Matt Yglesias

The Senate’s the Thing

It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the fact that in a unicameral United States of America, we would now have passed both a comprehensive health care reform bill and also the most important piece of environmental legislation in the history of the world. Now that’s not the world we live in. Instead we live in a world where neither of those things have passed and where their prospects aren’t clear. But think back on this point the next time you hear someone say Obama is struggling with his agenda because he’s not centrist enough, or else that Obama is struggling with his agenda because he’s not left-wing enough.

The reality is that he’s struggling with his agenda because of the way our political institutions are structured.

Incidentally, if you want to read live-ish coverage of the health reform debate, you should check out my public twitter feed which is a better medium for this sort of thing.

Do It Like Medicare

A lot of absurd things have been said during today’s health care debate, but I think obscure Representative Vernon J. Ehlers of Michigan took the cake for sheer nonsense just now. He accused the Democrats “ignoring the Republicans” and said that instead of producing a “Democrat bill” the parties should have worked together “like we did on Medicare.” That’s right, Medicare. As if Ehlers and other Republicans would have voted for the bill if only Nancy Pelosi had moved a single-payer to the floor. Come on.

Tax Land Instead of Property

I was walking north on 5th street the other day looking at the state of the neighborhood and it occurred to me that maybe it would make sense to tax land values rather than policy values. That would encourage people to put their parcels to use, rather than endlessly sitting on vacant properties hoping for a better deal tomorrow. Ryan Avent happens to have found a relevant paper, Junge, Jason and David Levinson, “Financing transportation with land value taxes: Effects on development intensity.”

A significant portion of local transportation funding comes from the property tax. The tax is conventionally assessed on both land and buildings, but transportation increases only the value of the land. A more direct, efficient way to fund transportation projects is to tax land at a higher rate than buildings. The lower tax on buildings would allow owners to retain more of the profits of their investment in construction, and have the expected side effect of increased development intensity. A partial equilibrium simulation is created for three sample cities to determine the magnitude of the intensity increase for both residential and nonresidential development if various levels of split rate property taxes were enacted.

It’s important, as a matter of governance, for progressives to spend more time thinking harder about the efficiency of different tax regimes. Tax issues are politically sensitive, obviously, but even in political terms the proof to a large extent is in the pudding. “Big government,” schemes, no matter how controversial, tend to become accepted when they work. But part of making them work is financing them intelligently. This seems like a better way to finance upgrades in our public infrastructure.

GOP Members Shout Down Women Members of Congress

I spent the day at the zoo rather than watching C-SPAN. And obviously the action is still happening. But this is pretty remarkable. The Democratic Women’s Caucus had a series of speakers lined up to talk in favor of the health care bill, and Republicans decided to shut them up by talking over them, endlessly interrupting with spurious parliamentary inquiries:

It’s bizarre behavior. I’m not one to put a ton of stock in the idea that civility is the be-all and end-all of politics, but this kind of thing is really nuts and I think only serves to underscore how hollow complains of insufficient bipartisanship are.

3 Pointers

John Hollinger swats down Doug Collins for suggesting that it’s a mistake for Richard Jefferson to take a third of his shots from beyond the three point line:

Setting aside for a moment the ridiculously small sample (24 shots over three games), or the fact that Jefferson shot a career-high 39.7 percent on 3s last season and ranked among the league’s top practitioners of the corner 3, there’s the simple matter that for a wing to take one-third of his shots from distance is completely unremarkable in this day and age. Last season, of the 63 small forwards to play at least 500 minutes, 30 took a third or more of their shots from beyond the arc. With Jefferson transitioning from a leading role in Milwaukee to a secondary one in San Antonio — a switch that, for perimeter players, usually leads to a spike in the portion of shots that are 3s — I’d expect his portion of triples to stay around this level all season.

I would go further: In general, there’s not enough three point shooting happening in the NBA. In the 2008-2009 NBA season the average possession resulted in 1.083 points. The league average on three point shooting, meanwhile, was .367 meaning that the expected value of a three point attempt was 1.101 points. Better than average. Indeed, last year only four teams scored at a more efficient rate than 1.101 points per possession. If you consider that 26.7 percent of missed shots become offensive rebounds, the long ball looks even better. The break even point for three point shooting, on average, is something a bit lower than 36.1 percent.

In general, two point jump shots are kind of a sucker play: dunks, free throws, and three pointers are where it’s at.

Controlling the Agenda

Owen Rice has a series of cool charts that show optimal classification location of members of congress and “cutting lines” on various votes. The way it works is first you locate members, based on their votes, into a two-dimensional ideological space. Then on any given vote you can create a “cutting line” across the ideological space that does the best possible job of correcting sorting members into yeas and nays. That helps you get a sense of the underlying dynamic of the issue.

