Reasonable Arguments

Inaugural Speech Excerpt

2009-01-22T12:57:00.000-08:00

It was a privilege to be able to attend Obama's inauguration. Many people I've talked to and some in the media have commented on the relative absence of applause lines in Obama's speech. First, I thought it was a good speech in setting up the public for what lies in store for us and preparing us for the tasks ahead, because our problems will not be solved just because we elected some new officials; these problems will take patience and input from ourselves. I thought Obama hit these notes when he talked about the need for us to take "responsibility" seriously again.

Second, I wonder whether the advent of the online age has or will have some effect on these speeches. Until now, speeches have been events heard once and quoted occasionally. But now they can be accessed anytime at our convenience. Perhaps Obama's speeches are geared to some extent for those interested in a repeat hearing in a screen-to-individual setting. If so, then the need to lay out a good argument may take precedence over a series of good applause lines.

Our Questionable Commitment On Kids' Health Insurance

2009-01-15T15:56:00.000-08:00

The House has passed a bill expanding S-CHIP, the combined state-federal program for children's health insurance. It passed Congress in 2007 but was vetoed by President Bush. With expanded Democratic majorities and a Democratic president, it seems likely to become law this time around. And who can be against making sure that kids have adequate health care, right?

Me. Or at least this version of ensuring it.

The problem is the payment mechanism. The bill pays for the expansion by raising the federal cigarette tax by 61 cents per pack. I have two objections to this funding method.

First, it's either unsustainable or it taxes addicts. The idea of a "sin tax" is to reduce the consumption or the activity being taxed. If the goal of raising the cigarette tax is to reduce smoking while at the same time expanding children's health insurance coverage, then its implementation will indeed reduce cigarette sales and eventually deprive the program of the money it relies on. A sin tax is simply not a sustainable source of revenue for any program if the sin tax accomplishes its objective. Or, if raising the price of smoking doesn't decrease the incidence of smoking, then perhaps all we are doing is shifting the cost of the program expansion to those who are addicted to nicotine and who have no choice but to pay whatever taxes are required to satisfy their habit. That hardly seems like a just way to fund a kids program.

But my more fundamental objection is that taxing smokers absolves the rest of us from taking responsibility for this program that most people say they want. Most people say they support health insurance for kids; but how strong is that support if the best we can say is "yes, insure kids--but only if smokers pay for it." I think if I support a program, then I should be willing to help pay for it myself, not sluff off the responsibility on others.

This legislation is one example of what's wrong with our relationship to our government today--or, conversely, our government's relation to us. It's easy to be for something that requires nothing of us. It was easy to be for the Iraq war if we were asked neither to server nor to pay for it. It was easy to be for tax cuts if we didn't have to give up any programs that would help make those cuts fiscally responsible. And it's easy to favor expanding health care as long as someone else picks up the tab.

But that approach is not sustainable, and it's not realistic. Government isn't an abstract entity that just takes our money, or just doles out programs. It's the way we work together to achieve certain goals that we think are of national importance. It's the way we pay together for programs we say we want. And we do pay together, for the most part; I don't want to minimize the taxes that many people pay or the burden they impose on some households.

But by placing the burden of paying for popular programs on a particularly small part of the population, we avoid having a real discussion about what we are and are not willing to pay for ourselves. I think we should have that discussion because I think it's the only way to achieve long term fiscal responsibility. I think that if we really care about health insurance for kids, we should be asked to help contribute to the cause. And if a majority of us say that we're not willing to pay, then maybe some of us don't really care about insuring kids as much as we say we do. Real support is manifested by a willingness to act; talking about some wonderful goal won't make it happen.

If most people say they don't want to pay for kids' health insurance, it may not be the outcome I prefer. But at least that's responsible democracy. To impose programs or reduce taxes as if they're all free may be democracy too, but it's not a responsible one, and it's not an approach we can keep up for long without suffering the fiscal consequences. Let's have an honest discussion with ourselves on this and other issues, and let the chips fall where they may.

Where Was Cheney's Plan B?

2009-01-15T14:13:00.000-08:00

In his Jan. 14 PBS Newshour interview, Vice President Cheney said that he "underestimated...the extent of which the Iraqi population had been beaten down by Saddam Hussein," adding that "we thought that the Iraqis would be able to bounce back fairly quickly once Saddam was gone or the new government established and step up and take major responsibilities for governing Iraq." When asked for the source of that miscalculation, he said "Well, we didn't have that good of intelligence, I don't think, with respect to sort of the state of affairs inside Iraq. A lot of that had been wiped out over the years. Saddam Hussein was so brutal, killed so many people, slaughtered so many innocents, that it had a lasting effect on Iraqi society that was greater than I expected."

This seems to me to be revisionism at its finest. My understanding it that there were plenty of people at the State Department who warned that Iraqis should not be expected to be able to take over major government functions, that there was likely to be a power vacuum, that more troops would be needed to supply security and the delivery of basic services, and that it would take time for Iraqis to develop the capacity for self-governance. I don't think the problem was an absence of good intelligence; the problem was that the administration had decided it was only going to listen to those who already agreed with what they thought was going to be the case and rejected the opinions of those who disagreed with them.

But even if the intelligence was bad regarding the Iraqi's ability to establish a new government, is that any excuse for the failure of American planning? Only fools make major plans based only on a best-case scenario. Even the most minor businesses have contingency plans and backups in case things go wrong. Where was this administration's backup plan? Why assume that in a project as complicated as reconstituting an entire national government would go exactly as those in charge of the operation would hope? If there was any doubt as to the nature of the operation, wouldn't it be incredibly stupid not to plan for other scenarios, even worst-case scenarios? In a project this complicated, wouldn't common sense dictate going in with the resources to deal with the most adverse set of circumstances instead of the minimal resources needed to deal with an ideal situation?

But such has always been the case with this administration. There is no Plan B except to make Plan A work. They believed that the way to eliminate the national debt is to cut taxes and "grow the economy." And if it doesn't work? Forget the idea of paying down our debt and then cutting taxes when it might be safer to do so. Plan A will work, and the possibility that it might leave us worse off isn't enough to have a contingency plan.

I can only speculate as to why this administration never has a backup plan. Perhaps it's because making sure things will work would actually make demands on government resources that they don't want to face. Going into Iraq with enough troops would prove too costly and conflicted with their tax cut mantra--never mind that doing it wrong would cost us far more in the long run. Paying off the debt before trying out their tax cuts wasn't as politically popular as cutting taxes now--never mind that running up more debt would leave us in a far more vulnerable position if the economy turned sour.

This administration hasn't just been irresponsible. It has been reckless. And those that run it have refused to take responsibility.

On another note, Cheney also said in the interview that "I think the tax packages we passed in '03, for example, produced 52 months - uninterrupted months of job growth.

"We've run into trouble recently, obviously, beginning in '08 because of the financial crisis, as well as the recession, but those are not U.S. problems alone. Those are global problems, those are problems that have affected nations and economies all over the world; that's not something that is just a U.S. problem."

First, it's hard to link economic growth to the tax cuts as effect and cause. Clinton raised taxes coming out of a recession, and we had more economic growth than this administration got with its tax cuts. Second, Cheney conveniently omits, or just doesn't realize, that those 52 months of job growth did nothing for most Americans. The job growth was by all accounts anemic for an economy coming out of a recession. And those years of "growth" did not move median salaries. The only ones who benefited were those at the top.

And yes, the economic problems today are global; but many economists trace their sources to the US. Foreign banks bought the securities based on mortgages in the US that never should have been sold and which assumed that US housing prices would never go down. So Cheney refuses to acknowledge that a fair share of the global economic crisis was inextricably linked to what was going on in the US.

But at least those packaging securities based on the false assumption that US housing prices would never go down show that this administration wasn't the only entity that lacked a Plan B.

