Crumbling Infrastructure-Satellite Edition

From All Things Considered yesterday:

Then, Lubchenco used the occasion to point to the importance of NOAA's satellite program.
Ms. LUBCHENCO: Satellites are a must-have when it comes to being prepared in detecting and tracking dangerous tropical weather. Not having satellites and not applying their latest capabilities could spell disaster.
HAMILTON: And she said there's a very real possibility that could happen.
Ms. LUBCHENCO: The future funding for our satellite program is very much in limbo right now.
HAMILTON: Already, Lubchenco said, the agency has been forced to delay the launch of a critical satellite. It would have traveled in a polar orbit, beaming down information for weather and climate forecasts. As a result, when the current satellite doing that job stops working, there will be no replacement.
Ms. LUBCHENCO: We are likely looking at a period of time a few years down the road where we will not be able to do severe storm warnings and long-term weather forecasts that people have come to expect today.
HAMILTON: And Lubchenco says satellites aren't just for hurricanes.
Ms. LUBCHENCO: For example, our ability to do a five-day heads-up about the severe tornadoes that hit a couple of weeks ago was a direct consequence of our having polar orbiting satellites.
HAMILTON: Lubchenco's comments come after years of warnings by groups, including the National Academy of Sciences, that the U.S. needed to replace many aging satellites used to study and monitor the Earth.

The Republican attempts to slash non-defense, non-entitlement spending, combined with constant tax cuts, leads to valuable basic science funding being slashed.  These programs don't have a strong constituency, but they have large real-life effects, and are extremely cheap based on their usefulness.  This nation will suffer for many years because of the 30 years of malinvestment under generally Republican guidance.

Net Recipient States

Via Ritholz, this:

Happily, the Tax Foundation — a conservative Washington-based think tank — has, however unintentionally, provided the answer. In 2007, the foundation published a survey of 2005 federal spending in each state and compared that with each state’s contribution in federal taxes. In other words, the foundation identified the states that sponge off the federal government and those that subsidize it. The welfare-queen states and the responsible, producing states, as it were.
The list, alas, hasn’t been updated — in part, no doubt, because conservatives didn’t like what it revealed: that those states that got more back from our government than they paid in were overwhelmingly Republican. The 10 biggest net recipients of taxpayers’ largess were, in order, New Mexico, Mississippi, Alaska, Louisiana, West Virginia, North Dakota, Alabama, South Dakota, Kentucky and Virginia. The 10 states that paid in the most and got back the least were New Jersey, Nevada, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Illinois, Delaware, California, New York and Colorado.
Now, that list has surely changed since the middle of the last decade — Virginia has probably gotten richer and paid in more; Nevada has surely gotten poorer and paid in less. But today’s ranking are probably much the same, unless farming and manufacturing suddenly pay more than finance and high-tech. Even allowing for cyclical variations and political transformations, it’s patently clear that the states that drain the government also constitute the Republicans’ electoral base, while those that produce the wealth constitute the Democrats’. Far from strengthening our moral character, the red states plunge us into the slough of dependency.

That is funny overall.  I think it is interesting that a state like Connecticut, home to many hedge fund titans, is a pretty high tax state, but governors in the Midwest claim that people are moving south to get lower taxes.  I think the real driver is the weather, but what do I know, I also thought that I might see the sun for more than 4 days in May.  I just love to see somebody point out the obvious: that the people who are the biggest beneficiaries of government dislike it the most.

Does Privatizing Prisons Work?

Matthew Yglesias says no:

Privatizing prisons hasn’t been the boon that was promised:

The conviction that private prisons save money helped drive more than 30 states to turn to them for housing inmates. But Arizona shows that popular wisdom might be wrong: Data there suggest that privately operated prisons can cost more to operate than state-run prisons — even though they often steer clear of the sickest, costliest inmates.
The state’s experience has particular relevance now, as many politicians have promised to ease budget problems by trimming state agencies. Florida and Ohio are planning major shifts toward private prisons, and Arizona is expected to sign deals doubling its private-inmate population.

