Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Monday, November 29, 2010
What's an "isarithmic visualization"?
According to David Sparks, it's basically a map "wherein a third variable is represented in two dimensions by color, or by contour lines, indicating gradations." Hemade one tracking the two-party vote since 1920, and it's oddly beautiful. Remember that this is tracking change in the vote, not the total vote. So when the map turns red or blue, that means that Republicans or Democrats are gaining voters, not that they necessarily won those areas.From Ezra Klein
China Update
China is attempting to rebalance its economy by encouraging more domestic consumption
To continue growing rapidly, China needs to make the next transition, from sweatshop economy to innovation economy. This transition is the one that has often proved difficult elsewhere. Once a country has turned itself into an export factory, it cannot keep growing by repeating the exercise. It can’t move a worker from an inefficient farm to a modern factory more than once. It cannot even retain its industrial might forever. As a country industrializes, workers will demand their share of the bounty, as has started happening in China, and some factories will start moving to poorer countries. Eventually, a rising economy needs to take two crucial steps: manufacture goods that aren’t just cheaper than the competition, but better; and create a thriving domestic market, so that its own consumers can pick up the slack when exports inevitably slow. These steps go hand in hand. Big consumer markets become laboratories where companies know that innovations will be tested and the successful ones richly rewarded. Those products can then expand into countries with less mature consumer markets. Look at the telephone, the personal computer and the iPhone and iPad, all of which were designed in the United States and are now sold around the world.
Today’s China cannot claim any such achievement, a fact that weighs on Chinese policymakers. They worry about the country’s ability to innovate and, in particular, about the quality of its education system. When I met with Guo Shuqing, a party official and the chairman of China Construction Bank, in his office high above Beijing’s financial district, he mentioned that a recent ranking of the world’s top 100 universities included 53 from the United States but just three from mainland China. Even those numbers, Guo said, probably overstated the strengths of China’s universities: “In terms of innovation — really original, creative ideas — they’re very weak,” he told me. By contrast, the American education system helped make possible Google and other companies.Life expectancy is rising slowly in China
A quick quiz: Which of the following countries has had the smallest increase in life expectancy since 1990 — Bangladesh, China, Pakistan, South Korea or Sudan?
The answer is not war-torn Sudan or tumultuous Pakistan. It isn’t South Korea, which started from a higher level than any of the others. And it isn’t abjectly poor Bangladesh.
It’s China, the great economic success story of the last two decades and the country that inspires fear and envy around the world. Yet when measured on one of most important yardsticks of all, China does not look so impressive.
From 1990 to 2008, life expectancy in China rose 5.1 years, to 73.1, according to a World Bank compilation of United Nations data. Nearly every other big developing country, be it Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia or Iran, had a bigger increase over that span, despite much slower economic growth. Since 2000, most of Western Europe, Australia and Israel, all of which started with higher life expectancy, have also outpaced China.Pollution is extremely bad China and costs hundreds of thousands of lives per year
No country in history has emerged as a major industrial power without creating a legacy of environmental damage that can take decades and big dollops of public wealth to undo.
But just as the speed and scale of China’s rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut.
Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water.Ezra Klein comments on the first article and provides a chart:
Healthcare links
Does Cutting Physician Fees Really Lower Costs? Here's a link to the post from John Goodman:
If physicians increase utilization sufficiently in response to declining fees, total spending can increase. In fact, a large body of evidence suggests that cutting fees leads to higher utilization when the targeted services account for a large share of physician income.The results of a survey on physician-assisted suicide:
Doctors are sharply divided over the question of physician-assisted suicide.
In August-September 2010, Medscape electronically surveyed over 10,000 physicians representing all specialties. Respondents answered a series of ethics questions, including the following: "Are there situations in which physician-assisted suicide should be allowed?" Of the more respondents, 45.8% answered "Yes"; 40.7% answered "No"; and 13.5% said "It depends."
Iran nuclear program update
David Frum argues that all the information obtained from the recent WikiLeaks dump builds the case against Iran
But here's the ghastliest irony of the leak. If it was Julian Assange's intention to use information hacked from U.S. computer systems to protect Iran from U.S. military action, he has very likely massively failed at his own purpose.
The leak makes military conflict between Iran and the United States more likely, not less. The leak has changed the political equation in ways that reduce the restraint on U.S. policy.
Public opinion in all U.S.-allied countries can now see that the dread of the Iranian nuclear program is not some artificial emotion whipped up by Israel, but a widespread fear among Arab and European governments. It's Iran's Gulf neighbors who have begged most urgently that the United States hit Iran's nuclear sites.
Assailants on motorcycles attached bombs to the cars of two nuclear scientists as they were driving to work in Tehran Monday, killing one and wounding the other, state media and officials said.
Iran’s nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, said the man killed was involved in a major project at the country’s chief nuclear agency, though he did not give specifics. Some Iranian media reported that the wounded scientist was a laser expert at Iran’s Defense Ministry and one of the country’s few top specialists in nuclear isotope separation.
State TV swiftly blamed Israel for the attacks. At least two other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in recent years in what Iran has alleged is part of a covert attempt by the West to damage its controversial nuclear program. One of those two was killed in an attack similar to those on Monday.More worthy debate here
Stem cell breakthrough
Scientists Trick Cells into Switching Identities
Scientists are reporting early success at transforming one kind of specialized cell into another, a feat of biological alchemy that doctors may someday perform inside a patient's body to restore health.
So if a heart attack damages muscle tissue in the heart, for example, doctors may someday be able to get other cells in that organ to become muscle to help the heart pump.
That's a futuristic idea, but researchers are enthusiastic about the potential for the new direct-conversion approach.
"I think everyone believes this is really the future of so-called stem-cell biology," says John Gearhart of the University of Pennsylvania, one of many researchers pursuing this approach.
An interesting proposition and an interesting observation
In an interview with The Fiscal Times, Uwe Reinhardt discusses healthcare in the United States and makes a very interesting proposition that I completely agree with:
TFT: You have studied hospital pricing systems around the world. What lessons do they offer for restraining prices?
UR: What is needed in hospitals is a management information system, and it's actually doable — these systems exist. Tracing every order entry of every doctor for every patient by every input, so that you can create files of costliness of treating patients by doctor. The other innovation we need is not so much in the hospital. We should have an all-payer system where every payer — Blue Cross, Medicare, Medicaid, you name it — pays the same fee for every service. But to do that you really have to have universal coverage.Mr. Reinhardt also makes an interesting observation about our form of government:
TFT: So you favor universal coverage but not a single payer system?
UR: For other countries I do [favor single payer] but we can't run it. You need a responsible system of governance. Whatever you can say about U.S. governance, you cannot call it responsible. You really couldn't. I think the founding fathers gave us an impotent government that acts quite irresponsibly. I don't think parliamentary systems are that bad.
Random Links
April 11, 1954 was most boring day in history
A excellent debate on religion between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens
Unions are losing the public's support as the benefits they receive drain public funds everywhere
Just how broken is the United States Senate?
Starve the Beast is a terrible theory
Tyler Cowen's nine observations on the current state and future of Obamacare
Milton Friedman Supports Ben Bernanke on Quantitative Easing
A excellent debate on religion between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens
Unions are losing the public's support as the benefits they receive drain public funds everywhere
Just how broken is the United States Senate?
Starve the Beast is a terrible theory
Tyler Cowen's nine observations on the current state and future of Obamacare
Milton Friedman Supports Ben Bernanke on Quantitative Easing
Doctors become very creative when they need their income to rise
From a story on the challenges of Medicare in the Washington Post:
Isn't it ironic that doctors are rationing healthcare for seniors? If a doctor refuses to see seniors because he or she is unhappy with the payment, isn't that rationing?
More from Ezra Klein
From 2000 to 2008, the volume of services per Medicare patient rose 42 percent. Some of this was because of the increasing availability of sophisticated treatments that undoubtedly save lives. Some was because of doctors practicing "defensive medicine" - ordering every conceivable test to shield themselves from malpractice lawsuits down the line.