Running Versus Governing

2008-12-01T06:29:00.000-08:00

While I'm glad to see Democratic majorities in Congress and a Democrat coming to the White House, I remain concerned about the long-term--heck, even the short-term--policies for the nation. Because I see races being won on policies that are neither wise nor sustainable, and I think our newly elected officials know better.

Yes, politicians run on what they need to to get elected. But running is different than governing, and if the governing goes badly, it makes it a lot harder to get reelected.

We know that our nation's fiscal policy cannot survive endless tax cuts. Yet both Democrats and Republicans ran on tax cuts for just about everyone. Obama, whose tax plan which raises rates on the highest-income Americans, proudly stated that his proposal was still a net tax cut for the nation (probably so that he wouldn't get labeled as a tax-and-spender). Yet if revenues decrease and expenditures continue to rise at present rates, we know we will dig ourselves into dependency and penury.

Many Democrats and Republicans both ran on lower gas prices. But we all know, or should know, that low gas prices are inconsistent with our calls for energy independence. Now that gas is back down, there are indications that bad habits are returning: people are driving more, and the incentive to buy more efficient cars is lessened. And it should be obvious that when gas is cheap, alternative fuel sources can't compete, delaying our inevitable and ultimately beneficial transition off of foreign oil. For economic, environmental, and national security reasons, the sooner we make the transition the better. Yet our politicians seem trapped by the demand for lower gas prices now and for the foreseeable future.

And after years of talking about Social Security, there is still no serious proposal on the table for dealing with its long-term future. We know that with our aging population, the demographics of the situation will lead to huge costs if nothing is done. But since there is no immediate problem, no crisis, the public ignores it and our politicians don't bring it up since it can only lose votes.

So how can we start to address these important issues when there seems to be no sense of urgency? I think it goes something like this.

Our elected officials need to say that we have some hard choices ahead. But they can't make the hard choices unless enough of their constituents are willing to make those same hard choices. Because that is where the ultimate accountability lies in our system of government: not with 535 representatives on Capitol Hill and the resident of the White House, but with the 200+ million eligible voters of this nation. We can't expect our officials to make difficult decisions about our future unless we are willing to do the same.

So then we can be asked: do we really want low gas prices? Because we can have it--but then we should be told not to expect to achieve energy independence. Do we really want to preserve Social Security? We can do it, but not without some kind of action on our part. Do we really want tax cut after tax cut? We can have it, but not without destroying our society's future.

We can, with the help of our elected leaders, look at our problems and see that the solutions lie within our grasp, but only if we choose to act. We can take responsibility for our fiscal situation and realize that "the government" doesn't tax us; we tax ourselves for the programs we say we want. Then we can have that messy, sprawling discussion that resolves itself however imperfectly through our representative system. We can ask ourselves how badly we want energy independence and consider whether we'd tolerate a gradually increasing gas tax to create incentives for ourselves to change our behavior. We can think about whether caring for the retired is worth asking those of us in our 30s, 40s, and perhaps early 50s to wait a little longer before receiving Social Security benefits when we retire.

Our leadership should not tell us what to think, but what to think about. And then we can choose. Right now, I fear we're not even thinking. We're not thinking because most people don't have the interest, time, or energy, and our leaders see little to gain by bringing these things up. But we could all be so much better off if some group of legislators on the Hill got together and decided to ask us as a nation: are we serious about these problems? And if we are serious, what are we willing to do?

The public has expressed a great deal of dissatisfaction with the direction of the country. Someone should tell us that the direction is our responsibility. If we want different results, we have to start making different choices. And some of those choices will be tough ones. It would help if our leaders would start letting us off the hook for the choices we have made, and asked us what choices we are willing to make to change our direction. Because pulling a lever for a candidate of a different party won't give those who get elected any more support for hard choices if we continue to avoid those choices ourselves.

The Tyranny of Ideology

2008-11-18T06:12:00.000-08:00

I continue to be amazed at how ideology trumps facts in some people's minds. Some people, even those very prominent within their movements, are so convinced that they are right on principle that they cannot even appear to contemplate that they might be wrong, and are oblivious to the disastrous effects that clinging to such ideology in the face of a changing reality will have to their own goals.

In yesterday's New York Times article, Grover Norquist, the president for Americans for Tax Reform and a prominent conservative, scoffed at those who called for the Republican party to move left politically. "They will be cheerfully ignored," he said.

But what does he offer to regain a political majority? What has he or his movement proposed to deal with the real issues facing people today? We just had an election, and there seemed little appetite in the public for less economic regulation, a hands-free approach to health care, or letting people get kicked out of their homes. When families have problems paying the bills, ideology purity is not on their list of priorities. Though I think claims of a political realignment may be premature, there has been a significant shift in public attitude. And unless Mr. Norquist's party adjusts, he will find their proposals being uncheerfully ignored at the polls.

The same article cites Texas governor Rick Perry as advocating that the Republican party continue to stay focused on social issues, claiming that anti-gay marriage measures in California, Arizona, and Florida show that conservative social values still matter to many Americans and so would be an asset to the party that adopts and promotes them.

But he's fighting a losing battle. Regardless of the ability of people to change their minds on such matters (and some do), the demographics regarding gay marriage at least is inexorable: older people think this issue is far more important than younger people. The California anti-gay marriage voters have been losing ground every time it has been brought up, and most people think that the outcome will flip in four or eight years. People of course are free to have their individual opinions on the matter, but it would appear to be self-destructive for a political party to bet its future on what is clearly a losing demographic battle. Why a sitting governor would think that this approach is good for rebuilding his party is a mystery.

And in another context, Stephen Moore, founder of The Club For Growth and presently on the Wall Street Journal editorial board, was on the Colbert Report last week arguing that higher taxes would kill the economy, that we should cut all government spending by 25%. This despite clear evidence that the marginally higher tax rates of the Clinton years was a period of robust growth. This despite the fact that there is no serious possibility or will to cut our massive expenditures in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense by 25% (which, with debt financing, constitute over 65% of the budget), much less aid for schools, law enforcement, environmental protection, or a host of other less costly programs. Even if he's right that smaller government will make everyone better off in the long run, such a proposal has no political support whatsoever and is simply not politically possible. It doesn't address people's present needs and won't serve as a plausible platform for Republican reconstruction.

Principles are important. But they shouldn't be considered inviolate when reality requires a different approach.

Primary Memory Lane

2008-11-08T06:33:00.001-08:00

Remember all those arguments that we heard during the primaries?

Hillary wins the big states.

Hillary wins the swing states necessary for Democrats to win in November (implying that Obama won't win those states).

Obama can't get the white blue-collar vote.

Clinton supporters won't vote for Obama.

The supposed snubbing of Michigan and Florida in the primaries will be big problems for Democrats in the general election.

Just goes to show what many of us argued all along: you can't conclude much about general election results from primary results.

The idea that if people prefer A to B, then they won't prefer B to C was fallacious from the start. Perhaps intuitively attractive, but logically fallacious. We can't know if Clinton would have done better or worse than Obama in the general election, but we do know that his loss to Clinton in Ohio primary did not prevent him from winning Ohio against McCain. Or Pennsylvania. Or Florida. Or Indiana. Or New Hampshire. And he carried Virgina and North Carolina, states which might not have been as competitive if Clinton had been the nominee, though she probably would have had an easier time in Florida.

Most Clinton supporters came home to the party. Of course most of them would, just as most Obama supporters would have voted for Clinton if she had been the nominee. There was too much at stake for people not entirely wrapped up in the personality of the candidates to do otherwise.

The early primary controversies in Michigan and Florida turned out to be complete non-factors. Michigan wasn't even contested down the stretch, with the McCain campaign withdrawing from the state long before election day. Florida was close, but it was going to be so with Obama as the nominee regardless of what happened during the primaries. I've heard nothing to suggest that the Florida primary problems affected the final tallies in the general election.

