think that's the last thing he really wants anybody to do.

Normally, I would say here that this would be really funny if it weren't so sad, and really sad if it weren't so funny. But this time this is really funny because it is really sad. Here we have an extraordinary example of Stephen Colbert's concept of "truthiness"--that in Goldberg's world, everybody is not only entitled to their own opinion, but also entitled to make up their own facts. In this case Jonah Goldberg makes up his own facts about what Shep Krech wrote in The Ecological Indian. The idea is not to say anything about pre-1492 America--not to write true sentences--but to write "truthy" sentences that make the readers of National Review feel good.

But Kate G. and Tim Burke say this better than I can. Here's Kate:

Kate G.: I'm not sure what a "neurotic" post looks like. Does it wash its hands a lot? Does it look hunted and scared of things? Does it cry a lot? My keyboard, alas, is dry and my withers are unwrung.

In my opinion great ad hominem invective is, of course, its own raison d'etre--that's a feature, not a bug, so I take the compliment.

But to get back to our case at hand, allow me to wring out my neurotic handkerchief and add this. Any defense of Jonah's remark which does not take into account his specific history, his education, and his employment simply misses the mark. In other words, I'd argue that even taking Jonah seriously enough to rebut his "facts" is a waste of time. If Jonah's point were to explore the historical issues surrounding Native American use of the environment I would definitely urge everyone to read up on this subject. For example, I second everyone else's fact based criticism and urge everyone to read Cronon's two books (because they are both excellent) and also a wonderful book called Reflections on Bullough's Pond (or else its Bullock) which explores the ecological and technological history of New England. It wouldn't be relevant to the specifics of Jonah's so called argument but I'd argue that that hardly matters. Not to me, that is, but to Jonah. As an anthropologist and a social scientist I have a special love of facts and information about societies, and hold no brief for any romanticized notion of "indigenous" societies (Nor do I live in a Jonaesque/RNC world in which determining that one people are "bad" means that some other people somewhere must be "good.") But I do have a lot of respect for subject expertiese. Jonah's own essays and comments don't fall under that heading. They are not really "about" a subject, like Indians or whatever. The proof of that is that he will be on to something else tomorrow, and he'll be pursuing it just as shallowly. Jonah's essays and comments have, instead, an *object*--which is purely political.

Jonah's arguments are simply bought and paid for (gee, I must have been channelling Krugman, or maybe we are both simply right) to advance a particular politico/economic goal. That goal is de-legitimizing, parodying, and truncating other histories and other arguments about society and politics. If you read Jonah, or other fellow travellers like Jeff Jacoby, Mallard Fillmore, or the RNC alerts circulated to the faithful you see the promulgation not only of the same messages (over and over) but the same tenous and tendentious links to "real" science and "real" history and "real" pop culture. Jonah uses words like "history" and "indians" and even "prarie" or "fire" but to paraphrase others in the blogosphere in reference to the Princess Bride [those] words don't mean what you are supposed to think he means by them. You'd actually have to know, or care, about history, indians, praries, fires and etc...to use them as true scholars would use them. My god, just look at Juan Cole's magisterial slap down of Jonah last year, and at Jonah's pathetic response, to begin to see how little Jonah cares about the topics on which he bloviates.

How do I know Jonah is a tool and not a true scholar? Because he will write about the next pop cultural or coffee table book image/factoid with the same authority tomorrow even if it outright contradicts his point today. That is because the object of his writing is simply to score points again and again against his enemies.

But you knew that.

Posted by: Kate G. February 07, 2006 at 11:06 AM

And here's Tim:

Tim Burke: Goldberg is making a bad and lazy gloss of an argument that's been made in a number of works published in the last decade, most incisively Shepherd Krech's book The Ecological Indian.

Krech and others have observed that Native Americans as a whole were not more notably inclined towards premodern versions of environmentalism than any other human society in history, and that the tendency to view them as such is something of a fiction created slowly and complicatedly in American culture over the last 150 years, especially in the last 50.