"Then you have doctors who order an MRI for an unremarkable headache or at the first sign of back pain," said Robert Berenson, a Commissioner of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, an independent congressional agency. "It's pretty well documented that it doesn't help patients to have those scans done in these cases. But if you have the machine in your office ... why not?"
Whatever the cause, the explosion in the volume of services provided helps explain why Medicare's total payments to doctors per patient rose 51 percent from 2000 to 2008.
A review of physicians' incomes suggests that specialists - who have more opportunities to increase the volume of the services they offer than primary-care doctors - reaped most of the benefit.This is why you should be very skeptical of a politician that wants to keep healthcare between "the patients and the doctors." Doctors don't always have your best interest in mind. Many times they have their own financial interests in mind. Which means you are getting ripped off. Of course we are not talking about all doctors, but there are plenty out there that are too worried about their own income.
Isn't it ironic that doctors are rationing healthcare for seniors? If a doctor refuses to see seniors because he or she is unhappy with the payment, isn't that rationing?
More from Ezra Klein
Why privatizing social security is a bad idea
An op-ed in the Washington Post argues that privatizing Social Security is a bad idea:
Why is privatizing Social Security such a turkey? Because retirees shouldn't have to depend on the market's vagaries for survival money. More than half of married couples older than 65 and 72 percent of singles get more than half of their income from Social Security, according to the Social Security Administration. For 20 percent of 65-and-older couples and 41 percent of singles, Social Security is 90 percent or more of their income. That isn't projected to change.
Using personal accounts to replace Social Security's guaranteed benefit would subject people to two separate risks. First, there's investment risk: Most people have no idea how to invest well - study after study shows that mutual fund buyers tend to buy high and sell low. But even if you manage to invest well, you run into the second risk, largely unrecognized, that interest rates will be low when you retire.
Let me show you how this works, using numbers from Vanguard. Let's say you had $200,000 - a not insignificant sum - in the Vanguard Target Retirement 2010 fund as of Sept. 30, 2007. That was a few days before stocks peaked.
This is only the beginning of genetic manipulation
From the Wall Street Journal, an article entitled "Aging Ills Reversed in Mice"
Scientists have partially reversed age-related degeneration in mice, an achievement that suggests a new approach for tackling similar disorders in people.
By tweaking a gene, the researchers reversed brain disease and restored the sense of smell and fertility in prematurely aged mice. Previous experiments with calorie restriction and other methods have shown that aspects of aging can be slowed. This appears to be the first time that some age-related problems in animals have actually been reversed.
An excellent op-ed on the Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore
From the New Yorker magazine:
What made the decision in Bush v. Gore so startling was that it was the work of Justices who were considered, to greater or lesser extents, judicial conservatives. On many occasions, these Justices had said that they believed in the preëminence of states’ rights, in a narrow conception of the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and, above all, in judicial restraint. Bush v. Gore violated those principles. The Supreme Court stepped into the case even though the Florida Supreme Court had been interpreting Florida law; the majority found a violation of the rights of George W. Bush, a white man, to equal protection when these same Justices were becoming ever more stingy in finding violations of the rights of African-Americans; and the Court stopped the recount even before it was completed, and before the Florida courts had a chance to iron out any problems—a classic example of judicial activism, not judicial restraint, by the majority.
Bush v. Gore would resonate, in any case, because the Court prevented Florida from determining, as best it could, whether Gore or Bush really won. (Recounts of the ballots by media organizations produced ambiguous results; they suggest that Gore would have won a full statewide recount and Bush would have won the limited recount initially sought by the Gore forces.) But the case also represents a revealing prologue to what the Supreme Court has since become. As in Bush v. Gore, nominally conservative Justices no longer operate by the rules of traditional judicial conservatism.
The Court is now led, of course, by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., who was appointed by Bush in 2005 (and who, in 2000, travelled to Florida as a private lawyer working on Bush’s behalf). Under Roberts, the Court has continued to use the equal-protection clause as a vehicle to protect white people. In 2007, in Roberts’s first major opinion as Chief, he struck down the voluntary school-integration plans of Seattle and Louisville, which had been challenged by some white parents. Likewise, under Roberts the conservatives have abandoned their traditional concern with states’ rights if, for example, the state is trying to protect the environment. In another 2007 case, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito, Jr. (who replaced O’Connor), argued in dissent that states had no right to force the Environmental Protection Agency to address the issue of global warming.More worthy debate here
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Roger Cohen gives thanks
From the New York Times:
So I give thanks this week for the Fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
I give thanks for Benjamin Franklin’s words after the 1787 Constitutional Convention describing the results of its deliberations: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
To keep it, push back against enhanced patting, Chertoff’s naked-screening and the sinister drumbeat of fear.
Lifestyle-related diseases cost a lot of money
Disease Prevention Could Save U.S. Billions of Dollars Annually:
The study authors concluded that reducing the prevalence of diabetes and high blood pressure by 5 percent would save the nation about $9 billion a year in the near term. In addition, conditions related to those health problems would also be reduced, which would increase the savings to about $24.7 billion a year in the medium term.
"Our estimate that $24.7 billion in excess medical spending would be avoided annually if primary prevention were able to achieve a 5 percent reduction in only the conditions we examined can be considered a conservative estimate of the investment in prevention activities that could be offset by medical care savings alone," the researchers noted in a news release from the American Public Health Association.
Hospitals are dangerous places
Study Finds No Progress in Safety at Hospitals:
It is one of the most rigorous efforts to collect data about patient safety since a landmark report in 1999 found that medical mistakes caused as many as 98,000 deaths and more than one million injuries a year in the United States. That report, by the Institute of Medicine, an independent group that advises the government on health matters, led to a national movement to reduce errors and make hospital stays less hazardous to patients’ health.
Among the preventable problems that Dr. Landrigan’s team identified were severe bleeding during an operation, serious breathing trouble caused by a procedure that was performed incorrectly, a fall that dislocated a patient’s hip and damaged a nerve, and vaginal cuts caused by a vacuum device used to help deliver a baby.
Americans pay far too much for their healthcare
From Ezra Klein:
There are a lot of complicated explanations for why American health-care costs so much, but there are also some simple ones. Chief among them is "we pay too much." And I don't mean in general. I mean specifically. Mountains of research show that for every piece of care you might name -- a drug, a doctor visit, a diagnostic -- you'll pay far more in the United States than in other countries. That's why seniors head to Canada to buy drugs made in the United States. In Canada, the government negotiates one low price. In America, insurers with much less bargaining power negotiate many higher prices.
But it's one thing to say that that's true. It's another thing to see it. Here are four graphs from the International Federation of Health Plans tracking what people in other countries pay for various medical services and items, and what we pay. Note that the American number manifests as a range, while the others don't: That's because in other countries, the government gets one price, while in our country, an array of insurers get many different prices.There are many charts in the post which are definitely worth your time.
Do Americans expect too much from our government?
Anne Appelbaum argues that we do:
If you don't live in this country all of the time, and I don't, here is what you notice when you come home: Americans -- with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession and, above all, their addiction to government spending programs -- demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world. They don't simply want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is prevented, or that they are fully compensated in the event something goes wrong. And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the government responsible for that, too.
When, through a series of flukes, a crazy person smuggled explosives onto a plane last Christmas, the public bayed for blood and held the White House responsible. When, because of bad luck and planning mistakes, an oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, the public bayed for blood and held the White House responsible again.
In fact, the crazy person was stopped by an alert passenger, not federal officials; and if the oil rig disaster is ever fixed, it will be through the efforts of a private company. Nevertheless, these kinds of events set off a chain reaction: A government program is created, experts are hired, new machines are ordered for the airports or new monitors sent beneath the ocean. This is how we got the Kafkaesque security network that an extraordinary Post investigation this week calls, quite conservatively, "A hidden world, growing beyond control."