As for the white blue-collar vote, Obama won white voters earning under $50,000 by 52% to 46% and received a greater percentage of the white vote than Gore and Kerry. And Pennsylvania, home of the blue-collar Clinton voter, was called very early on election night for Obama despite the concentrated efforts of the McCain campaign to wrest the state from the Democrats.

Sure, there may have been intervening factors that prognosticators weren't thinking about when they made their assertions during the primaries. The Palin selection may have pushed many Clinton supporters to Obama who might not otherwise have voted for him or stayed home. The financial crisis may have given Obama more heft with blue-collar voters than he would have had otherwise.

But I think it's hard to refute the assertion that many of the claims linking primary results to the general election were wrong. And it makes sense that they were wrong because they had little logical basis to begin with.

Do people who make assertions that turn out to be wrong ever admit their mistakes, or become more cautious about doing so in the future?

The McCain Campaign: "Country First" or Me First?

2008-09-14T19:43:00.000-07:00

An Open Letter To The McCain Campaign

Dear Senator McCain:

Your convention was themed “Country First.” You had a day of that convention devoted to “service.” You have pledged to fight the “me-first” crowd in Washington.

But after watching your campaign the past several weeks, I must ask: are you putting country first? Have you asked for service? Or have you employed me-first tactics to the detriment of our nation and to get yourself elected president?

Putting country first would have your campaign engage Obama on real issues such as health care, housing, the economy, the environment, energy, education, Iraq, and Iran, and then letting the voters decide. Instead, we’ve gotten policy-less accusations of “celebrity,” mock outrage about lipstick, and deliberately deceptive innuendos about sex education for kindergarteners. Is this what your campaign calls putting country first? Or is it the ultimate expression of “me first”: that it’s OK to say anything as long as it helps you to get elected?

I would be thrilled to see you and Obama really discuss the problems that matter to Americans so they can make informed decisions that should constitute the foundation for our democratic process. To me, that would really be putting the country first. But I don’t know how you can look at the warping of your opponent’s positions and say you’re really willing to let the people reach their own conclusions. You’ve repeatedly said that Obama will raise “your” taxes. If “your” means “everyone,” then you must know that your statement will be wrong as applied to at least 80% of the public. Is that distortion putting country first? Why is there such fear to honestly describe your plan and Obama’s plan and simply argue why you think your plan is better?

Nor do I see from your campaign any call for real service. Your budget plan calls for more tax cuts, but there are no proposed budget cuts that come close to paying for them and you do not ask the public what they might be willing to give up to satisfy their desire for lower taxes. Instead, you seem to pretend that everything will be free; but do you truly believe that such a path leads to anything but economic ruin? Even more pointedly, you call for an extended military presence in Iraq but you have not asked the public for an iota effort to really support our troops: we have not paid for them so far, and there are no plans to pay for them in the future. As a military man yourself, I though that you would have the courage to say that if we send our troops to war, the very least we could to is pay for it. Instead, we have borrowed the money and not paid a dime ourselves; indeed, we have been lavished with tax cuts, and you have promised still more. Is this your idea of service, that we should be fine with letting a tiny fraction of the population bear all of the risk and sacrifice while we contribute less and less to their effort and send the bill instead to our children?

It seems to me that your proposals are anything but country first and almost entirely me-first. They pretend that wars are free, that tax cuts are free, that we have to do nothing to get the things we say we want. They ask nothing of us. Instead, they play along with the fiction that we can have everything while doing nothing. That approach may get you elected, but it is inadequate for governing because it is unsustainable. And promising the public something that is not sustainable is not putting country first; it’s putting our nation’s future at terrible risk.

Democrats are not blameless on these matters. I disagree with their proposal to expand children’s health insurance by taxing smokers: if that issue is something we care about, we should care enough to do something about it ourselves and not sluff off the responsibility to others. Nor are Democrats pure on the attack ad front, as I know that some of your statements have been taken out of context.

But at least Obama has asked some of us for action. He is asking those of us who are wealthy and have done so well over the past eight years to pay a little more in taxes so that the vast majority who have not benefited can have some tax relief. He is asking those of us who are serious about energy independence to make some changes in our own lives to help achieve that goal. By contrast, you now support maintaining tax cuts for the wealthy even though you previously opposed them as unfair, and you mocked suggestions that people take such small but easy steps such as properly inflating their tires to reduce oil consumption. I fail to see how either of these positions are put country first or asked any of us for the slightest bit of service.

So I ask you if you are serious about “country first” and “service.” If you are, you will stop your campaign’s rapid downward mud-slinging spiral and focus on the real and serious problems we face today. And you will talk about not only your goals for the nation but honestly tell us what we as individuals will need to do to achieve those goals.

I know politics is a rough sport, and I don’t expect purity from either side in this election season. But someone who has adopted the themes of “country first” and “service” must be able to do better that what we’ve seen so far. Otherwise, those terms will be nothing more than ironic as punch lines that you never meant seriously in the first place. I think the American people deserve better.

Don’t you?

Losing The Drilling Argument

2008-08-05T20:52:00.000-07:00

It's just maddening to watch the Democrats flailing on the offshore drilling issue. Republicans, and their presidential candidate John McCain, keep scoring political hits on how they support offshore drilling, while the Democrats respond that they support drilling too--just not as much as the Republicans. If the debate remains about who favors drilling more, it's a contest the Democrats will lose.

The problem is that the Democrats have ceded the idea that more drilling will help with oil and gas prices, even though that idea is false. When one side's repeated assertions go unchallenged, the public tends to believe them regardless of the facts. Democratic leadership was weak on contesting the drilling issue and now seems to think that there's no way to convince the public that more drilling really won't help us get out of our oil problem. But how do they expect to win on policy if they allow the public to believe untruths about the situation?

Here's what they should be doing. They should be asking every Republican why they think drilling will solve our problems when our government's own Energy Information Agency says that opening up the outer continental shelf "would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030," and that even when that oil does come online, "any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant."

McCain and Hillary Clinton didn't gain much traction with their gas tax holiday proposals. Sure, some people who were die-hard supporters went along with what they had to say. But others must have been appropriately skeptical when those candidates got no support from serious economists. Democrats should be taking the same tack here: they should ask Republicans why they are supporting endless drilling when no serious experts in the oil field think it will have any real impact.

And it seems like Democrats are again hoping to win a policy argument while allowing vast swaths of the public to be misinformed. A July Rasmussen poll found that 59% of Americans think it's at least somewhat likely that offshore drilling will lower gas prices. A June CNN poll found that number to be 50%. Even if a large minority held these beliefs, it's a result that should embarrass anyone who thinks reality is important in making policy decisions.

This isn't the first time Democrats seem to have given up on the facts. One of Kerry's greatest errors in 2004 was his failure to address the truth about Iraq, leaving vast numbers in the public seriously misinformed. In October of 2004, a poll found that 75% of Bush supporters believed that Saddam was either directly involved in the 9/11 attacks or gave al-Qaeda substantial support, despite the utter lack of evidence to support such a view. 57% of Bush supporters also believed that a government report after the war stated that Iraq had WMDs or a major weapons program, when it in fact had found no evidence of such a program. What would have been the reaction of some of those voters if they knew the facts? And how do Democrats possibly expect to win on policy when they allow the public to believe whatever they want?

Democrats should be attacking with the facts. They should pound McCain for selling a popular fantasy instead of delivering the "straight talk" that he supposedly espouses. They should tell the public that, like Saddam's nonexistent ties to al-Qaeda, Republicans are again repeating statements that have no support whatsoever but are repeating them to get Americans to believe it. They should inform the public that more drilling won't help them now and, according to our own government, won't help down the road--though it will help the oil companies make a lot of money. They should excoriate the Republicans for advocating that we make the same bad choices that got us in this situation, and repeating the Bush administration's tragic compulsion to believe whatever they want regardless of the facts. They should be saying that if we're going to take this problem seriously, we have to make different decisions for the long term instead of the same old decisions that will do nothing for anyone except the oil companies. These attacks have the advantage of being true while (1) going after McCain's credibility, (2) tying Republicans to the Bush administration, and (3) associating the GOP with big oil. All are political winners.