Krech synthesizes work on a variety of pre-Columbian Native American cultures that suggests, among other things, that some Southwest cultures outstripped their available resources, in part through intensive and misguided infrastructure (this is the same research that Diamond cites in his two recent books); that some Native Americans in the Rockies and Sierras used fire fairly extensively to produce the mix fo meadow and old-growth forest that was later regarded as pristine and natural wilderness; and that some Plains Native American societies may have used wasteful hunting methods such as driving large herds of buffalo off cliffs. And so on.

So very distantly, Goldberg is correctly summarizing several important arguments--that Native Americans were not uniformly or automatically deeply committed to spiritual or practical analogues of contemporary environmentalism, and that what some 19th Century Americans moving into the West took to be pristine, untouched wilderness environments were actually environments that were significantly altered by human presence.

That's all. The material on the buffalo and the plains and all that is simply his fantasy: it's not in any of the work that he might plausibly mean to refer to.

This is a basic problem with a lot of public discourse on the right, and sometimes the left: people who spout off to score a quick point who are profoundly careless.

Posted by: Timothy Burke | February 07, 2006 at 11:15 AM

Something I Didn't Know

Globalization:

I'm Not One to Blog, But...: We've Got the Bleat : There's no need to be sheepish about knowing that on this day in 1880 the SS Strathleven arrived in London with the first Australian frozen mutton. London rejoiced...

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

St. Cornelius's Day

In celebration of St. Cornelius's Day, Fred Clark puts on the shoes of the fisherman.

Back! Back, You Beast! Back!

Eudora has just classified a message *from* me (I was on the "reply to all" list) as spam.

They are starting to take over...

Fafblog!

The Ethical Werewolf sings the praises of Fafblog:

The Ethical Werewolf: I present five of my favorite Fafblog quotes:


Giblets against John Edwards:
He is a trial lawyer! As a trial lawyer Edwards repeatedly stole money from poor corporations to give to greedy children crippled by their products! Do we really need a vice president who is a lackey of Big Children? Giblets thinks not!

Fafnir on interacting with Republicans in NYC:
Show your Republican that your home an culture are nothin to be afraid of. Take him to the park or to a Yankees game! Remember to bring lots of umbrellas an sunscreen because your Republican is not used to the harsh light of open nature. He has been raised in dark squalid caves filled with toxic poisons where he hunts bats an small elves for sustenance. Do not take your Republican to a museum! He comes from a "Red State" where all art is banned an has been replaced by very large engines eternally pumpin greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for no reason whatsoever.

Fafnir on extraordinary rendition:
maybe the torture jobs we send overseas will help build up the foreign torture markets so overseas torturers can get better salaries an buy more goods an help their economies in developin countries an such. Global torture lifts everybody's boat and we all win the end! Or just turn into monsters.

Fafnir on the election:
“Eleven States voted to Define Marriage tonight,” says Lester Holt, “and they have Defined it as a slow-moving, thick-skulled poison-spitting reptile that hates queers. America has spoken.”

Giblets on pigs and academic advice:
Giblets is proud of his beloved pet pig and has decided to reward it with a delicious treat. A treat like dynamite!

"You really shouldn't feed dynamite to your pig," says Juan Cole, mideast expert and professor of pig studies. "Dynamite has never been a safe feed for pigs and has only resulted in disaster for pigs and the pig community."

Oh what do you know Juan Cole! Your expertise in the fields of pig history and pig theory just means you have swallowed the standard academic dogma regarding the pig-dynamite dynamic! Giblets has reason to believe his pig will receive fantastic dynapig powers, but Cole has been too heavily indoctrinated by pigs and Arabists to see the truth.

"Dynamite is explosive," says Juan Cole. "If you feed it to your pig, your pig will explode."

Things I at One Time Wanted to Blog About...

Things I at one time wanted to blog about:

Arms and influence: The last throes : Vice President Cheney's statement that the Iraqi insurgency was in its final throes was so odd that it raises the question of why he said it. The signs are all there that the various insurgent groups are not being crushed: the number and lethality of attacks; the estimated size of the insurgent organizations; the continued inability of the Iraqi army to operate on its own against them; continued security measures based on the supposition that the insurgents have infiltrated the police, army, and other parts of the government.... Why did Cheney say what he did? Frankly, I don't know.... I don't think his motives are necessarily the important issue.... His statements complicate the work of others.... Cheney's comment distorts the decision-making process, making a hard job even harder.