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Look around the world, and we don't look as exceptional as we think. Chileans are willing to save for their own retirement. Most Europeans are reconciled to the idea that not everybody, at any age and in any condition, is entitled to the most expensive medical technology. A secretary of state or defense traveling with dozens of cars and armed security guards would seem absurd in many countries, as would the notion that the government provides a tax break if you buy a house or that schools should close if there is ice on the roads. Yet we not only demand ludicrous levels of personal and political safety, we also rant and rave against the vast bureaucracies we have created -- democratically, constitutionally, openly -- to deliver it.
Frank Rich hits the nail on the head
Frank Rich, in an op-ed entitled "The Best Congress Money Can Buy" at the New York Times, makes a strong argument backed up by substantial evidence that Congress is indebted to the corporations that finance elections.
But seemingly everyone is aggrieved about the hijacking of the political system by anonymous special interests. The most recent Times-CBS News poll found that an extraordinary 92 percent of Americans want full disclosure of campaign contributors — far many more than, say, believe in evolution. But they will not get their wish anytime soon. “I don’t think we can put the genie back in the bottle,” said David Axelrod as the Democrats prepared to play catch-up to the G.O.P.’s 2010 mastery of outside groups and clandestine corporate corporations.
The story of recent corporate political donations — which we may never learn in its entirety — is just beginning to be told. Bloomberg News reported after Election Day that the United States Chamber of Commerce’s anti-Democratic war chest included a mind-boggling $86 million contribution from the insurance lobby to fight the health care bill.The Times has identified other big chamber donors as Prudential Financial, Goldman Sachs and Chevron. These are hardly the small businesses that the chamber’s G.O.P. allies claim to be championing.
Since the election, the Obama White House has sent signals that it will make nice to these interests. While the president returns to photo ops at factories, Timothy Geithner has already met with the chamber’s board out of camera range. In a reportorial coup before Election Day, the investigative news organization ProPublica wrote of the similarly behind-closed-doors activities of the New Democrat Coalition — “a group of 69 lawmakers whose close relationship with several hundred Washington lobbyists” makes them “one of the most successful political money machines” since DeLay’s K Street Project collapsed in 2007. During the Congressional battle over financial-services reform last May, coalition members repaired to a retreat on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to frolic with lobbyists dedicated to weakening the legislation.
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America needs a rally — or, better still, a leader or two or three — to restore not just honor or sanity to its citizens but governance that’s not auctioned off to the highest bidder. When it was reported just days before our election that Iran was protecting its political interests in Afghanistan’s presidential palace by giving bags of money to Hamid Karzai’s closest aide, Americans could hardly bring themselves to be outraged. At least with Karzai’s government, unlike our own, we could know for certain whose cash was in the bag.
Paul Krugman is absolutely right about Ireland
From the New York Times:
Part of the answer is that Iceland let foreign lenders to its runaway banks pay the price of their poor judgment, rather than putting its own taxpayers on the line to guarantee bad private debts. As the International Monetary Fund notes — approvingly! — “private sector bankruptcies have led to a marked decline in external debt.” Meanwhile, Iceland helped avoid a financial panic in part by imposing temporary capital controls — that is, by limiting the ability of residents to pull funds out of the country.
And Iceland has also benefited from the fact that, unlike Ireland, it still has its own currency; devaluation of the krona, which has made Iceland’s exports more competitive, has been an important factor in limiting the depth of Iceland’s slump.
None of these heterodox options are available to Ireland, say the wise heads. Ireland, they say, must continue to inflict pain on its citizens — because to do anything else would fatally undermine confidence.
But Ireland is now in its third year of austerity, and confidence just keeps draining away. And you have to wonder what it will take for serious people to realize that punishing the populace for the bankers’ sins is worse than a crime; it’s a mistake.
California GOP update
Outgoing Governor Schwarzenegger says federal lawmakers should take a lesson from California on climate change:
California is just one of 50 states, but its economy, measured individually, is the eighth-biggest in the world, larger than that of Spain, Canada, Brazil, Russia, India or South Korea.
Such economic clout makes California ideally positioned to take the lead on energy policy and environmental issues like climate change, even as the United States as a whole has failed to make much progress on either front.
At least that’s the view of California’s departing governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is touting his state’s environmental credentials in the aftermath of an election that featured the resounding defeat of a ballot initiative that would have suspended the state’s landmark climate change and renewable energy law.A California GOP recovery program
In the wake of the disastrous showing by Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina and the rest of the California Republican Party ticket, the leaders of the Golden State GOP should recalibrate their politics and policies to become relevant once again.
The state's Republicans are now so trapped in their ideological hall of mirrors that they have become a distorted caricature of themselves. The midterm election demonstrated that they utterly fail to reflect the impulses of the vast majority of California voters, who tend toward fiscal conservatism and social moderation.
Many Republican values have a wide following: smaller government, lower taxes, reduced regulation, economic growth, individual freedom and law and order, to name a few. The California GOP should fight for these ideals. But it needs to incorporate them into a platform that begins with a realistic growth agenda. Investment in roads, bridges, dams and/or levees, ports, water projects, redevelopment projects and schools and universities — all of these things and more are wholly consistent with their philosophical worldview.California's Ailing Republicans: A Dying Breed?
Republicans are relishing the coming of a new day on Capitol Hill. But across the country in California, the party of Nixon and Reagan is drifting toward obscurity.
The latest sign of imperiled health: In a year Republicans notched big victories in Congress, governor's offices and statehouses around the nation, California Democrats made a clean sweep of eight statewide contests on Nov. 2. Democrats padded their majority in the Legislature, where the party controls both chambers and no congressional seats changed parties.
California counted more registered Republicans in 1988 than it does today, even though the state population has since grown by about 10 million. Setting aside the politically ambidextrous Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose celebrity eclipsed his Republican registration, the California GOP counts only a single victory in 21 statewide contests since 2002 – that of insurance commissioner in 2006.
A great op-ed on the dilemmas we are facing in healthcare
Stephen Pearlstein at the Washington Post does a great job explaining the serious dilemma that the country is facing in healthcare:
Here's the dilemma: The only way for the health-care industry to move toward accountable care is to further accelerate a process of consolidation that has already reduced competition and increased market power. Hospitals are once again busily buying up physician practices and outside laboratories that used to compete with them, incorporating them into their "systems." And independent physicians who used to compete with one another are quickly merging into multi-specialty practices, offering a full range of services to large blocks of patients for fixed annual fees - an arrangement known as "capitation."
How corrupt and backwards is Afghanistan?
From the New York Times:
So perhaps we should not be surprised that even today the Afghans might be up to similar shenanigans. “For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement,” report The Times’s Dexter Filkins and Carlotta Gall. “But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.”
Bob Herbert argues against inequality
From the New York Times:
Extreme inequality is already contributing mightily to political and other forms of polarization in the U.S. And it is a major force undermining the idea that as citizens we should try to face the nation’s problems, economic and otherwise, in a reasonably united fashion. When so many people are tumbling toward the bottom, the tendency is to fight among each other for increasingly scarce resources.
What’s really needed is for working Americans to form alliances and try, in a spirit of good will, to work out equitable solutions to the myriad problems facing so many ordinary individuals and families. Strong leaders are needed to develop such alliances and fight back against the forces that nearly destroyed the economy and have left working Americans in the lurch.
Aristocrats were supposed to be anathema to Americans. Now, while much of the rest of the nation is suffering, they are the only ones who can afford to smile.On a related note, it seems that recession is completely over for the wealthy in Manhattan.
Yet another reason why we need immigration reform
Undocumented UCLA law grad is in legal bind
Ever since he was 8 years old, Luis Perez has dedicated his life to becoming an American.
In grade school, days after his arrival fromMexico, he studied hard to master English — it quickly displaced Spanish as his dominant language.
As a teenager he woke up every morning at 5:30 a.m. for a long bus trip across the San Fernando Valley, away from a neighborhood with a bad gang problem, to a high school where being a studious young man didn't make him a social outcast.
