Debate thoughts

Romney promises that his tax reform wont raise taxes on middle class, increase the deficit, or lower taxes on the wealthy.  A promising change in policy.

I wish Obama had addressed the idea that small businesses need less taxes to hire more workers.  I'm pretty confident that businesses hire if demand is high, but if there's no demand, they wont hire more workers no matter how profitable.  Business profits are very high right now.

I wish they wouldn't talk past each other.  I actually like that Romney has been addressing points (somewhat).  Obama is really just making and expanding his economic stump speech. 

Bringing down rates while decreasing deductions is about incentive effects, not about budget effects; that's the whole point of revenue neutral reform.  So Romney's early point about businesses not having enough money to hire workers doesn't get fixed by his proposals.  I mean, I guess he can move that cost to someone else while being revenue neutral, but who? 

Romney: cuts through attrition based on the "is it worth borrowing from China for?" principle.   Borrowing money from China doesn't seem like a huge risk to me, I mean... are they going to come collect?  I'm pretty sure they only have one aircraft carrier.  That's not going to go well.

I think it's kind of unfair to hold Obama's pre-recession deficit promises against him.  Recessions cost money to fight, and they dramatically reduce tax revenue on account of no one has money to pay taxes.  Also, there are plenty of programs like unemployment that automatically grow.

Romney definitely has the best of the early energy policy exchange, albeit through conceding his early policy position.  I don't know how John Taylor would feel about discretionary rescues for failing state poverty programs.

I like that the debate is fairly respectful thus far.  That makes me not hate myself.

I hate how Romney presents interesting useful general principles without every being willing to instantiate them.  Why is Obama spending more time detailing Romney's proposals? Because Romney's proposals either violate his expressed general principles, or are super unpopular, or both.

Romney's "private plan better than medicare" argument is silly.  You can switch from medicare any time you want, so long as you can afford it.  Ditto for private plans.  They compete against one another.  Also, medicare is cheaper than private health insurance.

Appeals to authority are *really* annoying in this format, because they are completely contentless and hard to verify.

Always, Romney is avoiding details in favor of interesting but hilariously general problems.  Total lie about Dodd-Frank.  The "too big to fail" thing is all about setting up plans to put those banks through specialized bankruptcy procedures, not backstopping them.

Dealing with the cost of healthcare: all of the cheapest healthcares are socialized. Dear Mitt Romney, why are we ignoring that fact?

Every private insurance company is an unelected board that decides what they'll cover in insurance.

Why didn't Romneycare cause companies to get rid of insurance coverage?  It is the same as Obamacare.

Government is awesome at cost control. It just sets the prices and that's what they are.  It may be bad at providing equal quality on a given price point in the absence of market failures, but that's not what they're talking about.  And, for the record, healthcare is basically the definition of market failure.

Also, on every single point about healthcare, why do we never reference every single European nation--a group that has unanimously solved the universal healthcare problem in a variety of interesting ways?

Romney's preferred health care policy is that every state implement Romney care.  So Romney's preferred policy is Obamacare, but run by states?

Liberals think that supply side reforms are necessary for education and healthcare, I think.  Have to consider that more.  Not sure how I feel.

Romney seems to start every thing with agreeing with Obama, or discarding the accurate description of his prior policy positions provided by Obama.  I mean, fair enough.  

"trickle down government" is one of Mitt's "clever" phrases.  Emphasis on "", Mitt's, and phrases.

I'd like to just have Obama say "I will return to Clinton era policies: policies that coincided with the most prosperous time in our nation in recent years.  In what way is that radical or dangerous?"

And just one more thing (still contraceptives)

The key question about whether Catholics are harmed by the contraceptive mandate is whether they are being asked to do something immoral.  I don't think they are.  The key questions about whether religious freedom is harmed by the contraceptive mandate are:
1. Is the mandate objectionable to some on the grounds of faith?
2. Is there a legitimate federal interest in overriding these objections (as in prohibitions on human sacrifice or (perhaps less legitimately) polygamy)?

It's clear that the answer to 1 is yes, but it's not clear that the answer to 2 is no.  The federal government heavily subsidizes employer provided healthcare, so one might reasonably think that if you take the subsidies you have to take the strings that come with them.  Furthermore, it seems possible that there's a legitimate federal interest in reducing healthcare costs, and perhaps even a right to reproductive freedom to be protected.  More below the fold.