Here’s an example of a vote that broke down on pure party lines:

Kevin Drum wants to know why the optimal classification comes out this way:

Actually, though, I think I’m more interested in the placement of senators themselves. Democrats are almost all bunched into a single grouping, with only four outliers. Republicans, by contrast, are spread through considerably more space on both the economic and social dimensions. That doesn’t seem intuitively right to me, but it strikes me as more complimentary toward Republicans than Democrats. So tell me again why they want to defund pointy-headed political scientists?

It’s not intuitively right. What I think it is is an illustration of the importance of setting the agenda. The Democratic leadership has only brought to a vote bills that unite the overwhelming majority of Democrats. Consequently, a visualization based on votes of the 111th Senate shows the Democrats as enormously bunched-together. If you look at the House where Nancy Pelosi doesn’t need a unanimous caucus to pass bills, you see that Democrats and Republicans are about equally dispersed. If Republicans were to capture the House and pick up some Senate seats in 2010, then legislation would more often be focused on issues that split the party caucuses (education, immigration) and the visualizations would look different.

What a Legitimacy Problem Looks Like

Atta Mohammad Noor, governor of Balkh province in Northern Afghanistan says:

“Karzai is a thief of people’s votes. Democracy has been buried in Afghanistan. He’s not a lawful president,” Mr. Atta said in an interview in his vast rococo-styled office, as turbaned supplicants lined up to petition for his help in resolving court cases and disputes with local authorities.

At the moment, the mainstays of the Karzai government in Afghanistan are the non-Pashto areas of Afghanistan where there’s a great deal of popular hostility to the Taliban. But its precisely for that reason that Karzai, a Pashto, was picked to lead Afghanistan. The view was that such a person would have the most legitimacy in the most contested areas. The risk with what’s now happened in the election is that Karzai will either start to lose his Tajik support and his government will become untenable, or else that to prevent that from happening the government will need to shift all the way in the direction of him basically being a frontman for a Fahim/Dostum Tajik/Uzbek warlord coalition that has no support in Pashto areas.

On a Budget Commission

Politicians love commissions. They love them so much that journalists have come to love cynically deriding them. So now that talk of a “budget commission” to tackle the long-term deficit is in the air, people are being cynical about it. I actually think commissions are a pretty good idea since congress is so bad at designing policy. The real question is what would a serious budget commission look like?

I think Pete Davis and Bruce Bartlett have some pretty good posts on this matter. I would say the most important thing is for congress to not entirely abdicate its policymaking role. The key is to actually tell the commission, in a real way, what it wants studied. Reduce the deficit to such-and-such a percent of GDP relative to baseline and do it this percent with tax cuts and this percent with spending cuts. That’s a real mandate, and exactly the sort of decision elected officials should be making. Similarly, if congress wants the Pentagon to get special treatment, they should say so. With that done, having a commission try to work out the details within the framework of a congressional mandate makes sense.

Open Access Needed

Enjoying fast, fast broadband in Stockholm (my photo, available under cc license)

It’s pretty well-known at this point* that despite the fact that the Internet was largely invented in the United States and that most of the iconic Internet brands are US companies, that America is only a mediocre performer in terms of quality of broadband access and depth of broadband penetration. These points are, however, often made in a pretty superficial way. This recent major study from the Berkman Center (see more discussion) breaks the information down in a more sophisticated way. That shows that some things aren’t quite as they initially seem—Canada and Norway both look worse, for example—but that the US remains a middling performer.

Their main policy conclusion is that “open access” policies of the sort the United States had in the mid-1990s but then abandoned are common across all the high performing nations:

Our most surprising and significant finding is that “open access” policies—unbundling, bitstream access, collocation requirements, wholesaling, and/or functional separation—are almost universally understood as having played a core role in the first generation transition to broadband in most of the high performing countries; that they now play a core role in planning for the next generation transition; and that the positive impact of such policies is strongly supported by the evidence of the first generation broadband transition.

The importance of these policies in other countries is particularly surprising in the context of U.S. policy debates throughout most of this decade. While Congress adopted various open access provisions in the almost unanimously-approved Telecommunications Act of 1996, the FCC decided to abandon this mode of regulation for broadband in a series of decisions in 2001 and 2002. Open access has been largely treated as a closed issue in U.S. policy debates ever since. Yet the evidence suggests that transposing the experience of open access policy from the first generation transition to the next generation is playing a central role in current planning exercises throughout the highest performing countries. In Japan and South Korea, the two countries that are half a generation ahead of the next best performers, this has taken the form of opening up not only the fiber infrastructure (Japan) but also requiring mobile broadband access providers to open up their networks to competitors.