When he eventually made it to college, it was the U.S. Constitution that grabbed hold of him, especially the Bill of Rights. And this year, his study of American institutions culminated with his graduation from UCLA School of Law.
Americans were for universal health care before they were against it
Sometimes, the public gets mad at Washington because politicians never do what they say they're going to do. And other times, the public gets mad at Washington because politicians do exactly what they say they're going to do. From the perspective of the politicians, it must be quite confusing.
Climate change update
To Fight Climate Change, Clear the Air. Two professors argue that governments should take modest steps and prevent other greenhouse gases, such as chlorofluorocarbons and methane before attempting a global strategy at curbing carbon dioxide emissions:
The impasse that was evident in Copenhagen last year and is likely to reappear in Cancún arises in part from the inability of China, India, Europe and the United States to show that they are adopting practical measures to slow climate change. Agreeing on a shared strategy to curtail short-lived pollutants would be a good way for all of them to start.
Credibility is especially important for the United States. It can already offer the world much of the technology and regulatory expertise that will be needed to reduce short-lived pollutants, particularly ozone and soot. Some American efforts are under way to share these technologies, including a program to help provide better cookstoves for people in developing countries. By making such programs more visible and demonstrating that they deliver tangible results, and by establishing a realistic plan for cutting its own emissions at home, the United States could show that it is serious about addressing climate change.
For too long, overly ambitious global climate talks have focused on the aspects of global warming that are hardest to solve. A few more modest steps, with quick and measurable effects, are a better way to proceed.On Global Warming, Start Small. Bruce Usher argues that a bottom-up strategy (rather than a top-down global approach) has a much better chance of succeeding in preventing climate change in the next few decades:
But there is an alternative to this top-down approach to climate change: a bottom-up strategy that stands a much better chance of working. Rather than count on international negotiations to produce an effective strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the United States should build upon the innovative clean-energy developments already under way in individual states. (Disclosure: I invest in clean energy in America and abroad.)
Texas alone produces more electricity through wind power than all but five countries. In California and Arizona, solar energy will soon provide electricity for three million homes. Geothermal energy plants are being built in Nevada. Michigan is making electric cars. And these are only the leaders. Iowa, Oregon and Illinois are also building wind power generators; New Jersey and Florida are investing in solar, and Maine in biomass.
These state-level efforts are already having national impact. Last year, renewable energy accounted for more than half of all the new power generation plants nationwide. Another 40 percent was from natural gas, which emits only half as much carbon dioxide as coal.
An Almanac of Extreme Weather. A farmer from Minnesota argues that he is experiencing the effects of climate change:
THE news from this Midwestern farm is not good. The past four years of heavy rains and flash flooding here in southern Minnesota have left me worried about the future of agriculture in America’s grain belt. For some time computer models of climate change have been predicting just these kinds of weather patterns, but seeing them unfold on our farm has been harrowing nonetheless.
My family and I produce vegetables, hay and grain on 250 acres in one of the richest agricultural areas in the world. While our farm is not large by modern standards, its roots are deep in this region; my great-grandfather homesteaded about 80 miles from here in the late 1800s.
He passed on a keen sensitivity to climate. His memoirs, self-published in the wake of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, describe tornadoes, droughts and other extreme weather. But even he would be surprised by the erratic weather we have experienced in the last decade.Indonesia’s Billion-Dollar Forest Deal Is at Risk:
The archipelago nation has been a key testing ground of U.N.-backed efforts to use international funding to pay developing countries to curb forest destruction, which accounts for nearly 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. The approach, known as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD, is widely seen as one the rare global environmental successes since the collapse of talks in Copenhagen last year.
But as a fresh round of climate negotiations begins in the Mexican resort of Cancún on Monday, some environmentalists say that Indonesia’s experiment with forest conservation is also under threat.
A report by Greenpeace last week accused Indonesian government ministries of planning for massive land clearance, despite signing a $1 billion REDD agreement with Norway earlier this year. The agreement, which includes a two-year moratorium on clearing natural forests and carbon-rich peatlands, is aimed at helping Indonesia, which by some counts is the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, reach a target of cutting emissions by at least 26 percent by 2020.
Friday, November 26, 2010
California politics update
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta's ecological decline is breathing new life into bypass proposals
A drilling rig bit into the bed of California's biggest river, hauling up sage-green tubes of clay and sand the consistency of uncooked fudge.
The rig workers rolled the muck into strips, dried it in sugar-sized cubes and crushed them under their palms. They packed slices into carefully labeled canning jars for testing at an engineering lab.
They were taking the river bottom samples for a $13-billion project that would shunt water around — or under — the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the big aqueducts that ferry supplies south.
Nearly three decades after a proposed delta bypass was killed by voters in a divisive initiative battle, the idea is back in vogue.
Pumping water from the delta's southern edge has helped shove the West Coast's largest estuary into ecological free fall, devastating its native fish populations and triggering endangered species protections that have tightened the spigot to San Joaquin Valley farms and Southern California cities.A fresh battle between Southern California water adversaries
Dead these hundred years,Mark Twain would wholly understand the dispute between the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the Imperial Irrigation District over water flowing into the Salton Sea.
In the West, Twain is famously reported to have quipped, whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting.
In the world of water, Metropolitan and Imperial are behemoths, for different reasons. When these two clash, as they have done repeatedly in recent decades, other water agencies in the West fret and wait for the fallout. At stake is a lot of water and a lot of money.
Metropolitan serves more people (19 million) than any other water district in California. Farm-rich Imperial gets more Colorado River water (3.1 million acre-feet) than any agency in the seven states that depend on the river.A California GOP recovery program
In the wake of the disastrous showing by Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina and the rest of the California Republican Party ticket, the leaders of the Golden State GOP should recalibrate their politics and policies to become relevant once again.
The state's Republicans are now so trapped in their ideological hall of mirrors that they have become a distorted caricature of themselves. The midterm election demonstrated that they utterly fail to reflect the impulses of the vast majority of California voters, who tend toward fiscal conservatism and social moderation.
Many Republican values have a wide following: smaller government, lower taxes, reduced regulation, economic growth, individual freedom and law and order, to name a few. The California GOP should fight for these ideals. But it needs to incorporate them into a platform that begins with a realistic growth agenda. Investment in roads, bridges, dams and/or levees, ports, water projects, redevelopment projects and schools and universities — all of these things and more are wholly consistent with their philosophical worldview.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
The International Energy Agency admits that conventional peak oil has already happened
In a post entitled "Peak oil is officially set to start the economy," Chris Martenson explains how conventional peak oil has already arrived. Very much worth your time.
The IEA has been producing annual reviews of the world energy situation for a long time and has not mentioned the term "Peak Oil" (as far as I know) until this year's report. And not only did they mention it, they said that as far as conventional oil goes, it's in the rear view mirror:
Crude oil output reaches an undulating plateau of around 68-69 mb/d by 2020, but never regains its all-time peak of 70 mb/d reached in 2006, while production of natural gas liquids (NGL) and unconventional oil grows quickly.
The only question about a China crash is when?
Here's a link to an interview with Vitaliy Katsenelson, who believes that China is a giant bubble waiting to pop. The whole interview is worth your time, but here are two questions and answers that sum up many of the problems China is facing.
Is China's Big Competitive Advantage Already Eroding?
Perhaps A Recession Is The Only Option For China
TCR: On the topic of real estate, I was speaking to a very well-off Chinese friend recently who had bought a very expensive apartment in Beijing. When I asked him about buying at bubble prices, he commented that it really didn’t matter. The money was almost irrelevant, given the status that came from having an apartment in that particular part of town. He said it was very good for his business and that he didn’t really plan on using it very much. It was an interesting perspective, how he saw real estate.
VK: In the same way that everyone in the United States decided they “must” own a house, this belief was reinforced by continuously rising house prices. You can see how big a problem this became in big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai where the affordability ratio is horrible, so the property-value-to-income ratio in Beijing is pushing 15. In Shanghai it is over 12. If you look at the national average, it is over eight times.