There are important general lessons here. The genius of the real private economy is that firms that are really poorly run go out of business. It’s not that some magic private sector fairy dust makes the firms all be runs soundly. Lots of bad businesses are out there. But they tend to lose money and close. Meanwhile, well-run firms tend to earn profits and expand. The public sector doesn’t have this feature. Just because a public agency is inept is no guarantee that it will go out of business. Resources are allocating according to political clout rather than any criteria of merit. It’s a problem. But it’s not a problem that “privatizing” public services actually solves. There’s no magic private sector fairy dust.

I'm not surprised that private prisons end up costing more than publicly-run prisons, as there has to be a profit factor figured in there.  But also, I would guess that while the private prisons pay guards and other workers much less, they end up paying executives more.  They also will end up handling more administrative duties that are spread out over all the prisons in the public system.  Therefore, they end up doing redundant work that adds up to higher costs than a similar publicly-run prison.  I think that higher executive pay and profits for the shareholders is considered a feature by Republican governors like John Kasich, not a bug.  They really don't care about how much government spends, they really care about where they spend it.

More On Stupid Competition Amongst States

Richard Longworth (h/t the Dish):

This competition is not new, but it seems to have heated up since 2009, when Kansas passed a law that lets companies relocating to the state keep 95 percent of their employee withholding tax for up to 10 years. This has lured several companies to move from Kansas City, Missouri, to Kansas City, Kansas (known locally as KCK) and its suburbs, bringing several hundred jobs with them. Stung by the moves, the Missouri KC has offered multi-million-dollar packages to keep firms, like the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and AMC Entertainment, from decamping to the Kansas side.
Top Corporate Leaders Urge Governors to Stop Poaching Neighbors’ Businesses, Kansas City Star, April 11, 2011
Businesses Stand to Gain Most in Rivalry of States, New York Times, April 7, 2011
Kansas and Missouri aren't the only Midwestern states raiding each other's watermelon patches. The governors of Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana, which would seem to share a common economy, have been squabbling over which state has the lowest taxes, to the point that Indiana and Wisconsin have posted billboards on their state lines urging Illinois companies to flee north or east, as the case may be (presumably passing en route all those Democratic legislators from Indiana and Wisconsin who hid out in Illinois to avoid having to vote for objectionable legislation back home.)
In Kansas and Missouri, all this has reached the point that even businesses in the two KCs, which presumably could benefit from these bribes, have told their two states to grow up. Seventeen leading businessmen from both sides of the border sent an open letter to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback and Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, urging them to voluntarily "agree to a bilateral halt" in this "economic border war."
Nixon responded positively. Brownback basically told the businessmen to go jump in the Missouri River. This probably has something to do with the fact that, so far, Kansas has been winning most of these battles. 

Republicans have staked their political future on being able to prove that lower taxes mean more jobs, so they have to go around slashing taxes and spending, and then bribing businesses to move to their state, preferably from a higher tax state.  Unfortunately, this means cuts to primary, secondary and higher education, cuts to local governments and public safety, cuts to libraries and cuts to infrastructure spending.  Those are all long-term investments to improve the work force and the livability of the state which are being cut.  The short-term payoff of new jobs (taken from a neighboring state) might get a politician reelected or allow him to move to higher office (failing up, as it were), but come time those incentives expire, the business will start shopping for more incentives, possibly in a state which is willing to undermine long-term investment for short-term job growth (see Sears).  This is a failing strategy for all but the companies, and even they are undermining the long-term workforce quality where they move to.  When businesses are requesting that it stop, you know it has gone too far. 

Who Owns U.S. Debt?

Robert Reich says rich Americans (via Mark Thoma):

Forty years ago, wealthy Americans financed the U.S. government mainly through their tax payments. Today wealthy Americans finance the government mainly by lending it money. While foreigners own most of our national debt, over 40 percent is owned by Americans – mostly the very wealthy.

This great switch by the super rich – from paying the government taxes to lending the government money — has gone almost unnoticed. But it’s critical for understanding the budget predicament we’re now in. And for getting out of it.  

Over that four decades, tax rates on the very rich have plummeted. Between the end of World War II and 1980, the top tax bracket remained over 70 percent — and even after deductions and credits was well over 50 percent. Now it’s 36 percent. As recently as the late 1980s, the capital gains rate was 35 percent. Now it’s 15 percent.

