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?"

About belief

Just a quick one from a conversation I had today.  When we're talking about persuasion, we're really talking about two very different tasks.

Sometimes we argue about how to do things, and normally in that discussion the relevant information is about the world and how it works.  The way we convince people in that context is by showing them evidence about the way the world works--facts, studies, that sort of thing.

The other thing we argue about is what we should care about. These sorts of arguments about first order beliefs--which we just take as given in the former class of argument--aren't at all amenable to facts, studies, and figures.  Persuasion on these points is essentially an act of conversion and is effected mostly through personal relationships if at all.

Now, first order beliefs are held with varying strengths, and sometimes things that should be higher order beliefs--empirically testable ideas about how the world works--are treated as first order.  But, I'd say that's more or less the structure of things.

Who do you side with?

I thought this was an interesting attempt at getting people to look at their politicians by the issues.  The choices were nice in that they gave additional options for a little more nuance, but the policy questions were high enough level that you could still pretty obviously pick the party-signalling choice, which probably isn't super useful for making people think twice about their preferred candidate.  Also, who the hell is Jill Stein?

Here's the quiz: http://www.isidewith.com/presidential-election-quiz

Here're my results: http://www.isidewith.com/results/20218768

ACA Ruling (part 1 - The One Man Majority)

The Supreme Court ruling on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is, well, complicated.  One of its most interesting features is that the "majority opinion", or the opinion holding legal weight, is  held in its entirety only by one man--Chief Justice John Roberts.  In this post we'll focus exclusively on his opinion, which is as follows:

1. The Anti-Injunction Act does not impede the States' ability to bring suit against the ACA
2. The Individual Mandate cannot be upheld under the Commerce Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause
3. The Individual Mandate, being functionally identical to a tax and enforced under the Tax Code, is within the taxing powers of congress and therefore Constitutional
4. The Federal government unduly coerces the states in its conditioning all medicaid funding on the ACA's expansion of medicaid, only new funding may be so conditioned

Basically the only thing the entire court agrees on is (1).  The Anti-Injunction Act is a law saying that people can't sue to avoid a tax until they've actually paid the damn thing.  Roberts says that congress explicitly said that the penalty associated with the Individual Mandate is not a tax, and therefore the Anti-Injunction Act doesn't apply. (This gets a little weird later on, when the Individual Mandate is determined to be a tax, but the takeaway is just that congress has the power to say what things are and aren't taxes for the purposes of the law, but not for the purposes of the constitution.  That actually makes a lot of sense, since otherwise the Feds could do anything, call it a tax, and have it be constitutional.)

Roberts joins the conservative dissent in stating (2) that the Individual Mandate is unsupported by the Commerce Clause because it regulates inactivity, rather than activity.  Frankly, I think this distinction is weird and stupid, but I'll put off arguments until after I've gone through the dissenting opinions.

Roberts, along with the liberal dissent, points out (3) that because the Individual Mandate is exercised through the IRS,  is governed by the laws governing taxation, is levied at least in part to provide revenue, and is not punitive (it never exceeds the value of purchasing insurance, and is usually substantially less), it is a form of tax for constitutional purposes, and, as such, is constitutional under the taxation powers of congress.

Finally, in agreement with a large block of both liberal and conservatives (though some Justices still dissent), Roberts rules (4).  I don't fully understand this argument, but it seems like the basic claim is that federal-state programs have to be looked at as contracts between the federal government and state government.  The medicaid expansion greatly exceeds the scope of changes the states could have reasonably expected when signing on to the program, therefore their original contracts must remain valid regardless of whether they decide to expand their programs to the new medicaid levels.  That's the theoretical justification, which I find weak.  The practical justification is much stronger.  Basically, the amount of money involved in medicaid amounts to 10% or more of most states' budgets.  Giving up that funding would be fiscal suicide for most states.  Therefore, the states have no real choice but to accept the changes to medicaid.  The Justice rightly points out that a similar tactic could be used to coerce the states to enact basically any law, even those that the federal government has no right to enact, which would pretty much defeat the purpose of Federalism.