PressThink: Transparency at the Post: Q & A with Jim Brady of Washingtonpost.com : "So if you're a responsible reporter and you call up the RNC spokesman and get the response to Gore's speech, you're just going to have to accept that when the spokesman tells you something kinda sorta plausible but fundamentally untrue you're going to attribute it, quote it accurately, and run it. Now you're involved in the propaganda machine yourself, but it happened as a result of trying to be balanced and responsible and 'avoid the impression of...' -- Jay." Unless, of course, you write the follow-up paragraph, based on a little research easily accessed in these days of digital databanks, which says, basically, "The RNC response is fundamentally untrue." Now, I grant you, nine out of 10 reporters don't do that -- even though it is not that hard to take that extra step. I learned that woeful fact in 2004, running Campaign Desk, the predecessor to CJR Daily. And every time we saw it, we called them on it -- usually to no avail. But my point is, that is the way out of what you describe as Downie's dilemma ... or Sue Schmidt's dilemma ... or Harris's dilemma ... or Howell's dilemma. What's depressing is that none of them get it. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at January 22, 2006 07:40 PM | Permalink

TPMCafe || Politics, Ideas & Lots Of Caffeine: It may not be readily apparent to people why an image of an 18th century coffeehouse is appropriate adornment for a new media enterprise. The intended reference, I believe, is to the ideas expressed in Jurgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgois Society. Before checking it out with Google I was under the impression that this was an essay I'd read in school. It seems, though, that it's a whole book I must have read excerpts of.... The most important feature of the public sphere as it existed in the eighteenth century was the public use of reason in rational-critical debate. This checked domination by the state, or the illegitimate use of power. Rational-critical debate occurred within the bourgeois reading public, in response to literature, and in institutions such as salons and coffee-houses. Habermas sees the public sphere as developing out of the private institution of the family, and from what he calls the 'literary public sphere', where discussion of art and literature became possible for the first time. The public sphere was by definition inclusive, but entry depended on one's education and qualification as a property owner. Habermas emphasizes the role of the public sphere as a way for civil society to articulate its interests. Good stuff. Eventually, though, things took a turn for the worse.... The key feature of the public sphere - rational-critical debate - was replaced by leisure.... Habermas argues that the world of the mass media is cheap and powerful. He says that it attempts to manipulate and create a public where none exists.... We still need a strong public sphere to check domination by the state and non-governmental organizations. Habermas holds out some hope that power and domination may not be permanent features. A serious problem indeed. TPM Cafe, one hopes, is part of the solution.... [T]he site does involve a system for quality-rating comments, so maybe things will get ugly...

Limbo: Roberts%u2019 Rules of Guile : According to the Portland Oregonian, last August Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) had a conversation with then-Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr., after which Wyden pronounced himself convinced that %u201Cin cases dealing with end-of-life care, [Roberts] would "start with the supposition that one has the right to be left alone." This was important, because Oregon is the only state in the Union that permits physician-assisted suicide.... A final decision on the issue came down just yesterday, with the high court ruling 6-3 in favor of Oregon, upholding its 1994 Death With Dignity law.... So, how did the new chief justice--whom a reassured Wyden eventually chose to confirm--vote in this landmark case of individual rights versus government intrusion? Well, he was one of the three dissenters, joining ultraconservatives Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia in arguing that Ashcroft's efforts to criminalize the dispensing of life-ending drugs was legally appropriate.... Trusting George W. Bush's nominees can prove to be as difficult as trusting the prez himself.

The Big Picture: The Psychology Behind Common Investor Mistakes : Behavioral finance, a relatively new area of financial research, has been receiving more and more attention from both individual and institutional investors. Behavioral finance combines results from psychological studies of decision-making with the more conventional decision-making models of standard finance theory. By combining psychology and finance, researchers hope to better explain certain features of securities markets and investor behavior that appear irrational.... Six common errors of perception and judgment.... Overconfidence.... What, if anything, can investors do about the general tendency toward overconfidence?.... Trade less.... Fear of Regret.... Cognitive Dissonance.... How can you adjust for the tendency to avoid or deny new, conflicting information?... investment discipline.... Anchoring.... Representativeness.... Myopic Risk Aversion...