Not only are rates lower now, but loopholes are bigger. 18,000 households earning more than a half-million dollars last year paid no income taxes at all. In recent years, according to the IRS, the richest 400 Americans have paid only 18 percent of their total incomes in federal income taxes. Billionaire hedge-fund and private-equity managers are allowed to treat much of their incomes as capital gains (again, at 15 percent).

He doesn't have any solid numbers here as to what the wealthiest own, because I'm sure a lot of that debt is held by mutual funds and pension funds.  I would guess most wealthy Americans have fairly small holdings in Treasuries as a percentage of their portfolios.  Regardless, he gets the chance to repeat a lot of numbers which can use repeating. In the meantime, Paul Krugman points out that Paul Ryan is again calling for lower taxes on the wealthy to create growth.  I still want Paul Ryan to explain where all the growth is from the Bush tax cuts.  The fact of the matter is that the wars in Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and the Great Recession are most responsible for the deficits we are currently running.  Throw in Medicare Part D, and you have the Republicans as primarily responsible for the mess we are in.  CBPP points that out again.

How the Very Rich Are Different

Chuck Marr compares how Republicans treat the very wealthy compared to average Americans (via Mark Thoma):

Congressional Republican leaders are trying to put a new twist on how the very rich are different.  By seeking to reduce long-term deficits entirely through huge budget cuts that fall disproportionately on low-income programs — rather than a balanced package of budget cuts and tax increases — they are effectively arguing that wealthy Americans shouldn’t have to sit with other Americans at the table where sacrifices will be made.
As the chart shows, the top 400 have enjoyed the best of both worlds over the past couple of decades:  dramatically higher incomes and much lower taxes.  Between 1992 and 2008 (the period the IRS data cover), the average share of their incomes that these households paid in federal taxes dropped from 26 percent to 18 percent, while their annual incomes shot up by over 700 percent, after inflation.  And still, Republican leaders insist that wealthy Americans shouldn’t pay a penny more in taxes.

He goes on to highlight planned Republican cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Pell Grants, and how those will affect Americans who are definitely not very wealthy.  It amazes me that Republicans claim all Americans should share in the sacrifice, but don't ask the best-off Americans to give anything more up.  It is truly bizarre.  Never in the past 60 years have the wealthiest Americans paid less in tax, yet Republicans won't acknowledge that this fact is one of the main reasons we are in such dire financial straits.  And yet when the time comes for sacrifice, people who have benefitted so much as tax rates came down, aren't asked to pay rates closer to what they used to.  Unbelievable.

John Boehner is Full of Crap or Stupid

Steve Benen thinks he means what he says (via Mark Thoma):

But that’s not what this is about. The House Speaker is presenting an economic vision based on fantasy, confusion, and lies. The man simply has no idea what he’s talking about.
Marcus, Bloomberg, and Chait walk through a striking list of bizarre errors of fact from Boehner. He said the economy will be worse off if the debt ceiling is raised without massive cuts. He thinks the Recovery Act “hurt” the economy. He believes the public sector is “crowding out” private investment. Boehner’s certain the economy “never” grows after a tax increase. He’s convinced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “triggered the whole meltdown” of the U.S. financial system.
These claims aren’t just wrong; they’re ridiculous. It has nothing to do with Democrats vs. Republicans, or left vs. right. This is Boehner vs. reality.
At an almost instinctual level, the political establishment tends to strongly resist this. I more or less understandable why — considering Boehner’s rhetoric at face value, and assuming he means what he says, is almost terrifying to think Boehner is so painfully confused.
But here we are. We’re left with the discomforting fact that it appears the Speaker of the House, Congress’ most powerful official, when dealing with the nation’s most important issue, is functionally illiterate, bringing the sophistication of a slow child to the debate.

I am stunned to talk to everyday people who believe what Republicans say.  Either the Republicans are completely ignorant and blind to reality, or they are the biggest, most conscience-free shills for rich assholes who like to screw over people who aren't as lucky and crooked as them (or both).  I haven't decided which is the case, but I'm leaning more and more toward ignorant.  Ten years of tax cuts haven't helped the economy.  All the banks (especially the investment banks) are responsible for the housing boom and bust.  The stimulus stopped the economic freefall.  All of that is obvious to anyone with eyes in their head.  Arguing against this is faith-based argument.