In leading countries like Sweden and the Netherlands, following the earlier example of the United Kingdom, regulators are addressing the complexities of applying open access policy to next-generation infrastructure by pushing their telecommunications incumbents to restructure their operations and functionally separate their units that sell access to network infrastructure from their units that sell connectivity directly to consumers. Moreover, countries that long resisted the implementation of open access policies, Switzerland and New Zealand, changed course and shifted to open access policies in 2006.

We should do this! The main common denominator, I think, is that the high-performing countries are generally places where electronics manufacturers have more political clout than telecom firms and thus are able to force implementation of these open access policies. The United States, meanwhile, is really shooting ourselves in the foot. The software/media nexus of industries is very important to our economy—these are the things we do well—and we’re letting ourselves be stifled by basically useless telecom firms.

More »« Less

Endgame

We will soon forget our past:

— Ezra Klein featured in overheard in DC.

— The last-minute wrangling in the House.

— What specifically does David Brooks think Obama’s moved too fast on?

— HOPE comes to congress.

— Fox & Friends contemplating second class status for Muslim soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

— “Matthew” is a very popular name.

We’re very committed to bringing you the latest in Nordic rock here, so here’s Finland’s I Walk The Line with “Black Wave”.

Podcasting

You’ve probably been saying to yourself “sure this political blogging is great, but where can we hear Matt Yglesias talking about the NBA on a podcast?” Well, consider your prayers answered. I’m a guest on the latest edition of the Disciples of Clyde Podcast.

Frum on Nuclear Socialism

I was saying this morning that I thought conservative affection for nuclear power was a bit odd in light of the fact that only massive socialism seems capable of financing nuclear power plants. David Frum has a post in response that I don’t totally understand:

Nor is it true, as Matt contends, that only an active state can deliver nuclear power. The United States already draws 20% of its power from nuclear. Until recently, it’s true, the stock market has preferred utility companies that generate their power from coal. Coal is cheap and reliable. But if a carbon tax increased the price of coal, nuclear would come back into vogue – and the regulatory changes needed to facilitate that shift would not have to be very dramatic. Probably more important would be mergers in the utility industry. The rule of thumb in the industry is that a new nuclear plant would cost some $10 billion and start yielding revenue only after 5 to 7 years. That’s a big check to write when the largest utility in the United States, Exelon, has a market capitalization of only $35 billion. Electricite de France by contrast has a market cap of some $85 billion.

We seem to me to be in agreement here. Even though carbon pricing ought to make nuclear power profitable on an operating cost basis, it would be prohibitively expensive to raise the capital necessary to construct nuclear plants. I think you could resolve this by having the state step in and do the financing. He thinks, I guess, that some counterfactual private utility could do it if it were far larger than any existing utility. But how would you make these mergers happen? That sounds to me like you need an active state.

Note that many of these same considerations apply to windmills. They generate electricity quite cheaply on an operating cost basis, the problem is building the windmills. But the scale of the investment in a windmill is much smaller, so it’s easier for the private sector to mobilize the risk-bearing capacity necessary to build one. That said, obviously you need a certain amount electricity that can be relied upon irrespective of how windy it is or whether the sun is shining. So I’d happily see the nuclear share of the pie grow at the expense of coal and oil as the provider of that baseload electricity. But from where I sit, making it happen requires a pretty forceful state intervention. Or perhaps what I should say is that the cleanest way to make it happen would be to bite the bullet and engage in forceful state intervention. I’m afraid that what we’re going to do instead is try to subsidize the operating profits of nuclear power to such a sky-high level that the private sector can’t help but jump in with the financing even though the deadweight loss of doing it that way will wind up being a lot higher.

Cantor vs Limbaugh, Nazi Analogies

Should we start the clock on how long it takes Eric Cantor to apologize?

“The Republican Party in its roots is a party of inclusion and we ought to be promoting that and making sure that voices are heard,” Cantor, of Virginia, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing today.

Cantor, when asked about Limbaugh’s comments that “Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate” and his comparison of the administration’s health-care logo to a swastika, said Limbaugh was wrong.

“Do I condone the mention of Hitler in any discussion about politics?” Cantor said. “No, I don’t, because obviously that is something that conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful.”

I wonder if that applies to members of the conservative grassroots who analogize health care reform to concentration camps? There’s research which indicates that diverse groups make better decisions than homogeneous ones. And I think the fact that the one Jewish Republican in congress can see that there’s a problem here, despite being a stone-cold right-winger, illustrates some of the issue. Put that guy in the room, and there’s someone to raise a note of caution. But in a lot of rooms, there’s no one from outside the pretty narrow circle of middle-aged white male goyim who dominate the party and that brings with it a certain loss of perspective. That’s a good enough demographic for a popular radio show, but it’s not big enough for a political party.