TCR: Can you explain that ratio to our readers?
VK: You get the ratio by taking the property value and dividing it by annual disposable income.
Basically, if you spent all your money, after you paid your taxes, just to pay off the mortgage, it would take you 14 years – which means you didn’t pay for food, electricity, etc.
This ratio is important because it helps put the scale of the Chinese real estate bubble in its proper context. In Tokyo, at the peak of the massive Japanese bubble, the ratio stood at nine times. In Beijing it’s already 14 times. In Shanghai it’s over 12 times. The national average for China is pushing 8.2 times right now. So housing affordability is very, very low, and the housing prices are extremely high.
Here is another interesting piece of data: property investment in China in 2009 was 10% of GDP, up from 8% in 2007. In Japan, at the peak of its bubble, it did not exceed 9%; in the U.S. it never exceeded 6%.
A recent study found that 64.5 million apartments basically don’t use electricity because they are empty. Chinese people buy those condos, and they don’t rent them. Similar to new cars in the U.S. when taken off the lot, in China an apartment is worth less once rented out. So they just keep them unoccupied with the hope to flip them, and you know how that story ends.Here part two more posts about the problems China is now facing:
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Bad news for climate change deniers
Experts claim 2006 climate report plagiarized
An influential 2006 congressional report that raised questions about the validity of global warming research was partly based on material copied from textbooks, Wikipedia and the writings of one of the scientists criticized in the report, plagiarism experts say.
Review of the 91-page report by three experts contacted by USA TODAY found repeated instances of passages lifted word for word and what appear to be thinly disguised paraphrases.
...
"It kind of undermines the credibility of your work criticizing others' integrity when you don't conform to the basic rules of scholarship," Virginia Tech plagiarism expert Skip Garner says.So, will this make the front page of the Drudge Report and every other conservative publication? I doubt it.
An interview with Bill Gates about global warming and clean energy
From Rolling Stone:
When it comes to climate and energy, Gates is a radical consumerist. In his view, energy consumption is good — it just needs to be clean energy. As he sees it, the biggest challenge is not persuading Americans to buy more efficient refrigerators or trade in their SUVs for hybrids; it's figuring out how to raise the standard of living in the developing world without wrecking the climate. Achieving that, he argues, will require an "energy miracle" — a technological breakthrough that creates an inexhaustible supply of carbon-free energy. Although he doesn't know what form that miracle will take, he knows we need to think big. "We don't really grasp the scale of the problem we're facing," Gates tells me in his office overlooking Lake Washington in Seattle. "The right goal is not to cut our carbon emissions in half. The right goal is zero."
A very interesting interview with the James Howard Kunstler, who believes we have reached peak oil
From The Business Insider:
Question: Now take out your crystal ball. What is the most likely scenario you see playing out in global energy supplies over the next few decades?
JHK: I see the USA getting blind-sided by events. We import nearly three-quarters of the oil we use and much of it comes from very dodgy places. The ideas derived from Jeff Brown's Export Land Theory tell us that oil export rates are certain to go down very steeply and soon. Before long, exporting nations will have to ask themselves whether they ought to keep some of their oil around for their own people.
In the meantime, China is very busy spending its foreign exchange reserves on "favored customer" oil contracts, more or less cornering a lot of the market. I think that will lead to conflict between them and us. We may even invoke the Monroe Doctrine over Chinese oil purchases out of Canada.
Question: What question didn’t we ask, but should have? What’s your answer?
JHK: Will China dominate the world further into the 21st Century?
A lot of people think so. I'm not so sure about that. They have problems that are orders of magnitude greater than ours with population overshoot, dwindling fresh water, industrial pollution, relatively little oil of their own, and legitimacy of governance. They've become net food importers.
We look at them and their recent accomplishments in awe -- and they've come a long way from the point thirty years ago when most Chinese lived like it was the twelfth century. But they came to the industrial fiesta very late. They are making some rather dumb choices -- like, trying to get their whole new middle class in cars on freeways, putting up thousands of skyscrapers. Their banking system is possibly more corrupt and dysfunctional than ours -- since it's run by the state, with very poor accountability for lending. As a Baby Boomer, I well remember China's psychotic break of the 1960s, when the country went cuckoo under the elderly, ailing, paranoid Mao Tse-Tung -- which is to say, they're capable of flipping out on the grand scale under stress. They are reaching out these days in a resource grab using their accumulated foreign exchange reserves. At some future time -- say, if the global banking system implodes, and their forex reserves lose value -- I wonder if they will reach out militarily for resources, and how the world might react.
In any case, I take issue with the Tom Friedman notion that the world has become permanently flat. The world is going to get rounder and bigger again. We'll discover -- surprise! -- that the global economy was a set of transient economic relations that obtained only because of a half century of cheap energy and relative peace between the big nations. Ahead now, I think you'll see the big nations shrink back into their own corners of the world. I'm not saying we'll see no international trade, but it will be nothing like the conveyer belt from China to WalMart that we've known the last few decades. And the prospects for conflict are very very high.
Why Peak Oil is Real and What To Do About It
First, a definition from Wikipedia:
Here is another recent presentation making a strong case that we have reached peak oil by Robert Hirsch. Mr. Hirsch directed America's nuclear energy program in the 1970s.
Another link questioning the available supply of oil.
An article that claims peak oil occurred in 2006 according to the International Energy Agency.
Here is a presentation that offers many solutions to redesigning the transportation networks of the United States.
Whether we have already hit peak oil or not, one thing is for sure: things that are fine and do not last forever. Oil is finite. There is not an unlimited supply of oil on this planet; at some point production will decline and prices will rise to levels we have never seen: $200 per barrel of crude oil, $300, $400, $500. At what point will the American people stand up and realize that we are on an unsustainable path. Why wait until it is too late? Why wait until the price of oil is so high that it consumes an enormous amount of our income? We know it's coming, sooner rather than later.
Update: Here's an article from the New York Times that has the other side of the story, that the era of cheap oil and gas is not yet over.
Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached after which the rate of production enters terminal decline. Peak oil may or may not be upon us this year. We don't know and we won't know until global petroleum extraction has declined for at least a few years. However, peak oil is a popular topic among bloggers and investors planning for the worst.Here is a presentation from Jeremy Gilbert, the former BP chief petroleum engineer. He argues that peak oil is already here and that we must react immediately by transforming the sectors of our economy that depend upon oil, such as transportation, electricity generation and agriculture.
Here is another recent presentation making a strong case that we have reached peak oil by Robert Hirsch. Mr. Hirsch directed America's nuclear energy program in the 1970s.
Another link questioning the available supply of oil.
An article that claims peak oil occurred in 2006 according to the International Energy Agency.
Here is a presentation that offers many solutions to redesigning the transportation networks of the United States.
Whether we have already hit peak oil or not, one thing is for sure: things that are fine and do not last forever. Oil is finite. There is not an unlimited supply of oil on this planet; at some point production will decline and prices will rise to levels we have never seen: $200 per barrel of crude oil, $300, $400, $500. At what point will the American people stand up and realize that we are on an unsustainable path. Why wait until it is too late? Why wait until the price of oil is so high that it consumes an enormous amount of our income? We know it's coming, sooner rather than later.
Update: Here's an article from the New York Times that has the other side of the story, that the era of cheap oil and gas is not yet over.
Interesting paragraph to ponder
From Tyler Cowen:
Here in the United States, one thing that strikes me about my most liberal friends is how conservative their thinking is at a personal level. For their own children, and in talking about specific other people [TC: especially in the blogosphere!], they passionately stress individual responsibility. It is only when discussing public policy that they favor collectivism. The tension between their personal views and their political opinions is fascinating to observe. I would not be surprised to find that my friends' attachment to liberal politics is tenuous, and that some major event could cause a rapid, widespread shift toward a more conservative position.