Taxes - how they should be (Part 2 Simple)

Complexity is the friend of the wealthy.  This causes problems all over our country, but I'm going to focus only on tax law right now.

Complexity problem 1: Wealthy people can afford lawyers and accountants, who exist entirely so that money can be made off of the complexity of our laws.  Unsurprisingly, this means that the well off are more likely to receive tax deductions &c.  They report and record their income and expenditures more carefully and they have access to experts who can maneuver the many loopholes and edge cases in our current system.

This is compounded by problem number 2: As some of you may have noticed from this income and expenditure spreadsheet, education trends with income.  That means that if you're not making a whole lot of money, it's likely that you don't have a whole lot of education or training in order to deal with the complexities of tax law, which means you probably wont be able to do as good a job as a highly trained professional expert tax payer like an accountant.  Surprise!

I'm not the first person to have noticed this, as you can see from Obama's recent budget speech, but I hope this expresses the issues succinctly.  Basically, I think tax payments should be a simple function of your income.  We should be adjusting the level of taxation to what we expected to make on average at each income level once deductions were applied, and we should leave social policy implementation out of our revenue stream.  This would have a whole pile of interesting side benefits like:

1. Taxes would be hilariously easy to calculate for people with regular salaries, which means the government could just send you a bill rather than forcing you to wade through a pile of inconvenient forms.  I'd love that.

2. Human beings might understand the tax code.

3. Politicians wouldn't be able to sneak in weird policy ideas under the guise of tax breaks.

4. Our revenue stream would be highly predictable on account of no variance being introduced by lawyers

5. We would put huge numbers of accountants out of jobs (Hurray!)

State of the Union (part 1)

So.  My first comment on the State of the Union:

BORING!

Seriously, this is arguably the least interesting or engaging Obama speech I have ever seen.  Whoever he fired on his writing team needs to come back, or something.

Some other things that pop out at me:

Winning the Future! This may be the single worst piece of political rhetoric ever produced.  I will do Science later to find out for sure.

There was little to no agenda.  I think this has something to do with the "laundry list" that (apparently) every previous state of the union gave and this one wasn't going to.  I'm not sure when serious discussion of policy became a boring chore better replaced with bland feel good rhetoric, but whatever, okay.

The few concrete items addressed by Obama were hilariously awful ideas (HAIs from now on)

HAI 1:  Veto everything with an earmark

I used to think the awfulness of this idea was self evident, but it appears that I was incorrect about the base competence of America once more.  Here is why earmark's are good:  They are the only effective mechanism for compromise in Washington.  Essentially, elected officials are beholden to the people who elect them.  Those people have broad political views (Conservative, Liberal, Libertarian, Marxist, whatever), but they also have direct interests (local jobs, food on their tables, access to utilities, &c).  Earmarks allow elected officials to sacrifice the broad political views they generally espouse in favor of some direct benefit to their constituency.  That way, a centrist republican can get re-elected in a highly conservative district by doing well by his constituents and voting slightly left of them (obviously this works for any political configuration).  I can think of no better incitement to compromise.  Vetoing every bill with earmarks is akin to vetoing every bill with compromises.  Also, as my friend Andrew pointed out, promising to veto bills with earmarks is roughly akin to giving everyone a veto.  Get an earmark in and you kill the bill...

HAI 2: Magical extension of social security:

I have trouble imagining that anyone truly believes that the sentiment expressed here has any relationship with the realms of the possible, foreseeable, or even vaguely real.

To put us on solid ground, we should also find a bipartisan solution to strengthen Social Security for future generations. And we must do it without putting at risk current retirees, the most vulnerable, or people with disabilities; without slashing benefits for future generations; and without subjecting Americans’ guaranteed retirement income to the whims of the stock market.

Let's list the words and word combinations which are innately impossible.

1. bipartisan
2. Social Security + future
3. "without slashing benefits for future generations" + "without putting at risk current retirees"
4. "without putting at risk" + "the most vulnerable" (BY DEFINITION... come on people)
5. That bit implying that anything to do with money could be protected from the movement of the economy

I have to say, there are more stupid things in that paragraph than there are sentences.  I bet I could come up with more stupid things in it than there are independent clauses.  That is sad.

I'll do a more cogent summary tomorrow, and make some less snarky comments (maybe not that much less snarky), but for now let's call it a generally boring speech broken up with moments of intense awfulness.