The Elephant in the Room

It's nearly impossible to cut the deficit entirely on spending cuts.  Especially when the Bush tax cuts would cause most of the future deficit if they are extended like John Boehner and Republicans want:



 Chart via Andrew Sullivan

Boehner and the Republicans need to get their heads out of their asses and face up to the fact that the Bush tax cuts are stupid.

Andrew quoted Ezra Klein's explanation:

Extending the Bush tax cuts over the next 10 years, which Boehner favors, will increase the deficit by twice as much as the $2 trillion in spending cuts he's calling for will reduce the deficit.

These guys have no business being in government.  A vote for them is a vote to destroy our society.

Chicken Manure Tax Credit

Are folks in the Grand Lake St. Mary's watershed using this:

You don’t believe there’s spending in the tax code???  Here’s a real life example:  the chicken-s**t tax credit.  Really, section 45 of the Internal Revenue Code.  You can look it up.  The late Senator Roth of Delaware (home of lots of chickens and “poultry manure,” as it’s euphemistically called) put this little goody into our tax laws.  Here’s the backstory:  the EPA said that enormous chicken farms could no longer put their poultry waste in pools or bury it because it poisoned the ground water.  One of the best options to meet the new requirement was to dry the vile effluent and burn it to make electricity, but that was still costly.  Roth didn’t want chicken farmer profits to plummet or chicken and egg prices to rise just because farmers couldn’t use the earth as a giant toilet, so he pushed through the chicken s**t tax credit to create a profitable market for that (as well as all sorts of other crap).
There are lots of chicken s**t tax subsidies.  The mortgage interest deduction is basically a housing voucher for rich people.  Those who really need help get bupkes.  The tax-free health insurance you get at work is heavily subsidized by the tax code, but those with low incomes rarely get health coverage and, if they do, the subsidy is worth little or nothing.  The ethanol tax credit is a farm price support program  that is literally starving people.

I am glad Republicans are around to stand up for multinational oil companies when evil Democrats try to take away their tax credits ($21 billion dollars over 10 years).

Torture Doesn't Work in Gathering Intelligence

Who should one believe, Dick Cheney or people who actually interrogate people?  Barry Ritholtz:

Virtually all of the top interrogation experts – both conservatives and liberals (except for those trying to escape war crimes prosecution) – say that torture doesn’t work:
• Army Field Manual 34-52 Chapter 1 says:

“Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.”

• The C.I.A.’s 1963 interrogation manual stated:

Intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress. A time-consuming delay results, while investigation is conducted and the admissions are proven untrue. During this respite the interrogatee can pull himself together. He may even use the time to think up new, more complex ‘admissions’ that take still longer to disprove.

I think it is a sign of how far the Republican party has sunk that we are even discussing this subject.

Bush-era War Criminals Continue Claiming Torture Located Bin Laden

Barry Ritholtz takes the offensive against the torture works meme.  He highlights Dan Froomkin making the case that torture slowed down the investigation:

Indeed, as Dan Froomkin notes in a little-noticed essay, torture actually delayed by years more effective intelligence-gathering methods which would have resulted in finding Bin Laden:

Defenders of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies have claimed vindication from reports that bin Laden was tracked down in small part due to information received from brutalized detainees some six to eight years ago.
But that sequence of events — even if true — doesn’t demonstrate the effectiveness of torture, these experts say. Rather, it indicates bin Laden could have been caught much earlier had those detainees been interrogated properly.
“I think that without a doubt, torture and enhanced interrogation techniques slowed down the hunt for bin Laden,” said an Air Force interrogator who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander and located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006.
It now appears likely that several detainees had information about a key al Qaeda courier — information that might have led authorities directly to bin Laden years ago. But subjected to physical and psychological brutality, “they gave us the bare minimum amount of information they could get away with to get the pain to stop, or to mislead us,” Alexander told The Huffington Post.
“We know that they didn’t give us everything, because they didn’t provide the real name, or the location, or somebody else who would know that information,” he said.
In a 2006 study by the National Defense Intelligence College, trained interrogators found that traditional, rapport-based interviewing approaches are extremely effective with even the most hardened detainees, whereas coercion consistently builds resistance and resentment.