KR Washington Bureau | 01/11/2006 | Knight Ridder's Alito story: Factual and fair : On Dec. 1, Knight Ridder's Washington bureau sent a story analyzing the record of Judge Samuel Alito to our 32 daily newspapers and to the more than 300 papers that subscribe to the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service. Written by Stephen Henderson, Knight Ridder's Supreme Court correspondent, and Howard Mintz of the San Jose Mercury News, the story began: "During his 15 years on the federal bench, Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has worked quietly but resolutely to weave a conservative legal agenda into the fabric of the nation's laws."... Henderson and Mintz cataloged the cases by category - employment discrimination, criminal justice, immigration and so on - and analyzed each one with help from attorneys who participated on both sides of the cases and experts in those fields of law. They interviewed legal scholars and other judges, many of them admirers of Alito. They concluded that, "although Alito's opinions are rarely written with obvious ideology, he's seldom sided with a criminal defendant, a foreign national facing deportation, an employee alleging discrimination or consumers suing big business." You might find this neither surprising nor controversial. Alito, after all, was nominated by a president who said that his ideal Supreme Court justices were Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the high court's most reliably conservative members. You'd be wrong. Within days, the Senate Republican Conference circulated a lengthy memo headlined, "Knight Ridder Misrepresents Judge Alito's 15-year record."... Fact-based reporting is the lifeblood of a democracy. It gives people shared information on which to make political choices. But as people in new democracies risk their lives to gather such information, in this country fact-based reporting is under more relentless assault than at any time in my more than 40 years in Washington.... I invite you to reach your own conclusion about Knight Ridder's Alito story...

battlepanda: Why are our Intro to Econ classes failing us?: How is it possible for a guy like RJ to, for all intents and purposes, not believe in economics? He certainly is intelligent, and more importantly intellectually curious. He was even curious enough about economics at one point to take an intro to Econ class at college. Amherst College, which is among the best schools in this country... this class, Econ 11, was tailored precisely to function as a freestanding introduction to economics...

Singularity! - A Tough Guide to the Rapture of the Nerds

It's hard to talk about what "liberalism" is as a philosophical doctrine because there are at least four:

  1. There's the "let's not celebrate St. Bartholomew's Day this year" liberalism--the liberalism of fear.
  2. There's the "let's try lots of different things on an individual and a group level and then learn from each other's mistakes" liberalism--the liberalism of uncertainty, and of the consequent value of social diversification.
  3. There's the "this liberal order stuff has worked *much* better than anything else we've tried" liberalism--the liberalism of conservativism.
  4. There's "stairmaster liberalism"--the liberalism of John Stuart Mill in which adulthood is reached only by exercising your mental decision-making muscles, which can only be properly done in a liberal order.

Jonathan Weisman Has a Good Budget Article This Morning...

Robert Waldmann points out that Jonathan Weisman has a very good budget article on page A10:

Budget Plan Assumes Too Much, Demands Too Little : President Bush's budget blueprint would bring the federal government's budget deficit under control by decade's end. But to do that without raising taxes, the White House would need a sweeping tax reform that it has avoided proposing and a swift end to the war in Iraq.

The budget plan for fiscal 2007 underscores what budget analysts of all political stripes have been saying for years: The goals of balancing the budget, waging a global fight against terrorism and making Bush's first-term tax cuts permanent may be fundamentally at odds.

Under the budget plan, the deficit would jump from $318 billion last year to $423 billion in 2006, then slide back down to $183 billion in 2010. In 2011, the last year of the White House's projection, the deficit would again begin to rise, to $205 billion, reflecting the cost of extending Bush's tax cuts beyond their 2010 expiration date and enacting a proposed Social Security restructuring that would cost $57 billion in that year alone.

But even getting there requires some heroic assumptions.