McCain said recently the line "Drill here, drill now." Democrats should respond by saying: "Sounds nice, won't work." The facts are on their side. Why they don't make more of an effort to make them matter is a mystery to me--and may result in a lost presidential election unless they become more aggressive in telling the people the truth.

Making Facts Matter

2008-07-31T21:45:00.001-07:00

So much for the prospect of an election based on real issues. With Obama and McCain as our major presidential candidates, some pundits expressed hope in the possibility of a high-minded campaign that really engaged on the issues instead of devolving into insinuation, insidious name-calling, and unsubstantiated innuendo.

Recent events seem to show that we're in for another three months of mudslinging. The McCain campaign has run ads accusing Obama of ignoring hospitalized troops in Germany because he couldn't bring cameras into the facility. This accusation has been shown to be false, and was only reluctantly admitted to by the campaign (which blamed the press for being unclear about the matter instead of doing any fact-checking on its own). The McCain campaign has run ads blaming Obama for high gasoline prices, as if a very weak dollar, an absence of any energy policy for the past decade, and a vehicle fleet that uses the stuff at far higher per-mile rates than Europeans do had nothing to do with the price at the pump--and never mind that Obama has been in federal office for less than four years and is only one of 535 legislators.

McCain has accused Obama of wanting to raise "your" taxes, even though Obama has proposed raising income and Social Security taxes only on the "you" who make above $250,000. And McCain and his surrogates repeatedly argue that raising taxes would kill off economic growth, despite the clear example of the early 1990s that the slightly higher income tax rates and substantially higher capital gains tax rates during the Clinton administration were no serious impediment to substantial and uninterrupted growth, even pre-tech bubble.

Most serious, in my opinion, is the McCain campaign's repeated call for drilling as a solution to high gas prices. Can McCain really think that drilling for oil that won't come onto the market for seven years will have any significant impact on prices today, especially when many analysts say it won't even have a significant impact when it does come onto the market? Never mind the adverse affects that our continued oil use has on our economy, our foreign policy, and the environment.

McCain says he'll balance the budget, but his numbers don't come close to adding up since he doesn't cite budget cuts to offset his tax cuts.

Oh, and the latest: McCain ads criticizing Obama for being popular, comparing him to Brittney Spears and Paris Hilton. The ads as: Is Obama ready to lead? Of course, they provide no facts to explain why he wouldn't be able to lead, or why McCain would be a better leader. They are innuendo without content.

Though the Obama campaign has responded, I'd like to see a harder-hitting answer that goes after McCain's credibility and moves the discussion back to the issues. When McCain says Obama is going to raise the taxes of most Americans, it's simply not the truth. When McCain says Obama's modest and targeted tax hikes will hurt the economy, it's just not necessarily the case. When he says Obama has caused our oil problem and drilling is the answer to high gas prices, he's just wrong on the facts. When McCain says he'll balance the budget despite his hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts, he should be forced to tell us what spending cuts he'd propose to achieve that goal. (Obama should have to defend his budget numbers as well, though at least he doesn't pretend to balance the budget and says instead that certain spending programs are worth running up more debt.)

If facts don't matter, we shouldn't bother with elections. But we can make the case that the past seven years of ignoring the facts has led to our present problems. It's time to make facts matter again.

Winning The Drilling Argument

2008-07-31T21:17:00.000-07:00

I just got an email from a Senate candidate that was “setting the record straight” regarding the candidate's position on drilling. It said that the candidate supported more domestic drilling, just on currently leased land and not in waters that could jeopardize tourism and fishing industries. For short-term relief for families suffering from high oil and gas prices, the candidate supports regulating speculation, closing the Enron-Dubai loopholes, a “demand” that refiners process more oil (though how that demand would be carried out remains unspecified), releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and pressuring OPEC to increase production.

I find this response stunningly weak. First, as I’ve posted before, many experts doubt speculation has been the driving force behind high oil prices. With prices so high that people are cutting back on use, I’m not sure why refineries would hold back on production; I’ve heard they’re operating pretty much at capacity. I doubt that releasing oil from the strategic reserve would be substantial enough to have more than a marginal impact on price. And we have no leverage over OPEC; we depend on their oil, so I don’t see how we can pressure them to do anything regarding production (Bush has already tried that path and failed).

But all of these positions are generally in line with the Democratic approach. They’re saying: we do support more domestic drilling, just not as much as the Republicans do. This sounds astonishingly timid, coming off as "drilling lite." The basic problem is that it concedes the idea that some drilling will help solve our oil problems, which isn’t really true but gives credence to the Republican position that more drilling is better. And unfortunately the Republican position seems to be gaining traction.

Here’s how I think Democrats should respond:

“We can drill, but anyone who says drilling is going to help us much in the short term or the long term is lying. Republicans can’t dispute that oil from new drilling won’t come onto the market for years, and anyone who thinks that today’s prices are substantially affected by the prospect of new supply of offshore oil seven years down the road is telling you a fairy tale. Sellers don’t think: gosh, there might be more of this stuff around in seven years, so I’ll lower the price now. Present price is set by present demand and present supply.

“Nor will drilling significantly affect the price when the oil does eventually come onto the market. Yes, there are substantial amounts of oil in ANWR and the outer continental shelf, but it’s not much in the global scheme of things. So the effect on price even in the long term will be minimal. We import about 65% of our oil, so even if we increased our own production by 50%, we’d still be importing over half our oil. That’s not a big improvement.

“The facts simply don’t support more drilling, and so the Republican proposals for drilling everywhere we can won’t solve our gas problem. They will, however, make a lot of money for oil companies (Exxon reported another record quarterly profit yesterday).

“If we’re honest, we’ll admit that there’s not much we can do about current high oil and gas prices. What we can do is start making different choices so that we don’t wind up in this situation again. One thing we can do is encourage people to buy better cars. If the price of gas goes up 40%, you don’t pay one penny more to drive around if your car is 40% more efficient. And it won’t take new technology: European fuel standards are already at over 40 miles per gallon, while we’re still in the low 20s. So the technology is here; we just have to decide to use it.

"And by the time that offshore oil would be coming onto the market, we should be transitioning to cars that are not only more efficient but cars that don’t need oil at all: cars that run on electricity, fuel cells, biofuels, or other technologies. We can make that transition—if we start now.

“The choice is between the past and the future. Republicans are offering the choices of the past: easy choices that don’t work and have led to this situation. Or we can make different choices: better choices that require us to start doing things differently and will leave all of us better in the long run.

“There is no need to wait to start making better choices. If we care about ending our oil dependency, we’ll start making better choices today. If we care about improving our economy, we’ll start making better choices today. If we care about bringing Iran to the bargaining table, we’ll start making better choices today (and waiting at least seven years for domestic offshore oil is far too late). If we care about reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, we’ll start making better choices today.

“And the better choices are about using oil more efficiently and them moving off of it, not indiscriminant drilling that won’t have any effect for seven years if at all.

“This oil crunch will probably ease somewhat eventually. But prices also probably will never return to where they were. We should try to help those families who have no choice but to spend 15% of their income on gas. But we also need to start making decisions, at both the personal and governmental levels, that will keep us from ending up in this situation again.

“Republicans are offering a choice that won’t do much to end our oil dependency or help with today’s prices but will be great for oil companies. Democrats are offering a smarter, better solution—one that might actually work for us domestically, internationally, and environmentally. If we choose it.”

At least that’s what I’d hope Democrats would say. They don’t seem to be saying it yet. Personally, I think it comes off better than looking like a weaker version of the Republican pro-drilling agenda. And it has the added advantage of being true.