I would think that an examination of human nature would tell you that would be the case.  When your enemies resort to torture, they are proving your belief in their inherent evil.  It becomes heroic in your mind to resist them as much as possible.  Because you are suffering physical pain, you have to tell them things, so you make stuff up.  They can't know what is true and what isn't, so they have to try to confirm these stories, leaving you with time to embellish more, and come up with reasons for why they couldn't confirm what you'd told them. 

Whereas, treating the detainees with respect, trying to build trust, undermines the detainee's belief in his enemy's inherent evil.  It is likely that long exposure to the "enemy" will humanize him and convince the detainee that he and the interrogator aren't as far apart as previously believed.

The fallacy of the "ticking time-bomb" scenario which torture proponents use to soften opposition to torture is that if a detainee has information of an "imminent" attack, you need to know the anticipated timing of the attack, which you likely don't, and the detainee must be forced to give up the information quickly.  He actually knows how long he must resist torture to allow the attack to go off, and he knows the factual information about the attack, which you don't.  He can send your manpower off on wild-goose chases in a situation in which time is of the essence.  In other words, the situation in which torture advocates try to prove the necessity of torture is actually the least-likely time in which torture would ever work.  The person being tortured holds all the cards, and in his mind is engaged in a noble struggle against evil opponents.  The torturer is making it less likely that he will get his information.  So far, I have not seen any evidence that utilizing tactics used by tyrants throughout history to get forced confessions from political opponents has ever produced usable intelligence anywhere outside of the obviously fantasy world of 24, where one man is able to stop years of planning in a single day.  Dick Cheney and his henchmen should be tried for their crimes.

Update:  Andrew Sullivan discusses Cheney's campaign:

So in order to defend torture, Cheney has to say that it's a success when the tortured tell lies. Heads he wins, tails we lose. Moreover, in the last two years or so, torture has been forbidden - although its legacy remains with war criminals protected by the US government, in violation of Geneva - and it was after those two years of a return to decency that bin Laden was found and killed. As for the Bush administration's over-arching goal - democratization of the Middle East - it was only under Obama that we got the Green Revolution in Iran, the successful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, and the power-struggles now happening in Syria and Libya. When these Bush administration fanatics are presented with clear evidence that Obama has been far more successful against terror and its causes than they ever were, they return to their precious, their torture program, and claim ludicrously that, without it, bin Laden would not have been captured. Rumsfeld joined in the chorus of mass distraction this weekend on the same basis. All this really tells you is that these people realize that if their torture regime is definitively found to have been counter-productive in their lifetimes, if bin Laden was caught two years after the torture program was ended and with no evidence it helped, then their barbaric policy will be exposed once again as unnecessary, un-American, unproductive, and a violation of core human values.
Cheney calls investigations into war crimes that went beyond the authorized torture techniques "an outrage." Well, he would, wouldn't he? He knows where the war crimes trail ends up - in his office. And he knows where he should be if we were governed by the rule of law: in jail. The real outrage is that he is still walking free - and doing all he can to entrench torture in the American way of war.

I've got to agree.  Cheney is the worst of the worst, and a giant coward.

Irish Economy Struggling With Austerity

NYT:

Benefiting from years of low interest rates that followed the creation of the euro zone in 1999, Ireland enjoyed one of the biggest growth spurts of any country in Europe, and spent lavishly as its wealth increased. The economy expanded an average of 7 percent in the decade leading up to 2007 before plunging into a deep recession. Per person, inflation-adjusted economic activity has fallen approximately 18 percent from the peak, when the average gross domestic product per person was a shade over 43,000 euros ($62,000). Now it is less than 35,000 euros ($50, 767).
As the country tries to recover from the bust, many of its people are paying a tremendous cost for the folly of the country’s banks and to bring its government finances back in order.
As part of Ireland’s effort to pay down its immense debts and bail out the banks, the Condras’ salaries from their state jobs as hospital workers have been cut 20 percent in two years. Higher taxes and further spending cuts are on the horizon.