Another reason high-speed rail is a great idea
From Matt Yglesias at ThinkProgress:
For example, today there seem to be almost 30 flights daily between Seattle and Portland. Clearly a lot of people are making the trip. If you built a high-speed rail connection, a lot of people would take that. But how many would obviously depend heavily on how the price compared to the price of those flights. And that in turn would have a great deal to do with how we price pollution.
Can the federal government require individuals to purchase health insurance under the commerce clause?
Tyler Cowen has a post that quotes another blogger stating that "over the last century we have gradually accepted the proposition that anything the government tells us it can regulate, it can regulate." The post links to a Wikipedia article on the US Supreme Court decision Wickard v Filburn.
Here are the facts in the case (From Wikipedia):
In the health care bill, Congress passed a law which requires individuals/families to purchase a health insurance policy or pay a penalty/tax to the IRS. Obviously,one of the goals in the health care bill is to stabilize healthcare costs by requiring individuals/families to purchase health insurance. (We know how insurance markets work, the people who don't have claims higher than their premiums subsidize those who do have claims higher than their premiums. Therefore, Congress had the intent of stabilizing health insurance policy prices by requiring individuals/families to purchase health insurance.)
One individual/family that does not purchase a health insurance policy will not have a large effect on interstate commerce, But, interstate commerce would be affected through the cumulative actions of thousands of other individuals/families that do not purchase health insurance policies.
This is a very simple analysis and a loose application of the Wickard case, but it is meant to prove the point that Congress has extremely broad authority when it comes to regulating commerce under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.
Here are the facts in the case (From Wikipedia):
Roscoe Filburn was a farmer who admitted producing wheat in excess of the amount permitted. Filburn argued however that because the excess wheat was produced for his private consumption on his own farm, it never entered commerce at all, much less interstate commerce, and therefore was not a proper subject of federal regulation under the Commerce Clause.
In July 1940, pursuant to the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1938, Filburn's 1941 allotment was established at 11.1 acres (4.5 ha) and a normal yield of 20.1bushels of wheat per acre. Filburn was given notice of the allotment in July 1940 before the Fall planting of his 1941 crop of wheat, and again in July 1941, before it was harvested. Despite these notices Filburn planted 23 acres (9.3 ha) and harvested 239 bushels from his 11.9 acres (4.8 ha) of excess area.
Here is a summary of the Supreme Court's decision (emphasis mine):
The intended rationale of the Agricultural Adjustment Act was to stabilize the price of wheat on the national market. The federal government has the power to regulate interstate commerce through the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. In Filburn the Court unanimously reasoned that the power to regulate the price at which commerce occurs was inherent in the power to regulate commerce.
Filburn argued that since the excess wheat he produced was intended solely for home consumption it could not be regulated through the interstate Commerce Clause. The Supreme Court rejected this argument, reasoning that if Filburn had not used home-grown wheat he would have had to buy wheat on the open market. This effect on interstate commerce, the Court reasoned, may not be substantial from the actions of Filburn alone but through the cumulative actions of thousands of other farmers just like Filburn its effect would certainly become substantial. Therefore Congress could regulate wholly intrastate, non-commercial activity if such activity, viewed in the aggregate, would have a substantial effect on interstate commerce, even if the individual effects are trivial.One can loosely apply the individual mandate to the facts of this case. In Wickard, Congress passed a law with the goal of stabilizing wheat prices by limiting the total supply of wheat produced and consumed.
In the health care bill, Congress passed a law which requires individuals/families to purchase a health insurance policy or pay a penalty/tax to the IRS. Obviously,one of the goals in the health care bill is to stabilize healthcare costs by requiring individuals/families to purchase health insurance. (We know how insurance markets work, the people who don't have claims higher than their premiums subsidize those who do have claims higher than their premiums. Therefore, Congress had the intent of stabilizing health insurance policy prices by requiring individuals/families to purchase health insurance.)
One individual/family that does not purchase a health insurance policy will not have a large effect on interstate commerce, But, interstate commerce would be affected through the cumulative actions of thousands of other individuals/families that do not purchase health insurance policies.
This is a very simple analysis and a loose application of the Wickard case, but it is meant to prove the point that Congress has extremely broad authority when it comes to regulating commerce under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.
How are we going to lower the cost of healthcare in this country?
From Merrill Goozner at The Fiscal Times, (emphasis mine):
Can Medicare afford the next generation of marginally effective cancer drugs, whose price tags are approaching $100,000 a year?
That issue wasn’t on the agenda last week when an outside advisory panel told the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services that the medical evidence was strong enough to justify the agency paying for the prostate cancer drug Provenge. But it was clearly on the advisers’ minds since paying for men eligible for the drug could wind up costing the agency $2 billion a year.
Several commented near the end of the meeting that Medicare should begin measuring how well the $93,000 immune system enhancer treatment actually works – just in case its real world efficacy is less than what has been proven so far through clinical trials run by the manufacturer. The evidence submitted to Food and Drug Administration by Seattle-based Dendreon Corp. showed sipuleucel-T (that is Provenge’s generic name) extended the average lifespan of people with metastatic prostate cancer, which is currently about two years, by an average of four months.
Another poll that shows the American people don't want to cut spending
The link is here:
A November 17 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll had several questions on budget issues. Question 16 found that two-thirds of voters in the recent congressional elections supported candidates favoring cuts in federal spending. However, in question 32a, 70 percent of people said they were uncomfortable with the idea with actually cutting spending.
The unintended consequences of Social Security reform
From Merrill Goozner at The Fiscal Times
Most people are working and living longer, so it seems like a no-brainer to raise the retirement age to help close the long-term Social Security funding gap. But the move could backfire and not save as much as predicted. Why? Not all groups are able to work longer, anew report from the Government Accountability Office says.
“Raising the retirement ages would likely increase the number of workers applying for and receiving disability insurance benefits,” which also comes out of Social Security, said the report, which was prepared for Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI), chairman of the Select Committee on Aging.
The report presented a sobering view of the health status of near-retirement age population. About a quarter of Americans aged 60-61 have a work-limiting health condition, according to the report, and about two-thirds the ones who are still on the job report working in occupations that are “physically demanding.”
An excellent column explaining the blur between spending and taxes
Greg Mankiw, writing in an op-ed in the New York Times, explain something that many Americans probably find confusing.
The distinction between spending and taxation is often murky and sometimes meaningless.
Imagine that there is some activity — say, snipe hunting — that members of Congress want to encourage. Senator Porkbelly proposes a government subsidy. “America needs more snipe hunters,” he says. “I propose that every time an American bags a snipe, the federal government should pay him or her $100.”
“No, no,” says Congressman Blowhard. “The Porkbelly plan would increase the size of an already bloated government. Let’s instead reduce the burden of taxation. I propose that every time an American tracks down a snipe, the hunter should get a $100 credit to reduce his or her tax liabilities.”
To be sure, government accountants may treat the Porkbelly and Blowhard plans differently. They would likely deem the subsidy to be a spending increase and the credit to be a tax cut. Moreover, the rhetoric of the two politicians about spending and taxes may appeal to different political bases.
But it hardly takes an economic genius to see how little difference there is between the two plans. Both policies enrich the nation’s snipe hunters. And because the government must balance its books, at least in the long run, the gains of the snipe hunters must come at the cost of higher taxes or lower government benefits for the rest of us.
Will the Republicans in Congress commit to eliminate wasteful spending?
Here is there perfect opportunity:
There are two pieces of legislation set to expire at the end of this year. One is the $0.45 per gallon subsidy (called the VEETC) that is paid to oil companies to blend ethanol into gasoline. Because the oil companies are also mandated to blend ethanol, the subsidy is mostly redundant. That is, we are paying a subsidy for something that is already being compelled by law. As I have argued before, it is like paying people to obey speed limits. I don’t know too many people who would think it is a good idea to borrow money from our children so we can give it back to their parents for obeying traffic laws. (You can find a more detailed discussion on the VEETC here).