The Oil Test

2008-07-24T12:30:00.000-07:00

Watching the news summary on the July 23 PBS Newshour, I heard John McCain say at a town hall meeting: "As soon as the president announced that we were going to lift the moratorium on off-shore drilling, the price of a barrel of oil went down $10. As soon as we get that oil off-shore, then it's not only going to help us with our supply, but it's going to affect this futures market, which, obviously, as we know, has gone out of sight."

I know McCain has said that the economy is his strong suit, but can he really believe his own statment? First, many experts, including a recent federal task force, doubt that the futures market is responsible to any significant degree for the price of oil today. Second, it's simply ludicrous to think that the prospect that oil supply that, by our government's own estimates, won't come online for another 9 years or so can possibly affect the markets to bring down the price of gas today. It's bad enough that McCain admits that he doesn't understand economics; but we should at least have a candidate who doesn't automatically confuse coincidence with cause and effect.

But the larger problem is that drilling seems to have the support of a majority of Americans, and the issue may be gaining political traction for the November elections. Democrats need to hammer Republicans with the truth.

The truth is that drilling domestically for oil that won't come online for nearly a decade won't lower gas prices right now. And that whatever new oil is there simply isn't enough to have a substantial effect on prices even when it does come online. With only 3% of the world's proven reserves and a need to import 65% of our oil, we simply cannot produce our way out of our oil problems. Yes, the Republicans are proposing an easy solution--an easy solution that won't work (but will make a lot of money for oil companies).

So we can do the easy thing and change nothing, or we can take the problem seriously. Most of our oil is used for gas, and the cheapest gallon of gas is the one you never have to buy. We can't pretend that we'll have new technologies to completely free us of oil in the next ten years, but we know for a fact that we can double our present fuel efficiency--because the Europeans have already done it. So we can cut oil imports in half just by replacing our cars, which most of us will do within the next decade anyway, with better ones. And that will reduce the cost to drive around more than any amount of domestic drilling will.

We can frame the argument in terms of patriotism. We can frame it in terms of the past versus the future. It doesn't help the country to support drilling while we continue our present, failed course. Drilling won't help bring Iran to the bargaining table. Drilling won't reduce the need to have our troops ready to protect oil supplies. Drilling won't keep us from sending billions of dollars overseas to countries that don't like us but sell us their oil. And drilling won't bring down gas prices.

If we're patriotic, we'll move towards more fuel efficiency to increase our political leverage with Iran and other nations. We can end the threat of being held hostage by oil suppliers. We can stop funding dictatorial and oppressive regimes. We can dramatically reduce the pollutants we put into the air. And we can do it today, right now; we don't have to wait the better part of a decade that drilling would take even if it were effective, which it isn't.

Let's tell the American people they face a test: we can go for the easy solution that won't really solve a thing, or we can choose to rise to the occasion and take real action for a real solution.

The facts are on our side. We need to make them matter again.

Insuring Kids And Our Troops In Iraq

2008-07-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

What could providing insurance for kids and our ongoing military venture in Iraq have to do with each other? We haven't been asked to pay for either of them. And our unwillingness to pay for either of them should raise serious questions about how much we really care about both of them.

Last year, Congress passed legislation to expand SCHIP, a federal program which supplies funds to states to insure families with children. President Bush vetoed the legislation on the ground that it (allegedly) did not cover the poorest families first and would have allowed states to include some families of modestly higher incomes. Congress failed to override the veto.

My problem with the SCHIP debate did not concern the income limits for the program; it was the funding mechanism. Congress, operating under pay-as-you-go rules, decided to pay for the program by increasing the federal cigarette tax. I think there are two major problems with this revenue source.

First, it's either not a stable form of funding, or, if it is, then we're taxing addicts. If the point of the tax is to decrease the incentive to smoke, then the expectation is that it will work and people will smoke less. But if people smoke less, where is the money for the expansion of SCHIP going to come from? If the revenue source is going to be consistent, then the expectation is that the tax will not have an effect on smoking--in other words, we'll get the money from those who cannot be deterred from the habit by higher costs, essentially penalizing people for being unable to quit. Is that how we want to fund our social programs?

But the larger problem is that taxing smokers fails to ask us to take responsibility for programs we say we want. Who could possibly be against insuring uninsured kids? Surely, opposition would be callous. Yet I wonder what it says about our commitment to this goal if we say that it's so important that we want...smokers to pay for it.

An Oregon ballot initiative last year also tried to expand the state program for insuring kids by taxing smokers to provide the revenue. Tobacco firms spent $12 million to defeat it. The New York Times ran aNovember 8, 2007 editorial"Big Tobacco Defeats Sick Kids," where they accused the companies of distributing deliberately misleading information and concluded: "The referendum said a lot about the power of money in any election, and not much about what the public thinks about the issue if given accurate and balanced information."

Perhaps. But even if it were true, there was a simple way around the machinations of tobacco companies. And that was to ask the people of Oregon, if they thought insuring kids was so important, to pay for it. There's nothing preventing us from insuring kids any time we want--if we're willing to back up our desires with action.

I made this same point regarding SCHIP at a Democratic fundraiser. Someone at my table said: what if we ask the public if they're willing to pay, and they say no? Then, I replied, our elected officials should tell us that we don't care enough to have the program. That's democracy. And that's not Congress's fault; that's my fault for not convincing enough of my fellow citizens that this program is worth paying for.

But I'd excoriate the Bush administration, and by extension McCain, for taking the same approach regarding the continuing military intervention in Iraq. Bush has repeatedly justified our massive military presence there by telling us how important it is. McCain has refused to provide any end date. And how are they paying for it? With borrowed money.

If they really thought it was so important, they should have the courage to ask us to help pay for it. Now. If we're not willing to pay for it, then maybe haven't convinced us that it's so important after all. Maybe they don't ask us because they know most of us would say no. But if we don't care enough to pay for it, then maybe we shouldn't have so many troops there. That's democracy.

Actions To Match Our Rhetoric

2008-07-21T20:46:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the most significant of the Bush administration's many failures is not the decision to invade Iraq, or to take no action on global warming, or make no move to get us out of our oil addiction. It is instead the consistent absence of any call for any action to match their rhetoric of urgency.

Bush has repeatedly said that Iraq is the central front of the war on terror, that it's the battle not only of our generation but of our children's generation, that civilization itself is at stake, and so he decided to...send 30,000 more troops to the region? If this battle is so crucial, so must-win, why has he not asked anything from us? He says we need to "support the troops," but what has he asked us to do to actually support them? Heck, he didn't even ask us to pay for them; this war is fought entirely on borrowed money. Supporting the troops isn't about putting a ribbon on your car where no one in Iraq will see it; it's opening up your wallet and saying "Here, buy some body armor already!"

In his 2006 State of the Union Address, Bush said that we're "addicted to oil." And then he asked us to do...nothing. He has said that global warming is real and a problem, and then asked us to do...nothing. But if we're not asked to do anything, what realistically can he--or we--expect to get done?

I'd like to say that Democrats have been better, but they haven't. The ongoing gas price debate is a prime example. As I wrote previously, economists have been saying for years that Americans will change their driving habits when the price of gas is high enough to matter. Now it is, and we are.

And what is the general pubic reaction? To ask for relief from high gas prices. But don't we also believe that reliance on foreign oil is a huge problem? That it hampers our foreign policy, puts our troops at risk, is bad for our economy, and bad for the environment?

Yet there is a bipartisan failure of leadership to ask us to face the contradictions in our desires. Some elected official should have the courage to ask: are we serious in ceasing the flow of our money to countries that dislike us, some of which may find its way to terror groups? Are we serious about improving our bargaining position with nations like Iran? Are we serious about not putting our troops in harms way to protect oil supplies? Are we serious about reducing emissions that degrade our air locally and add to greenhouse gases globally?

Because if we are serious, then we should be asked if we're willing to do something, such as make the choice to move to more fuel-efficient cars. If Social Security faces long-term problems and we think the program is important, we should be asked if we're willing to do something, such as waiting another year or two to receive benefits. If we think big money is a problem in politics, we should be asked if we're willing to do something, such as overwhelm it with public money. Things we say are important are things we should be willing to do something about. And if most of us are unwilling to act, then nothing will get done and we should stop pretending that the issues are as important as we say they are.