It looks like years and years of pain for the Irish as they bail out their corrupt banks.  They should have let them fail.  Bondholders should have taken haircuts and stockholders should have been wiped out.  Now the taxpayers are going to be slowly bled out.

Bush Did Not Find Bin Laden

ABL at Balloon Juice opens up a great post with a pretty good description of Republicans (maybe not safe for work):

Teabillies: Yes, they are assholes. No they won’t act like adults.

Despite Obama’s calls for unity in the aftermath of “We killed that motherfucker,” Republicans are still acting like Republicans—that is to say—lying assholes.  First, they are falling all over themselves to assign credit to George Bush for nabbing Bin Laden¹, despite two undeniable facts:
Fact One: George Bush gave up on the hunt for OBL, both in 2002 (when, at a press conference, Bush stated that he was no longer worried about finding Bin Laden) and then again in 2006 (when Bush closed the CIA unit tasked with finding Bin Laden).  Whether or not you fall into the weird contingent of people who are shedding morality tears for OBL, one thing is clear—this was all Obama.
Fact Two: Republicans are assholes (I think I may have mentioned that before):

She then goes on to the story of a teacher who, in front of the whole class, told a Muslim student, "I bet you're grieving."  Actually, there isn't anywhere that says the teacher is a Republican, but I would bet money on it.

Guess where that happened, yes, Texas.

Very True

Scocca: Pakistan's Ambassador Might Want To Reconsider Comparing Osama Bin Laden to Whitey Bulger. (h/t Anne Laurie) That is very true.  When the other guy had people in law enforcement who conspired with him, probably not the example you want to use if you are the Pakistani government.  When I heard the FBI had removed Bin Laden from the 10 Most Wanted List, I did think that maybe someday they'll find Whitey Bulger.

The Long View

From Economic Principals.  First, expectations of the future:

Some of what is going to happen over the next ten years is obvious. Global warming is going to be affirmed by experience. Human embryonic stem cell research will go forward, despite challenges in the courts.
Some is only slightly less obvious.  Social Security will be restored to actuarial balance through a mix of mild tax increases and benefit cuts.  Medicare will be preserved and, perhaps, extended through a second health-care statute.  The 15-member Independent Payment Advisory Board, established by the Affordable Care Act, will gradually morph into a Health Care Fed, a geographically decentralized organization with provider input engineered into the system at every level.
The harder problems that will become apparent in the next ten years have to do with the inequality that is growing all around the world.

Then, what he expects is the answer for economic inequality:

I belong to a luncheon club whose smartest member is a longtime investment manager whom I have observed for many years, He walked out of the room after a global tour d’horizon talk the other day and said on the sidewalk in front of the building, “The only things that can possibly address inequality of a magnitude that will soon be judged to be unacceptable in this country are much higher levels of taxation on the well-to-do and a negative income tax for the poor.”  I hadn’t heard it put so simply or succinctly before, but in the circumstances I was convinced instantly that he was right.
A “negative income tax” is a euphemism designed forty years ago to avoid what otherwise might have been called a “guaranteed annual wage,” when even Milton Friedman endorsed the idea.  Call it a “disability benefit” if you prefer.  We’ve learned a fair amount since then about how to entice workers to take low-paying jobs through earned income tax credits.
Some income floor beneath which citizens are not permitted to fall is the next frontier of social policy. Universal health care was the most recent skirmish in an ongoing campaign. The US will do fine in its economic competition with the newly industrializing world as long as its social fabric doesn’t become irreparably frayed. This is the world for which we are heading, and the sensible thing to do is to prepare for it.

It amazes me that Republicans are pushing for greater inequality, and Democrats can't adequately arouse voter concern about Republican policies.  It further amazes me that people I know who are not well-to-do are actively cheering for the rich and against the government and any sane progressive tax policy.  I had a guy on Facebook tell me that increasing dividend taxes is just theft by the government.  I'm certain that I make much more in dividends (and overall income) than he does, yet he is fighting to lower my taxes, while I want them to go up for the good of the country as a whole.  At this point, I am resigned to the fact that future policy may be terrible for the country, but I may benefit greatly.  I hope that isn't the case, but about 40-45% of the middle class seems to be working for their own destruction, just to spite brown people who are even poorer.  Dumbasses.