The second piece of legislation is an ethanol tariff that is applied to ethanol entering the U.S. market. Brazilian producers want to see that tariff removed to open up the U.S. market, and U.S. producers want to see it maintained to protect their market. For a more detailed look at the issues around the tariff, see Implications Of The U.S. Ethanol Tariff.
I believe that the ethanol lobby recognizes that they don’t really need the VEETC with the mandate in place. After all, we had subsidies for 30 years, but the explosive growth in the industry only happened once the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) was passed into law in 2005. The RFS meant that it was no longer optional for the oil companies to blend ethanol; they were compelled by law to do it.
David Brooks and Bob Herbert hit the nail on the head
David Brooks writes in a New York Times op-ed that "this has been a great month for conversation" about the reducing the debt and deficit of the US and reforming the US government. But, as he admits, none of this talk is going anywhere. Congressional leaders have no confidence that any changes will be made soon to fix the fiscal mess that the United States is in.
Mr. Brooks blames the Republicans for fighting against any tax increase whatsoever, even though tax increases must be part of the solution when the deficit is $1.3 trillion this year alone. He blames the Democrats for fighting over the direction of their own party and faults the liberal wing of the Democratic party since it is unwilling to accept any any significant spending cuts to entitlements, which are the key drivers of the deficit in the medium and long-term.
So what will happen? Budget gridlock, government gridlock and political gridlock. This is where Mr. Brooks hits the nail on the head:
My two cents: Mr. Brooks is absolutely right that American politicians have changed in recent years. But I disagree with him as to why they have changed.
It's not that politicians now view the country as a battlefield. It's because they are greedy, arrogant, elites that believe they are entitled to whatever they want, much like many Americans.
For example, Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, recently said that the number one goal of Republicans in the next two years is to make President Obama a one term president. With unemployment near 10%, the deficit at $1.3 trillion, the number of Americans in poverty at record numbers, millions of Americans losing their homes to foreclosures and the rampant corruption in Washington and on Wall Street, (among others) that is the number one goal of Republicans in the next two years?
It's because there are so many baby boomers in Congress (including Mitch McConnell) that are unwilling to compromise and demand that they get their way every time, without question. That is how many of these people have lived their lives since they were born and that's how they intend to finish their lives.
It's absolutely amazing and astonishing that leaders of both political parties, including the president, are saying that we can continue to cut taxes (on everyone and/or everyone but the rich) and still receive all the benefits that the government has promised. That is not possible in the current fiscal mess.
This sense of entitlement is a common theme throughout America today. As I posted yesterday, the director of the Congressional Budget Office said the following:
Another place to look for solutions is Bob Herbert, also writing an op-ed in the New York Times. Mr. Herbert hits the nail on the head about the current situation we are facing and how we can get out of the mess we are in. What he said can't be summarized without missing much of the important points, so I must post a lot of the column.
Mr. Herbert quotes John F. Kennedy from a speech he delivered as he accepted the Democratic nomination on July 15, 1960. (Emphasis mine)
As Mr. Herbert says, "selfishness and greed have virtually smothered all other values." We have seen this across the country since Obama took office. Give me my Medicare, but don't make me pay for it. Bailout the banks with no strings attached or the economy will implode into a depression and don't even think about prosecuting me for all my fraudulent practices.
To sum it up, two quotes: As JFK said in his speech, we have a choice "between national greatness and national decline." As Mr. Herbert said today, "the choice was never so stark as right now."
On a related note, Mr. Brooks points out that "Ronald Reagan raised taxes 12 separate times during his presidency." Where is the party of Reagan now? Ronald Reagan was great at compromising and working across the aisle. Where are all the people that claim to be the party of Reagan?
Mr. Brooks blames the Republicans for fighting against any tax increase whatsoever, even though tax increases must be part of the solution when the deficit is $1.3 trillion this year alone. He blames the Democrats for fighting over the direction of their own party and faults the liberal wing of the Democratic party since it is unwilling to accept any any significant spending cuts to entitlements, which are the key drivers of the deficit in the medium and long-term.
So what will happen? Budget gridlock, government gridlock and political gridlock. This is where Mr. Brooks hits the nail on the head:
So we’ve still got budget gridlock. But it’s worth stepping back to acknowledge how abnormal this is. As late as the 1980s and 1990s, Congress did pass serious measures to control debt. Across the Atlantic, Britain is enacting a budget with spending cuts and tax increases. In fact, all affluent countries are now faced with the challenge of reforming their welfare states and few are as immobilized as the U.S. is.Mr. Brooks argues that American politicians in recent years have ran up huge debts because they are no longer "constrained by a mentality from the founders" and instead view the country "as a battlefield in which the people ... do battle against the interests of the elites."
My two cents: Mr. Brooks is absolutely right that American politicians have changed in recent years. But I disagree with him as to why they have changed.
It's not that politicians now view the country as a battlefield. It's because they are greedy, arrogant, elites that believe they are entitled to whatever they want, much like many Americans.
For example, Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, recently said that the number one goal of Republicans in the next two years is to make President Obama a one term president. With unemployment near 10%, the deficit at $1.3 trillion, the number of Americans in poverty at record numbers, millions of Americans losing their homes to foreclosures and the rampant corruption in Washington and on Wall Street, (among others) that is the number one goal of Republicans in the next two years?
It's because there are so many baby boomers in Congress (including Mitch McConnell) that are unwilling to compromise and demand that they get their way every time, without question. That is how many of these people have lived their lives since they were born and that's how they intend to finish their lives.
It's absolutely amazing and astonishing that leaders of both political parties, including the president, are saying that we can continue to cut taxes (on everyone and/or everyone but the rich) and still receive all the benefits that the government has promised. That is not possible in the current fiscal mess.
This sense of entitlement is a common theme throughout America today. As I posted yesterday, the director of the Congressional Budget Office said the following:
The United States faces a fundamental disconnect between services that people expect the federal government to provide, particularly in the form of benefits to older Americans, and the tax revenues that people are willing to send to the government to finance the services.So how can we fix this fiscal mess? As I posted on Sunday, Michael Kinsley has made a very strong case for the baby boomer generation to make sacrifices in order to save this country from the baby boomer generation. His essay is a great place to start.
Another place to look for solutions is Bob Herbert, also writing an op-ed in the New York Times. Mr. Herbert hits the nail on the head about the current situation we are facing and how we can get out of the mess we are in. What he said can't be summarized without missing much of the important points, so I must post a lot of the column.
Mr. Herbert quotes John F. Kennedy from a speech he delivered as he accepted the Democratic nomination on July 15, 1960. (Emphasis mine)
It became known as the New Frontier speech. The candidate spoke of an old era ending and said that “the old ways will not do.” He spoke of “a slippage in our intellectual and moral strength.” He said:
“The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises; it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them. It appeals to their pride, not to their pocketbook. It holds out the promise of more sacrifice instead of more security.”
What Kennedy hoped to foster was a renewed sense of national purpose in which shared values were reinforced in an atmosphere of heightened civic participation and mutual sacrifice. That was the way, he said, “to get this country moving again.”
His voice was in sync with the spirit of the times. Americans were fired with the idea that they could improve their circumstances, right wrongs and do good. The Interstate Highway System, an Eisenhower initiative, was under way. The civil rights movement was in flower. And soon Kennedy would literally be reaching for the moon.
Self-interest and the bottom line had not yet become the be-all and end-all.
...
While the myriad issues facing the U.S. have changed and changed again since Kennedy’s time, the importance of being guided by the highest principles and ideals has not. We are now in a period in which cynicism is running rampant, and selfishness and greed have virtually smothered all other values. Simple fairness is not a fit topic for political discussion and no one dares even mention the poor.
The public seems fearful and cowed. People unworthy of high office are arrogantly on the march.
You can say whatever you’d like about the Kennedy era and the ’60s in general, but there was great energy in the population then, and a willingness to reach beyond one’s self.