Perhaps most of us are unwilling to act on these issues. In that case, the consequences of inaction rest with us, not the government. In the end, our elected officials represent us, and we bear the ultimate responsibility, and the ultimate power to effect change. But some of us won't be aware of the necessity to act unless someone has the leadership to ask us if we're willing to do something on the issues we say are important. At the moment, we seem to be engaged in this shadow play where don't push our elected officials to force us to do things we find inconvenient, and they don't ask us to accept the consequences of our own inaction. Everyone is happy because no one accepts responsibility. It may make it easier for politicians to win elections, but it's not a sound foundation for governing.

But I believe we can do things differently. All it takes is some political leader to ask: are we serious? I think many of us are willing to rise to the occasion and take action commensurate to our rhetoric. I could be wrong. But we'll never know unless someone is willing to ask.

Lack Of Straight Talk On Economics

2008-07-19T19:44:00.000-07:00

It's amazing to watch the McCain campaigns arguments about tax and budget policy become increasingly detached from reality.

First, McCain has said "Obama will raise your taxes." That statement is simply false. Obama has talked about allowing the Bush tax cuts for those making above $250,000 to expire. If McCain wants to call that a tax increase, fine. Obama has also talked about raising the Social Security tax for people with incomes of over $250,000. But only about 2% of the public makes that much money, so anyone looking at Obama's budget proposals--and telling the truth about them--would have to admit that the vast majority of Americans would not have their taxes go up (unless McCain is adopting a very expansive definition of "your"). Now, Obama's numbers may not balance the buget, but that's another issue.

More important in my view that McCain has repeatedly said that raising taxes in a weak economy would be a huge mistake. The supply-side conservative argument is that tax hikes always hurt the economy because they discourage growth, and that doing so in a delicate economy would kill off any chance at recovery. The problem with this argument is that conservatives said the exact same thing when Clinton and Congress raised taxes in the early 1990s as the country was coming out of a recession. And they were not only wrong, but spectacularly wrong as the nation endured one of the greatest sessions of long-term economic growth that benefited people at all income levels.

To me, this is a classic case of the tyranny of ideology. Some people believe in their ideology so strongly that when their ideology conflicts with facts, they throw out the facts instead of adjusting their ideology to reality (one can point to numerous instances of this phenomenon in the Bush administration). Yes, it's true that excessive tax rates will kill off growth; the Laffer Curve is obviously correct in the extreme case of 100% taxation producing zero revenue; no one would have any incentive to be productive if they can't keep any part of what they've worked for.

But the Clinton years should show that the tax rates of that period did not inhibit tremendous growth, even when imposed during shaky economic times. One might argue that those times happened to coincide with unprecedented productivity gains brought on by a technological revolution. Nevertheless, I see little evidence that people were deterred from working harder in order to avoid the top tax bracket. We aren't at the far end of the Laffer Curve, and it seems more likely to me that larger economic trends just aren't affected much by changing top tax levels by a couple of percentage points.

Yet supply-siders keep repeating the mantra that going back to the Clinton tax rates, even at just the higher levels, will stifle growth--despite the clear counterexample from the last decade. How can they keep saying it? Do they not remember even recent history? Or is their dedication to ideology so strong that they can't bring themselves to address the facts? At the very least, if they think that the continued prosperity under the Clinton tax code was an aberration that would not repeat itself today, they owe us that explanation. But we don't even get that explanation. And if they're not going to address recent history, it's hard for me to take their arguments seriously.

Withdrawing Troops From Iraq: Damned If You Do....

2008-07-19T17:10:00.001-07:00

Just a thought on what seems to me to be a bit of intellectual inconsistency about pulling troops out of Iraq.

Those favoring withdrawal like to make fun of the administration's arguments for staying. I've heard over and over quips about how the administration's position boils down to "things are going badly, so we have to stay until they get better; but if they're going better, we can't leave because then things might deteriorate and we'd lose all the gains that have happened." That's not to criticize the comment; the administration's reasoning does seem to have been that whether things are going well or going badly, we have to stay. And the point of this analysis seems to be that since the conclusion is "stay no matter what," the argument must be inherently flawed.

But doesn't the same reasoning apply the other way? Couldn't those who criticize calls for withdrawal say that their opponents' logic boils down to "If things are going badly, there's no use staying because we can't solve Iraqis' internal conflicts for them, but if things are going well, then we should be able to bring our troops home"? Isn't it really the same kind of argument: that whether things are going well or not, we should pull out? If the administration's argument is flawed because it calls for staying no matter what, why aren't the arguments of those who advocate withdrawal equally flawed for concluding that we need to pull out no matter what?

I confess I haven't resolved this one.

Intellectual Dishonesty On Oil Prices

2008-07-17T21:03:00.000-07:00

I think a June 11 NY Times article shows the problem our nation has in taking our oil problem seriously. And the problem is in both sides of the aisle in Congress--and ultimately with the American public.

The rise in the price of oil is already transforming American habits. The large SUV market is tanking (so to speak) as people flock to cars with better fuel efficiency. Some people are carpooling. Others are rushing to mass transit. Miles driven is dropping. Economists have been saying for years that Americans will use less oil when the price of gasoline is high enough to matter. Now it has become high enough to matter, and their predictions are coming true.

And the side effects of these changes are many. Using less oil means sending less money to countries that don't like us. It means less reliance on our troops to secure oil supplies. It means less pollution and lower global warming emissions. High gas prices make other energy sources more economically viable. All of these results further goals that most of us seem to think are important to us as a country and for the world generally.

So what is the reaction in Congress? Both sides are arguing about how to lower the price of oil. Democrats have argued for releasing supplies from our national Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and for imposing an excess profits tax on oil companies. The Republican proposal is simple: drill. Drill in the Arctic, and drill offshore.

There are two problems with what's going on in Congress. First, it seems fairly obvious that nothing government does will have much of an effect on the price of gasoline. An excess profits tax on oil companies will not increase supply. Using the Strategic Petroleum Reserve might have some minimal short-term effect, but I can't imagine that the result would be dramatic. And any oil from drilling won't come onto the market for nearly a decade. Republican John Cornyn of Texas says in the NY Times article that "We have a winning argument as long as we keep making it." I find it hard to believe that he actually believes this. With the US accounting for nearly 25% of the world's oil usage, possessing only 3% of proven oil reserves, and importing 65% of the oil we use today, drilling will neither provided short term relief at the pump nor lead to independence from foreign oil down the road. To say that drilling is the solution--and to say that the more we say it, the truer it will be--is nothing less than intellectual dishonesty (or a blatant refusal to face reality).

But the second problem, and the more serious one, is with the attempt to lower gas prices at all. The high price of gas is leading, finally, to good results in American behavior. Lower gas prices, while making people's wallets feel better, will result in less fuel efficient cars, more emissions, and more dependence on foreign oil. It would undo the beneficial changes we see happening before our very eyes.

Before the last election, the Democratic National Committee put out door hangers in battleground districts stating the principles that Democrats were running on in 2006, such as open and effective government and affordable higher education. One item was "Energy Independence/Lower Gas Prices." I shook my head, wondering how those who wrote and approved that line could possibly think that it was coherent. The way to get to energy independence is to get off of oil. And the most powerful incentive to get off of oil is if the stuff costs a lot.

And it's not as if it would take a revolution to dramatically reduce our reliance on oil. Most of our oil is used in transportation. And the fact is that we as a society have made lousy choices about the cars we drive. Congress passed legislation requiring average fuel economy to rise to 35 miles per gallon by 2020. Presently, we get slightly over 20 miles per gallon. But if the price of gas stays high, we'll achieve the 35 mpg mark long before 2020. And we know that goal is achievable, because Europeans average over 40 miles per gallon. Today. (It's no coincidence that they also pay over $8 a gallon for gas.) If this issue is important to us, if it's so vital to our future as a nation, why should we wait for over a decade to achieve what one of our peer societies is doing right now? (And just imagine where Europe will be in 2020 on this issue.)

