Delightfully Wonky

I thought I was going to have to do it myself, but this slide-deck from the White House puts together the graphical evidence about economic performance under Obama quite nicely.  Highly recommended for people who want to get a sense of context for the economy.

http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/Documents/20120502_EconomicGrowth.pdf

Signs of Sanity (even on RedState)

For those of you who don't know, RedState is the foaming at the mouth conservative blog that manages to occasionally include some form of evidence or (more rarely) reason in their discussions.  I like to highlight these moments as a matter of principle.  Here's one in which they admit that the debt ceiling absolutely has to be raised and that it was stupid to use it to do the deficit reduction thing.   Now, the post has some weird ideas about government spending.  For instance, this line:

The underlying politics is as follows: the American people are sick and tired of deficit spending. The pundits are completely wrong when they downplay this issue, because deficits are FAR worse now than they ever have been in peacetime (10+% of GDP). And they got far worse at almost the exact moment Obama was elected president.

I don't know why people keep forgetting that we are AT WAR, and that this is the first war in American History that wasn't paid for with higher taxes.  Maybe I got the direction of that wrong; people keep forgetting that we are at war because we have neglected to pay for the two we are in.   And as for the "got far worse at almost the exact moment Obama was elected president" thing, that is completely true, which sort of highlights the fact that he couldn't possibly have been at fault for it.  I mean, if we want to talk about deficit spending... the only president who didn't do it in recent memory has been Clinton.  I'm really not sure why that would give us the idea that Democrats are the ones who don't care about fiscal responsibility, but that sure seems to be the popular opinion.

The other strange thing about the article is that it starts with the premise that the debt ceiling was a bad place to raise the issue, and ends with the conclusion that Republicans should use the debt ceiling to raise the issue, but consistency is maybe too much to ask for.  Still, my complaints about this post have to do with its mission, not its sanity, and I greatly prefer that so kudos to Francis Cianfrocca.

I am sad now

Dear Politicians,

It has come to my attention that you are more or less incapable of doing anything in America at the moment.  Please quit mucking about and do something useful.  A couple basic guidelines:

1. Evidence - please use it, and please present it in context.  Large numbers are scary, but large numbers when compared to other historical or projected large numbers are much less so.
2. Consistency - I know it is bad politics to hold logically consistent beliefs, but I think that maybe if you don't someone should call you on it, and in a public easy to understand way, not in the clever but not terribly accessible way my favorite bloggers do.

Point 1 is for the pragmatists.  If you care about the impact of your legislation, and not terribly much on the abstract values behind the way it works, then you should be a slave to Evidence.  For those of you who are primarily interested in a legislative enactment of some value-system, you should be checking to make sure your enactment doesn't undermine your values by its effects.

Point 2 is for values-politicians.  If you're holding a core set of beliefs and want to enshrine them in law, then you should at the very least make sure that they don't contradict each other.  For pragmatists, this might not matter as much in your implementation, but you should be watching the aggregate effects to make sure they still do what you hope they will.

I know this is a hopeless and empty plea, but I'm burnt out on real world politics and needed to get that off my chest.  Expect more bounds on taxation and other abstract policy discussions in the near future.

Love,
Rory

The Plutocracy co-opts the Supreme Court for Bad

I've taken up reading supreme court decisions on matters I find interesting.  Here's a particularly fraught one showing how even our highest courts can make mistakes, and still have lots of right people on them.  This particular case discusses the rights of companies to restrict individuals from seeking class arbitration.  When I first saw the headline on slashdot I knew I was going to get angry about this one, and boy was I right.  The Argument:

 Some people have a dispute with AT&T.  They had to pay sales tax on ostensibly free phones, so they claimed a dispute and according to the AT&T service contracts were forced to subject themselves to third party arbitration.  However, AT&Ts contract additionally stipulates that they may not be rolled into a class arbitration.  In other words, every arbitration with AT&T must be one wronged party v. AT&T.  Clearly this is in AT&Ts favor as they can go about intimidating, avoiding, and inconveniencing the majority of claimants out of bothering to pursue arbitration.  They are assisted in this endeavor by piles of legalese, and also by the small size of each individual claim ($30 in this case).  The state of California in its wisdom wrote a law invalidating such clauses precisely because they allow a large company to defraud large numbers of people out of small amounts of money without much chance of ever getting in trouble for it.

The Ruling:

The 5 justices that made this ridiculous ruling seem to have based it on the idea that California's law goes against the FAA.  Their ruling is in the first link of this post.  It says that the FAA allows state laws to supersede it only if they are consistent with the intent of the bill (which is to put arbitration agreements on the same footing as all other contracts).  They basically say that since California's law specifically targets arbitration agreements it is contrary to the intent of the FAA and therefore it is not upheld.  They are all wrong.

The 4 justices who dissented in this one have it exactly right in my view.  They are in the second half of the first link of this post.  Basically they say: If you have to hire a lawyer to file a claim, or even spend a lot of time and effort or have any sort of expertise, and the amount of money in question is small, then no one will ever file claim, and the bad company will get away with its bad practices forever.  This is obvious.  They also point out a delicious and hilarious number of flaws in the majority opinion.  This rather undermines their final words: With respect, I dissent.

Rhetoric and Reality

One of the things that bothers me most about politics is the spectacular manner in which our leaders manage to use a shared rhetoric to pursue conflicting policy.  This infuriates me for several reasons. It occludes the real issues, it demonstrates hypocrisy in our system, and it fills debates with sound bytes rather than discourse.  That all sucks, but the thing that annoys me about it most is that it makes it painfully clear that our politicians believe that the American public has a broadly shared set of values.  If that's the case then why aren't we able to agree on a single damn thing?  If we have the same goals, the debate should only be about the most effective means to meeting those goals, and we have all sorts of tools for measuring progress towards them.  Let's look at some examples.

Freedom - I'd say freedom is a pretty much universally lipserviced American value, though when it comes down to it we appear chronically incapable of passing beyond rhetoric on this subject.  Here's an interesting commentary on the issue: http://www.slate.com/id/2291847/  Basically, we always talk about how free America is - we seem to value that quality highly - yet when asked to make specific policies to enhance the freedom of the American people, our politicians routinely balk.  Examples abound in the article and in recent political history: Patriot Act, all sorts of fancy shmancy warrant-less acquisition of electronic communication.  Maybe politicians have recognized that we don't actually value our freedom as much as we value hearing the word freedom in the context of pro-American rhetoric.

Opportunity - If I had a dollar for every time a politician used the phrase "American Dream" I would have very many dollars, maybe even enough to run for office.  So far as I can tell, the American Dream is basically about upward mobility.  If not "Rags to Riches" then at least "Rags to House-Lawn-and-Cable-TV".  Too bad we're not doing too well on that metric: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oecd.org%2Fdataoecd%2F2%2F7%2F45002641.pdf

I'm not really sure what we should do about this sort of nonsense, other than be more explicit about our goals, the relationships between our goals and proposed legislation, and the measured impact of enacted legislation upon those goals.  Good luck getting any of that passed through our legal system.