Higgs Boson

I don't understand anything about how the Higgs Boson stuff works, what we're going to do with the new knowledge, or really anything about physics.  But! here's a cool thing to take away:  Science made a prediction with theory, well before we even had the capability to test that theory.  We then built the capability, and tested the prediction.  It was verified.

That simple story, and ones like it, are at the root of human achievement.  It's good to be human.

Optimal intellectual property protection (part 2)

In which the state of current copyright law is discussed, a meager calculation is effected shewing the exercise of said law necessary to compensate rights-holders for their losses, and the stage is set for act 3.

The major U.S. laws currently in place to handle copyright infringement on the internet are: The United States Copyright Law, and the DMCA.  Under the former, the maximum penalty for an infringer is $150,000 dollars per copyrighted work.  An unknowing infringer--somewhat not protected by fair use provisions, but not willfully breaking the law--suffers a minimum penalty of $200 dollars per copyrighted work.  Recent rulings have indicated that the granularity of a work is on the song (as opposed to album) level.  Now, judging from iTunes, the market value of a song is about $0.99.  That's quite a mark-up.  Real world awards have reached truly astronomical levels, but let's look at a recent case, in which a judge knocked down a $675,000 dollar fine to $67,500 for willful infringement for 30 songs.  That's $2,250 a song, down from an initial $22,500 a song.

Just working with the music numbers for a moment, things look a little like this:

In 2007, the RIAA report estimates sales losses of 3.7 billion dollars with their (quite reasonable) download substitution estimator.  I'm ignoring their physical piracy numbers because they don't apply to the intarwebs points I want to make.  To make up for this they'd have to levy the minimum fine on 18,500,000 (by the RIAA estimates, 0.3% of 6 billion yearly illegal downloads), the maximum fine on 24,667, or the judge determined "reasonable" $2250 fine on 1,644,445 instances of illegal downloads.  Even the largest of these would be a tiny percentage of enforcement.  Of course, the RIAA only managed to file 20,000 lawsuits (primarily ending in settlement) by 2008 when they mostly stopped doing that on account of it being hilariously unpopular.  It seems like the settlements were generally between the "reasonable" and minimum fine levels, so the RIAA clearly wasn't going to recoup costs through these lawsuits.  Since they gave up that tactic, they have focused on the DMCA, and on producing bigger, badder, scarier versions of it. 

At issue in the DMCA and its would-be successors is the burden of enforcing copyright laws.  Basically, the DMCA explicitly prohibits circumvention of copyright protections regardless of whether such circumventions are used to violate copyright, enacts the mechanism of "takedown notices" which limit the liability of compliant online service providers (OSPs) in exchange for rapid response to notification of infringement by copyright holders, and permits subpoenas of OSPs for user identity information.  Copyright holders feel that these provisions are insufficient, and have proposed a variety of legislation holding hosting sights responsible for infringing content posted by users.  Obviously, this imposes substantial costs, risks, and responsibilities on social networks and community content sites.

All this sets things up quite nicely for part 3: actual cost-benefit analysis!
Potential costs: money of social network sites, money of taxpayers, money of RIAA and member organizations.
Potential benefits: greater compensation of copyright holders, deterrence of copyright violation.

Of course, that's only if you forget that the goal of IP law is to incentivize the development of intellectual property.  So, we'll be taking a look at the incentive maximizing level of IP protection as well.  All that to come.

Macroeconomic quicky

Recessions and depressions occur when total spending--and therefore total income--is reduced.  This reduction of total spending is brought on by an increase in demand for money, either to hold as savings or to use to pay down debt.  Once you have your head around this, the Federal Reserve remedies for depressions and recessions--lower interest rates and higher inflation--become kind of obvious: they're both just ways to increase the supply of money, and reduce the demand for it.  It also becomes obvious that government austerity exacerbates the problem; it's just one more player contributing to the reduced spending and resulting reduced income.

Obviously, there are a bunch of wrinkles in this story, but sometimes it helps to just look at the simple fundamentals of a situation.  Those fundamentals indicate we should have more government spending, higher inflation, and lower interest rates.  Since interest rates are already at 0, we've only got two options left.