So I recently asked a congressman about this tension between freeing ourselves from imported oil while acting to lower the price of gas. Yes, high gas prices are painful for some people, but don't we need them to achieve the goals we say we want? Won't they be more effective than just raising fuel efficiency standards? Don't they put all the incentives for behavior in the right place? Couldn't Congress advance these goals by putting a floor on gas prices? He said it was simply politically impossible to do so: no congressman could vote year after year to keep gas prices high. So if the market keeps prices high, so be it. If the price drops, we have the fuel efficiency mandate as a backup.

I find that response inadequate on three counts. First, it wouldn't take a vote every year to set a floor for gas prices. It would take one vote, and the price could automatically be adjusted for inflation. (Perhaps he meant that opponents would force a vote on repealing such legislation every year.) Second, there is no guarantee that more fuel efficient cars will be not be more expensive than the cars we buy today. If they do wind up costing more, then the consumer will wind up getting hit in the wallet anyway, regardless of what happens to gas prices.

But the most substantial problem relates to why it would be so politically difficult to pass legislation keeping gas prices high. If politicians can't take such an action because it would be rejected overwhelmingly by the public, then it shows that it's the public that is refusing to take the situation seriously and is unwilling to do what is necessary to solve our oil problem.

Ultimate accountability in our political system does not rest with the 535 elected representatives in Washington. It rests with over 200 million eligible voters. And we as voters cannot expect those in Congress to make the hard choices that we ourselves are not willing to make. We cannot expect that just putting the "right" people in office will solve our problems for us. Our problems will get solved when enough of us are willing to act on the issues we say are important, and then implement our common will through our government.

So there is general agreement in the public that reducing our oil usage would have tremendous beneficial effects. But there seems to be little recognition that the best incentive for using less oil is if its cost is high, which rewards people who use less and penalize those who use more. We seem to want the result of using less oil but unwilling to implement the most effective societal tools to get ourselves to actually do so. If we were serious about improving our bargaining positions with oil producing nations, if we were serious about keeping our troops out of harm's way, if we were serious about the effects of our actions on the environment, we would embrace higher gas prices.

And there's a failure of political leadership as well. I don't think our elected officials should force higher gas prices on an unwilling public. But leadership consists of asking people to face the inconsistency between what we say we want to happen and the absence of support for policies to bring it about. Politicians could say "if we're serious, we should support X. So, are we serious?" And the final decision should be left to the people, who are accountable for the result--for better or worse. If we choose lower gas prices, then we have only ourselves to blame if we continue to depend on the Saudis to keep our cars running.

I in no way mean to diminish the substantial burden that high gas prices have on some people. Many people don't have access to mass transit. Many people can't afford to get a more fuel efficient car. And rising gas prices are tremendously regressive, since the increase of any necessary commodity eats up a greater percentage of the funds of those who don't have much to spend to begin with. A NY Times article from last month reported that some communities are now spending an average of 15.6% of their income on gas. No one should have to bear that burden for the good of the country.

But there are ways of dealing with that burden that don't involve lowering gas prices. We could provide greater government assistance for low-income earners, for instance by raising the earned income tax credit. If recipients wanted to spend that money on gas, they could do so; but it would reward those who take conservation measures by leaving them with more money if they did so. So the cost of higher gas prices could be alleviated for those who would be hurt the most while maintaining the incentives we should all have to move to more fuel efficient vehicles, live closer to where we work, and generally look at how we can use less oil.

And government could offer rebates for cars that meet certain efficiency standards (perhaps subject to income limitations). If the price of gas goes up 40%, it doesn't cost any more to drive around if your vehicle is 40% more efficient. But that's a choice we have to make: to buy that more efficient car.

So if our government is going to be honest with us--and if we are going to be honest with ourselves--we should recognize that higher gas prices can be a good thing. And we can take steps to ease the effects of gas prices on lower income groups. We can act so that in a few years many of us won't be spending much more on fuel than we were a few years ago. But it requires a decision to act. It requires the political leadership to ask us to face the consequences of our choices. And if we choose to act collectively, to put in place the incentives to change our behavior, and to allow our elected officials to pass legislation creating those incentives without voting them out of office for it, then we can accomplish those goals that we say are so important to us.

If Wishes Were Horses . . . .

2008-05-12T11:12:00.000-07:00

Another argument the Clinton camp has been making recently is that if Democrats had the Republican winner-take-all system for allocating delegates, Clinton would already be the nominee. Long ago, someone told me that it's amazing how many arguments can be answered by asking "So what?" This is one of them.

The most common rejoinder is simply that Democrats don't have the Republican system. They have the system they were given, and both candidates operated accordingly. If the Republican system had been in operation, candidates would have allocated their resources differently and we can't say what the result would have been.

But an even more significant flaw is that the Clinton campaign raises this argument without putting forward any justification as to why the Republican system would be better (aside from giving her the nomination). A winner-take-all system tends to lock up the nomination earlier than the proportional Democratic system, and some people believe it's better for the party to have a nominee with more time to prepare for the general election. But Clinton has been the champion recently of making sure these states late in the process get to have their say; does she now think it would be fine to have more contests that don't matter?

Also, Clinton has been touting the overall popular vote as a metric to measure her against Obama (a metric which I think is irrelevant, since I don't think any rational candidate would devote resources to getting votes that did not lead to more pledged delegates). Yet a winner-take-all system would give all the delegates allocated to a district or state to the candidate who got 50% + 1 votes. If the pledged delegate result doesn't always represent the will of the electorate, the Republican system would be even worse.

Reasonable minds can differ as to whether the Democratic or Republican system is better for the party. But for the Clinton campaign to bring it up as a reason for superdelegates to vote for her when it would seem to contradict other positions that she not only held in the past but holds today seems to me another example of intellectual dishonesty (see previous post for more). What is even more disturbing is not that it comes from the campaign, but that so many supporters are willing to just parrot it.

As Michael Kinsley has said, if we don't hold our politicians accountable for these blatantly faulty arguments or for their inconsistent positions, we're just going to get more of it. That's democracy.

Clinton and the Problem of Intellectual Dishonesty

2008-05-09T20:29:00.000-07:00

There's a Michael Kinsley piece from the New York Times book review section before the 2006 election where he said:

"The biggest flaw in our democracy is, as I say, the enormous tolerance for intellectual dishonesty. Politicians are held to account for outright lies, but there seems to be no sanction against saying things you obviously don’t believe. There is no reward for logical consistency, and no punishment for changing your story depending on the circumstances. Yet one minor exercise in disingenuousness can easily have a greater impact on an election than any number of crooked voting machines. And it seems to me, though I can’t prove it, that this problem is getting worse and worse."

I have to say I've been extremely disappointed with the Clinton campaign because I think it exemplifies what Kinsley is talking about. She wanted superdelegates to wait before committing when Obama took the delegate lead and they became her sole path to the nomination, yet she had no problems with nearly a hundred committing to her before the primary voting had barely gotten underway. Her campaign seemed happy to support sanctions on Michigan and Florida until it became clear she might need their votes. After the Pennsylvania primary, she counted Michigan to give herself the "popular vote" lead even though that vote gave zero to Obama, a result which cannot possibly be considered to represent the will of eligible Michigan voters (never mind the threshold question as to why the popular vote should be relevant in what is essentially a delegate contest). Her fundraising appeals going into Pennsylvania stated that the campaign should be decided on their ideas and not the size of their campaign coffers, yet she outspent her Republican opponent for Senate in 2006 by over 7:1. She ridiculed Obama for saying that McCain would be an improvement over Bush, even though I can't believe she would vote for Bush over McCain if forced to make the choice. And, as noted in my previous post, she extrapolates primary results to the general election, even though those inferences are logically unwarranted--and I find it hard to believe she doesn't know it.