How To Cut Defense Spending

All Things Considered interviewed Ret. Col. Douglas Macgregor:

This year the U.S. is expected to spend $700 billion on defense. That's twice what was spent in 2001, and as much as is spent on the rest of the world's militaries combined.
Defense is the U.S. government's biggest discretionary expenditure, but given the level of the national debt — and the drive to reduce government spending — calls are louder than ever to find cost savings.
Ret. Army Col. Douglas Macgregor says there are ways to reap major savings when it comes to defense. He recently wrote about the subject in an article titled "Lean, Mean Fighting Machine" for Foreign Policy magazine. He tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered, that the U.S. simply cannot afford "wars of choice."
"Emphasis on choice," Macgregor says. "If you look at all of the interventions that we have launched since 1945 — beginning with Vietnam in 1965 and moving forward — none of them have changed the international system at all, and none of them have directly benefited us strategically."
World War II was the last military event that really had a strategic global impact, he says. "Americans need to understand that these wars of choice, these interventions of choice, have been both unnecessary, counterproductive, strategically self-defeating and infinitely too expensive for what we can actually afford."

Unfortunately, with one of our political parties being afraid of being called pussies by the idiots and fools in the other party, who only want to spend more on defense, I don't think this will go very far.  Plus, the cuts in defense would increase unemployment immensely.  I'm pretty sure we won't address this issue until it is too late.  In other words, I don't figure on selling my defense stocks yet.

Conservatives, Katrina and Alabama

I was listening to All Things Considered and heard parts of a story from Alabama.  Here is the summary:

The death toll from this week's tornadoes has topped 340 — and 28 of them came from one small Alabama town. Very little of Rainsville, population 5,000, remains. And yet, survivors continue the difficult task of picking up the pieces. One family, the Hamiltons, struggles to figure out what to do next.

It was heart-wrenching hearing about how they lost everything.  The lady said they needed a trailer or RV sent down to live in while they rebuilt, because they couldn't stay with friends forever.  That reminded me of this email, which my boss received from one of our wingnuttier clients a few years ago.  It claims North Dakota had a major blizzard and the people there didn't need government money or assistance like the folks from New Orleans.  According to Snopes.com, this email has circulated around a number of times, with Muskegon, Michigan, Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Colorado as the supposed site of the disaster.  Of course they are places with primarily white populations, unlike New Orleans.  Also, in all the cases except for Cedar Rapids, the people's homes weren't destroyed. Also, Snopes (that damn liberal site, the same client sent us an email saying Snopes was liberal, and couldn't be trusted because they used FACTS) pointed out that the National Guard was called out to deal with the blizzard in North Dakota.  I am curious if the same racists who circulated this email will reconsider, now that a large number of white folks are now homeless and in need of help.  I doubt it.

Of course, a tornado is much different than a major flood/hurricane, as private homeowner's insurance covers tornados, but government-subsidized insurance covers floods. Regardless, white bigot conservatives will most likely continue to insinuate that white people don't need government help, but useless, lazy blacks are the only people who benefit from government spending. I do not agree with any of those descriptions above, I am just trying to summarize what I hear when conservatives talk about government.

Cutting Government Spending, Stupidly

From Stuart Staniford, via Gregor, cuts to the Energy Information Administration:

Here is the press release announcing the amount of savings:

Immediate Reductions in EIA's Energy Data and Analysis Programs Necessitated by FY 2011 Funding Cut

WASHINGTON, DC - The final fiscal year (FY) 2011 budget provides $95.4 million for the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), a reduction of $15.2 million, or 14 percent, from the FY 2010 level.
"The lower FY 2011 funding level will require significant cuts in EIA's data, analysis, and forecasting activities," said EIA Administrator Richard Newell. "EIA had already taken a number of decisive steps in recent years to streamline operations and enhance overall efficiency, and we will continue to do so in order to minimize the impact of these cuts at a time when both policymaker and public interest in energy issues is high," he said.
EIA must act quickly to realize the necessary spending reductions during the present fiscal year, which is already more than half over. The changes in products and services identified below reflect initial steps to reduce the cost of EIA's program. Additional actions are being evaluated and may result in further adjustments to EIA's data and analysis activities in the near future.