Kennedy spoke in his acceptance speech of a choice “between national greatness and national decline.” That choice was never so stark as right now. There is still time to listen to a voice from half a century ago.What politician today is asking the American people to sacrifice? I spend a lot of time following politics and there is no one that I know of asking for shared sacrifice. All politicians today, including the president, are promising tax cuts and increased benefits. That is simply not possible. The math does not add up.
As Mr. Herbert says, "selfishness and greed have virtually smothered all other values." We have seen this across the country since Obama took office. Give me my Medicare, but don't make me pay for it. Bailout the banks with no strings attached or the economy will implode into a depression and don't even think about prosecuting me for all my fraudulent practices.
To sum it up, two quotes: As JFK said in his speech, we have a choice "between national greatness and national decline." As Mr. Herbert said today, "the choice was never so stark as right now."
On a related note, Mr. Brooks points out that "Ronald Reagan raised taxes 12 separate times during his presidency." Where is the party of Reagan now? Ronald Reagan was great at compromising and working across the aisle. Where are all the people that claim to be the party of Reagan?
California public employees make way too much money both when they are working and when they retire
Meet The 5,355 California State Workers Who Earn More Than $200,000
L.A. pensions may consume a third of city's general fund by 2015
State's stem cell agency seeks more time, money
Although California is slashing services again this year to fill a huge deficit, many state workers manage to take home massive paychecks.Search for public employee salaries at the Sacramento Bee website
L.A. pensions may consume a third of city's general fund by 2015
City administrative officer reports that benefits for retired police, firefighters, DWP workers and other city employees could grow by $800 million in the next five years.Former Chief of Police Bernard Parks, Others Part of $100,000 Pension Club
State's stem cell agency seeks more time, money
But California's stem cell agency quickly found itself mired in another form of politics: legislators and government watchdogs criticized the program for paying its president more than twice the governor's salary, distributing nearly $1 billion to universities with representatives on its board of directors and overselling the promise of stem cell cures.
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Another sore point has been the high salaries paid to top administrators, who handle a staff of about 50. In 2009, President Alan Trounson, a renowned stem cell scientist from Australia, was paid $490,000, the second highest salary in state government outside the university system, records show.
By comparison, the governor's salary, which Arnold Schwarzenegger declines, is $173,987, and the governor is responsible for oversight of more than 200,000 state employees.
In the research realm, Francis S. Collins, director of the federal government's National Institutes of Health which employs more than 17,000 people and invests $32.5 billion in medical research each year, makes $199,700, said spokesman Don Ralbovsky. Collins is one of the nation's best knowngenetics researchers.
Can high-speed rail be successful in America? Yes!
Megan McArdle argues that the United States is not densely populated enough to have a successful high-speed rail system.
My two cents: I strongly agree with Richard Florida and Jay Yarow.
High-speed rail can be successful in America. If you ask any American today that has ever experienced high-speed rail in another country (Japan, Western Europe, and now China), if they would rather ride a high-speed rail train for two hours or an airplane for one and a half hours, 9 out of 10 Americans would choose the train.
Trains have enormous advantages over airplanes. Trains (in other countries, at least) leave and depart from highly populated areas very close to the city center. Look at London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, etc. The train station where people depart and arrive is no more than a few miles from the city center. On the other hand, airports are long and expensive car (or public transit) rides from the city center.
Tickets on trains are less expensive than airplane tickets in other countries, so they should be in the US as well.
Here are several more benefits of high-speed rail from the California High-speed Rail Authority website that I believe are all true:
I know--carbon emissions! The environment! Don't we eventually have to deal with these problems?
Sure. But high speed rail is less of an environmental gain than regular rail; it takes a lot of energy to move that fast. One can argue that because it is more attractive than regular rail, it is still a bigger environmental gain, because more people will switch from planes to trains.
This is only true, however, if the trains travel very full; moving empty cars is not environmentally sound. The problem is that for trains to be an attractive alternative to planes, they need to travel fairly frequently. China can do this (arguably) because they have a large number of high-population cities that are very close to each other. We do not.Richard Florida makes a very strong case for high-speed rail in certain highly populated areas of the United States.
Philadelphia becomes a veritable suburb of NY, its commute time shrinking from nearly two hours to slightly more than a half hour. Washington-NYC and Boston-NYC become hour-and-a-half trips.San Diego becomes a bedroom suburb of Los Angeles. And commute times shrink considerably across Cascadias' main cities: The time to get from Portland to Seattle shrinks to just over an hour, while travel between Seattle and Vancouver is reduced to less than an hour. It would take just slightly longer than an hour and a half to get from Charlotte to Atlanta. And commutes between Dallas and Houston and Dallas and Austin shrink to an hour and a half or less.
Better high-speed rail connections promise considerable economic efficiency gains. And they also promise to relieve the psychological burdens of commuting by car. Research by behavioral economists like Nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman finds that long car commutes are among the things that most adversely affect our happiness.
But there is an even bigger and more fundamental reason to connect our mega-regions through high-speed rail. As I recently argued in The Atlantic, our current economic crisis promises to powerfully reshape America's geography. There will be winners and losers, and a new economic geography will emerge in time.
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Mega-regions, if they are to function as integrated economic units, require better, more effective, and faster ways move goods, people, and ideas. High-speed rail accomplishes that, and it also provides a framework for future in-fill development along its corridors. Just as development filled-in along the early street-car lines and the post-war highways, high-speed rail will encourage denser, more compact, and concentrated development with growth filling in along its routes over time.Spain's new high-speed rail link between Barcelona and Madrid not only massively reduced commuting times between these two great Spanish cities, according to a recent New York Timesreport, it has also helped revitalize several declining locations along the line.
It's time to start thinking of our transit and infrastructure projects less in political terms and more as a set of strategic investments that are fundamental to the speed and scope of our economic recovery and to the new, more expansive economic geography required for long-run growth and prosperity.Jay Yarow at The Business Insider argues that California should receive all the stimulus package money dedicated to high-speed rail.
Yesterday, a number of states applied for a share of the $8 billion in stimulus spending on high speed rail.
They should all be rejected. Except for California, which should get all of it. And it should get the other $5 billion coming down the pike....
If we built the train system proposed for California, we would get real, measurable, results. If the train is a flop, at least we'll know for sure. If it's a raging success, then we can choose the next part of the country in which to build a better train systemMore from The New York Times
My two cents: I strongly agree with Richard Florida and Jay Yarow.
High-speed rail can be successful in America. If you ask any American today that has ever experienced high-speed rail in another country (Japan, Western Europe, and now China), if they would rather ride a high-speed rail train for two hours or an airplane for one and a half hours, 9 out of 10 Americans would choose the train.
Trains have enormous advantages over airplanes. Trains (in other countries, at least) leave and depart from highly populated areas very close to the city center. Look at London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, etc. The train station where people depart and arrive is no more than a few miles from the city center. On the other hand, airports are long and expensive car (or public transit) rides from the city center.
Tickets on trains are less expensive than airplane tickets in other countries, so they should be in the US as well.
Here are several more benefits of high-speed rail from the California High-speed Rail Authority website that I believe are all true:
- Tens of thousands of good jobs, both to build the trains and the train line, but also jobs to operate and maintain the trains and the train line. Not to mention all of the jobs that will result from development that ensues around high-speed rail train stations.
- Improved movement of people, goods and services.
- Faster travel between major metropolitan areas.
- Improved air quality.
- Improved energy efficiency: high-speed rail uses only 1/3 the energy of airplanes and 1/5 the energy of a family car.
- Reduced dependence on foreign oil.
- Reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
- Transit and pedestrian oriented infill development promoted.
- There are more on the website.
I hope that California is successful with its high-speed rail system. I also completely agree with Jay Yarow at The Business Insider. California should be awarded all the money dedicated to high-speed rail in the stimulus package. As he says, California is ready to build and can be the experiment that either proves that high-speed rail succeeds in this country or fails.
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