I think each of those examples are fairly brazen displays of intellectual dishonesty. And I find it hard to find similar examples from the Obama campaign. One can accuse him of not being sufficiently specific, but at least he hasn't put forward an argument I can find that has been deliberately deceptive or specious. And that, I find, is extremely refreshing.

(OK, maybe there's one: he accused Clinton of taking money out of the highway trust fund with her gas tax holiday proposal, when her plan would have oil companies pay the tax. But it's at least no worse a representation than Clinton's claim that the gas tax holiday would bring down gas prices. Any college freshman who has taken Microeconomics 101 would know that if supply can't be increased, the price is going to stay pretty much where it is for the given demand. And Clinton, who prides herself on being the policy wonk, must know it--especially after she failed to name a single economist who supported the idea when asked by George Stephanopoulis on last Sunday's "This Week.")

Another Specious Clinton Argument: Will She Ever Admit That Primary Results Don't Apply To The General Election?

2008-05-08T21:02:00.000-07:00

Clinton, in a widely blogged comment, argues that she’s the stronger candidate against McCain than Obama because whites without college degrees voted for her in Indiana and North Carolina.

This argument is yet another in the specious series from the Clinton campaign that extrapolates primary results to the general election. The problem is that one can't extrapolate primary results to the general election because the general election presents a completely different choice with a different opponent (and often with a far larger eligible voting population and a far higher turnout).

Yes, Clinton is correct that white primary voters without a college degree tend to favor her over Obama to some extent. But that does not tell us whether they would also favor McCain over Obama (or whether they might prefer McCain over herself). Just because one prefers A to B does not mean one would prefer C to B (or A to C, for that matter).

It's a variant on the same argument she raises when she says she wins the big states and battleground states that Democrats will need in November. But if her argument is that she's better against McCain than Obama in those states, then the place to start would be polling data of her and Obama against McCain in those states, not the primary results of her against Obama.

Moreover, even if Obama were weaker than Clinton in attracting blue collar white voters against McCain (which may be true, even though Clinton’s primaries argument doesn’t show it), he must have some strengths to compensate since national polls have him doing about as well as she in head-to-head match-ups against McCain.

This attempt to link primaries to the general election has been refuted over and over again, yet the Clinton campaign keeps on using it. Maybe they think if they just repeat it enough times, it will be true.

What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Taxes

2008-04-27T16:12:00.000-07:00

Good article in today's New York Times about how none of the fiscal proposals by any of the presidential candidates add up to anything that looks fiscally responsible.

Columnist David Brooks has criticized both Clinton and Obama for promising in their last debate that they would not raise income taxes on people making under $250,000 or $200,000 per year (though Obama did talk about the possibility of raising the cap on the Social Security tax, which presently taxes income only below about $100,000). Brooks said that these promises make it next to impossible for either candidate to follow through with the domestic programs they’ve proposed while maintaining some semblance of fiscal responsibility. Though I often disagree with Brooks, I think he’s right on this one.

Which raises the question: why is it so hard for us to talk realistically about taxes? I think the reason comes back to the fundamental problem in American politics today: the disconnect between people and their government.

It seems to me that people blame their government for taxing them. And they believe it’s their elected officials that impose or reduce their tax burden.

But I don’t see it that way. “Government” doesn’t tax me; government is the means by which we decide to tax ourselves for the programs we say we want. Or at least that’s the way it’s supposed to work. If it doesn’t work that way now, it’s because too many people see government as this alien entity apart from us. But it is us, whether we want to admit it or not. And we have the responsibility, like it or not, to decide whether we’re willing to pay for the things we say we want. And responsible politicians should have the courage to tell us that if we’re not willing to pay, then maybe we don’t really care about those programs after all.

I trace this disconnect back to the Reagan administration. He had a winning line when he said “It’s not the government’s money, it’s your money.” And it’s easy to get the reaction: damn right it’s my money, and The Government has no right to take my hard-won earnings away from me.

Reagan's line is a dangerous one because it’s half right: it is your money. But it leaves out the fact that it’s also your government. To leave out that part is like going to the supermarket, arriving at checkout with a cart full of groceries, and they saying “I’m not going to pay, because it’s not the supermarket’s money, it’s my money.” If you don’t want to pay so much, fine—but some of that food is going to have to be put back on the shelf.

If Clinton or Obama had been talking responsibly, they could have said: Yes, I can promise not to raise taxes on people making under $200,000 a year. But if I make that promise, it’s going to be much, much harder to provide universal health care, affordable college education, vital infrastructure improvements and investments, and energy saving programs, among many other things. We’re not paying our bills now, and the entire Iraq war is being put on our national credit card, so just ending the war won’t get us the cash for these programs either. Now, it’s your choice: do you still want me to make that promise?

Because in the end, it’s not up to the politicians to decide for us whether our taxes go up or down. We live in a representative democracy, so it’s up for us to decide that question. We’ve given up that responsibility because too many of us don’t want to admit that we have that responsibility. It’s easy to criticize someone else for decisions that should be your own; it gives you an out from making tough choices, but it also cuts your own decisions out of the loop.

Only by taking that responsibility back can we begin to have real discussions about what we want, and what we’re willing to pay for. And it would be refreshing to hear one candidate ask us to do so.

As with many other questions facing us today, we seem to want politicians to tell us what they're going to do. But instead, they should be asking us what we're willing to do.

The Momentum Myth

2008-04-27T11:40:00.001-07:00

"The tide is turning," said Hillary Clinton after her win in the Pennsylvania primary. And her victory, like the tide, was due to scheduling more than anything else.

Almost without exception, both Clinton and Obama have won where they have been expected to win. Obama's win in Iowa was a true upset, but Clinton was favored to win in New Hampshire all along except for the five days between that contest and the Iowa caucuses. After New Hampshire, states have fallen pretty much as predicted, though Obama's margins in some places have been larger than anticipated.

It's always possible that patterns may change, but it doesn't seem likely. And if they don't change, it's extremely unlikely that Clinton will get the nomination, no matter what the predictable--and predicted--benefit she got last week. She can spin her Pennsylvania win as momentum, and can Obama same next week Obama assuming he wins in North Carolina.

But in this contest, it seems that demography is destiny. There is no real momentum, only the happenstance of the Democratic primary/caucus schedule.

David Brooks has been one of the few people to bring up this point (for instance, on the April 25 PBS Newshour). It's disappointing to see so many others in the media failing to question the momentum myth, though it's only one myth among many that they've failed to analyze in their consistently disappointing coverage of this race.

About This Blog

2008-04-21T12:18:00.000-07:00

The name of this politics blog, "Reasonable Arguments," is aspirational. I believe that reasonable people can disagree, but also that reasoned arguments can moderate positions and enable people, if not always to find common ground, to at least see the sources of their differences. And that itself can promote further productive discussion.

What I have little tolerance for is the unprincipled or purposely deceptive argument, and those are all to common in today's politics. I believe that people on either side of an issue should be called out when they make claims that they know will be misleading, even if technically true.

In the attempt to sway voters or rally the faithful, I hear far too many of our political leaders presenting issues in all-or-nothing terms. Rarely does any idea lend itself to an uncomplicated, risk-free or monetarily-free solution. As the saying goes, the perfect is the enemy of the good: we don't need to require perfection to make things better. We, and our politicians, shouldn't need to ignore possible downsides to policies and proposals to conclude that, on balance, we should or should not enact or continue various programs.

I think it's important to recognize that what we see is tempered by how we think; we all have preconceptions that affect what we choose to believe and what we don't. But we have the power to at least try to be self-critical, to engage in the imperfect attempt to asses the facts before we come to conclusions. Even the attempt to do so will lead to better political discussion than we have today.

I'm sure my biases will be evident in some of my posts, but I do my best to avoid knee-jerk reactions. I hope others will do the same.