The president's budget acknowledges the cost of Bush's call to make his tax cuts permanent -- $1.35 trillion over the next decade and nearly $120 billion in 2011 alone. But beyond 2007, the budget assumes no military expenditures in Iraq or Afghanistan and no effort to address the unintended effects of the alternative minimum tax, a parallel income tax system that was designed to hit the rich but has instead increasingly pinched the middle class. It also assumes Congress will cut domestic spending every year after 2007.Those factors led Goldman Sachs economists to tell clients yesterday that the deficit forecasts are "unrealistic."

White House Budget Director Joshua B. Bolten said that something must be done about the AMT. But beyond 2007, when Bush assumes a one-year provision to mitigate the AMT's impact on the middle class, Bolten said any fix should be part of a broader "revenue-neutral" restructuring of the tax system. Such a revision, once viewed as a priority of the president's, has disappeared from Bush's political agenda.

"In the absence of even mentioning tax reform in his State of the Union address, it may be presumptuous to assume a revenue-neutral AMT fix after 2007," said Brian M. Riedl, a federal budget expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The administration, for the first time, has spelled out anticipated spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in a formal budget document. Previously, the administration submitted requests for supplemental or emergency spending to cover costs. But the $50 billion in war funding for next year falls well short of the $120 billion that was requested for 2006. And no further war spending is included in future deficit projections."This budget is not going to happen," said Stanley E. Collender, a federal budget analyst at Financial Dynamics Business Communications. "Of all the budgets I've seen recently, this is the one going nowhere the fastest."

What is included may prove equally unrealistic, Collender and other budget experts said. The budget includes a crackdown on tax cheats that is supposed to net more than $1.5 billion over the next five years and $3.6 billion over the next decade. But if such a crackdown is in the offing, the Internal Revenue Service has said very little about it.

The president assumes that Congress will cut discretionary spending unrelated to national security from $492 billion in 2007 to $455 billion in 2011, and that lawmakers will hold the line on defense spending. Total discretionary spending -- including defense, homeland security and domestic government programs -- would fall under the president's budget from $1.03 trillion this year to $994 billion in 2011.

"Nearly all of their savings comes from this cut to total discretionary spending," Riedl said. "That does nothing for the real long-term problem," which the Bush administration acknowledges to be entitlement programs, such as Medicare and Social Security.

Many of the tough cuts the president did include were rejected just days ago, when Congress gave final approval to a major budget-cutting measure. Lawmakers left out the White House's proposals to cut agricultural price supports and food stamps, and to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

After a difficult political struggle that badly divided congressional Republicans, lawmakers muscled through savings from Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, federal child support enforcement and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. Before Bush has even signed that legislation, he is coming back for more. His budget proposes to wring out $4.9 billion more in savings from Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, $17 million from child support enforcement and $16.7 billion from the federal pension insurance program through 2011.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the recently retired director of the Congressional Budget Office, gave credit to Bush for putting entitlement cuts on the table. But the problems with the budget -- especially in not confronting the effects of the AMT and the war in Iraq -- have cropped up time and again, Holtz-Eakin said.

"There's lots of this we've seen before, and that's what Bolten said today: 'We're going to take our priorities and stick with them,' " said Holtz-Eakin, a former Bush White House economist. "This seems familiar because it is familiar."

The Economist Finds Its Snark

For a surprisingly large part of the time over the past six years, the Economist has been like Austin Powers without his mojo--has spent far too much time on its belly making craven and pathetic excuses for the incompetent, inept, mendacious, and malevolent George W. Bush administration.

Now it looks like it may have its snark back:

Bush's bulging deficits | Economist.com : POLITICAL speech is always full of slippery locutions, but George Bush's state-of-the-union address last week may have set a new standard for involuted meaning when he urged Congress to “act responsibly, and make the tax cuts permanent”. At that time, the official White House projection of the budget deficit for the 2006 fiscal year was $341 billion, a substantial portion of which could have been erased by rolling back the tax cuts so dear to Mr Bush’s heart. On Monday February 6th, the use of the word “responsibly” suddenly looked even more idiosyncratic, as the administration released a $2.7 trillion proposed budget, and announced that the 2006 deficit projection had grown to $423 billion, or 3.2% of America’s GDP.