Cutting statistical data for energy production in the U.S. and worldwide to save $15.2 million dollars?  That is absolutely stupid.  That works out to a nickel per person in the United States.  Maybe that wouldn't be an issue if we don't face very serious energy problems, but how about scraping around between the cushions of our couches and seeing if we can find a quarter or two.  But I'm sure that idiot blowhards like Rush Limbaugh don't think the government should know what the hell is going on in the world.  Rush and his ilk are enemies of humanity.

Was President Bush Curious?

Daniel Larison:

But I think people caricatured the president, and the only thing that I couldn’t understand is why this man with such a curious mind, who in briefings always asked the question you wish you thought of, why that quality didn’t come across. And I fully admit that it didn’t come across. ~Condoleeza Rice

I suppose it’s possible that George W. Bush could have had “such a curious mind” and still made all the terrible decisions that he did, but one of the reasons that he received a reputation for being incurious is that he overlooked such obvious, glaring flaws in his administration’s policies that someone with “such a curious mind” should have noticed. He wasn’t very good at demonstrating that he knew or cared to know very much about things. If Bush were as curious as Rice claims, he did an amazing job of hiding it.

I would have to side with Daneil.  Bush didn't strike me as a person who wanted to hear what the other side of the issue was, and consider whether his opinion might not be correct.  He seemed to me to consider rather who the person holding the other opinion was, and if it was somebody he already didn't care for, he'd dismiss it out of hand.  His circle of advisors gave him his information, and nobody else could break through that.  We only got decent policy discussions when his advisors didn't agree, and he had to choose between them.  Sometimes he chose well, (Rice versus Cheney and Rumsfeld in his second term) and sometimes poorly (Cheney and Rumsfeld versus Powell on troop levels to invade Iraq).  I guess at times I can dismiss an argument out of hand, but I try to read opposing views on occasion.  For instance, I want to read Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man, to take a look at her attack on the success of the New Deal, but I don't really want her to benefit, so I'll probably get it at the library.  I flipped through it at the library the other day, but I just couldn't put that money in her pocket.  I mad that mistake with Larry Schweikart's A Patriot's History of the United States, and I won't make that mistake again.

A Populism History Lesson

Joseph Thorndike, via Mark Thoma:

Tax avoidance is legal and tax evasion is not. Simple distinction, but not always relevant, at least not in politics. Consider the recent burst of outrage over corporate tax avoidance generally and General Electric's tax bill in particular. In some years, GE's tax schemes might have escaped public notice. But in other years -- especially hard ones -- they get plenty of attention. And it was ever thus.

Consider the lessons of 1933. Wall Street investigator Ferdinand Pecora hauled J.P. Morgan, Jr. before the Senate banking committee. Pecora had been charged with uncovering malfeasance on Wall Street, but he focused much of his attention on tax issues. In particular, he forced Morgan to acknowledge from the witness chair that he had paid no income taxes in 1931 and 1932.
Morgan provided a reasonable explanation: stock trading losses in the great market crash had wiped out his other sources of taxable income (such losses were fully deductible in those days). But the revelation still shocked the nation, and Morgan's explanation carried little weight with Pecora -- and pretty much none with the general public.

"The country, in 1933, was in no mood for nice distinctions between tax 'evasion' and tax 'avoidance,' " Pecora later recalled. "Approved by the existing tax authorities or not, the public could not see the justice or equity of financial giants paying nothing, while Tom, Dick, and Harry scraped the bottom of their modest purses to meet their tax obligations to the Government.” (Ferdinand Pecora, Wall Street under Oath; the Story of Our Modern Money Changers,1939).

The Pecora investigation sparked a powerful drive to clamp down on tax avoidance, producing (among other things), new limits on the deductibility of capital losses. More generally, it kicked off a decade of high-profile campaigns to boost effective tax rates on the rich, including a remarkably ambitious effort to revamp corporate income taxation from the ground up.

I think we could use some serious adjustments to the tax code, which would boost effective tax rates on the rich and revamp corporate income taxation from the ground up.  Too bad one party is too cowardly to pursue this, while the other is too stupid and bought and paid for.