The Bush administration claims it is trying to reduce spending to match the hefty tax cuts the president passed during his first term.... [S]uch fiddling is the fiscal equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. After shrinking surprisingly quickly in the 2005 fiscal year, the budget deficit is once again expanding, thanks to big bills for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the clean-up after Hurricane Katrina. If a Republican Congress and president can only manage to cut their least favourite programmes by a paltry amount when faced with a budget deficit soaring towards the half-trillion mark, then it is time to concede defeat and raise taxes. Mr Bush’s Democratic critics do not, of course, want him to trim spending at all.... [E]ven many of Mr Bush’s natural political allies are unenthused. The health-care cuts, after all, are projected to save only $3.2 billion next year, a drop in America’s sea of red ink.

Moreover, all this assumes that Congress will actually pass all of Mr Bush’s proposed spending cuts into law.... And even if Congress does oblige, the budget projections require some rather heroic assumptions about the future course of spending. Military spending is currently supposed to fall off sharply after 2007, the last year in which extra spending for Iraq and Afghanistan is budgeted. This seems hugely optimistic, considering the problems still faced in both countries.

The projections also receive a boost from assuming that America’s tax code will not change much in coming years. The Office of Management and Budget has assumed no alteration to the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), a special levy designed to catch wealthy people who had moved most of their income out of the taxman’s reach. Thanks to bracket creep, the AMT will soon threaten to catch the middle class in its net; most experts agree that it will probably be necessary to reform it soon, to refocus it on rich tax avoiders.

America’s gigantic budget deficit is not merely a concern for the generation of Americans currently in nappies, who are likely to be on the hook when the debt comes due. Many economists worry that the growing fiscal gap is one of the main forces driving the expansion of America’s current-account deficit, which was over 6% in the third quarter of 2005, the most recent for which figures are available. And that current-account deficit is a big global problem.

Since the worldwide economic slowdown of 2001, America’s gluttonous appetite for imports has been one of the mainstays of the global economy, allowing other countries to export their way back to a modicum of economic health. China, in particular, has deliberately fuelled its economic growth by keeping its currency cheap against the dollar, making its goods attractive to American consumers.... The federal budget deficit, economists worry, is essentially being financed overseas, particularly by central banks like China’s, who buy dollars to raise their price against the local currency, and then park those dollars in US Treasuries. Should the banks' appetite for American debt wane, American borrowers, including the government, would face sharply higher interest rates. This would be a nasty shock not only to the American economy, but to all those countries that depend on American demand to keep their own economies rolling along.

Many economists are urging the government to put the books in order now so as to lessen the potential blow of a disorderly correction. Even those who are not convinced that federal borrowing is driving America’s current-account deficit wider (such as Ben Bernanke, who has just replaced Alan Greenspan at the head of the Federal Reserve) are calling on the government to get its finances under control in order to improve the national savings rate and lower the bill that Congress hands to future generations.

But not even rescinding all of Mr Bush’s tax cuts would close the gap; much of the budget deficit is the result of new spending, on expensive projects, such as the Iraq war and a new prescription-drug benefit for Medicare, and the unexpected decline in tax revenues that occurred after the stockmarket bubble crashed. Bringing the budget back to balance will require a politically unpalatable combination of tax increases and spending cuts.

But for all their rhetoric, so far the Republicans have barely touched domestic discretionary spending. Even if they did find the gumption to make real cuts, this would be insufficient, since mandatory spending—which covers things like Medicare, Social Security and interest on the national debt—accounts for the lion’s share of federal outlays. That share will only grow as America piles up debt and the baby-boom generation retires. Mr Bush’s modest changes to Medicare rules are certainly not enough to alter that ruthless arithmetic. But neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have the stomach for any serious reforms to the popular programme—most of the political debate over Medicare has focused on how the government can spend more to help the elderly buy drugs. Perhaps Mr Bush’s successors will be able to find a creative new definition of “bankrupt”.