New Lows in Key Demographic Subsets

Heather Boushey dives deeper than the headlines in the latest unemployment report and finds little but bad news:

The dismal labor market for workers is evident in nearly every series the BLS has from its household survey, which measures labor market weakness. Nearly a million workers have left the labor force over the past year; two-thirds of those unemployed are out of work because they lost their prior job, dwarfing new and returning labor market entrants; 9.3 million workers are employed part-time even though they would prefer a full-time jobs; and the share of the population with a job has fallen to 58.5 percent, lower than at any point since 1983; adult men’s employment rates fell to 66.7 percent, hitting another all-time low (going back to 1948); and teens are seeing their worst labor market ever—unemployment among 16- to 19-year-olds is a record 27.6 percent.

The high unemployment among teens is going to retard their acquisition of basic labor market skills and they’ll suffer lifelong consequences as a result. You sometimes hear it said that we can’t afford to burden the future with additional debt and “printing money.” The reality is that we can’t afford not to. Surveying the political situation, there’s probably more room for action on the Fed side of things than the Congress/White House side, but either way we need more expansionary policies.

America’s Largest Retailer

Ezra Klein notes that in terms of number of outlets it’s the United States Postal Service:

Rep. Stephen F. Lynch (D-Mass.), chairman of the subcommittee on the federal workforce, Postal Service and the District of Columbia, noted that Postmaster General Jack Potter, who wasn’t at the hearing, likes to point out that the agency has more retail outlets than McDonald’s, Starbucks and Wal-Mart combined.

One approach you could take to the Postal Service’s problems, of course, would be to privatize it. Repeal their legislative monopoly on delivery of “ordinary” mail, repeal their legislative universal service obligation, and sell the thing to private investors. As run by the government, the USPS loses money, but I bet it would have significant value on the market. And the USPS’ massive real estate portfolio would be one of the key reasons. The politics of the situation make it basically impossible to manage these holdings in an economically rational way—nobody wants to see their local post office closed or relocated to someplace less convenient even if that’s what makes the most sense to do. And you see something similar with the controversy over halting Saturday delivery. Right now congress wants to make the USPS financially self-supporting, but doesn’t want to let USPS be managed the way an entity that’s actually financially self-supporting would be managed. Which is fine if you think that daily delivery of paper mail is a critical public service—critical public services shouldn’t be managed as profit-maximizing entities—but in 2009 does the delivery of paper mail really count as a critical public service?

Climate Optimism From Key Democrats

I don’t really think anyone quite knows what to make of this, but Max Baucus is seeming surprisingly bullish on the prospects of climate legislation: “There’s no doubt that this Congress is going to pass climate change legislation. I don’t know if it’s going to be this year. Probably next year.” I would have thought that one major reason to be skeptical about a climate bill’s prospects is that it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that key senators like Max Baucus would be enthusiastic about. But there you have it.

Meanwhile, here’s Joe Lieberman making a lot of sense on climate. Environmental issues have long been the topic on which Lieberman is most progressive, but it had seemed to me that he’d drifted away from that commitment over the past couple of years.

Your Statement of Support on Health Care

It’s worth mentioning that if you have time to read political blogs, you have time to pick up the telephone and call your member of congress and tell his or her office whether you support or oppose the health care reform bill. Members of congress, for good or for ill, take this kind of constituent contact seriously. Even if it’s ultimately not decisive in changing their mind, they still note it. I don’t get representation in congress, but if you do you ought to put that fact to use.

Obama Administration Supports H.R. 3962

This will come as no surprise, but the official Statement of Administration Policy on the House health care bill is below the fold. They “strongly support” it:

More »« Less

Nuclear Socialism

Brad Plumer has an interesting piece about the American right’s strangely passionate love affair with nuclear power and the impact it’s having on the climate debate in congress. What I find especially odd about it is that it’s so at odds with American conservatives’ ardor for the free market. You see this mismatch in a small sense in that their nuclear agenda in congress consists basically of asking for subsidies. But in a larger sense the issue is that the big example one can find of a country living the nuclear dream is . . . France. And it’s not just an irony or a funny coincidence, nuclear power in France is deeply tied to the genuinely socialistic (i.e., not just high taxes and a generous welfare state) aspects of the French economy.

When the French nuclear network was being built out Éléctricité de France was wholly owned by the French state and had a statutory monopoly on the distribution of electrical power. What’s more, of the different kinds of French state-owned companies (yes, there are several) it was an Établissement Public à Charactère Industriels et commercial (EPIC) which meant it was fully guaranteed by the state and could, in effect, raise capital at a sovereign rate. This solves the big economic problem with nuclear power. The projects are so big, so long-term, so risky, and have such high up-front costs that financing the construction of these things is a nightmare. As the MIT interdisciplinary project on the future of nuclear power wrote in its 2009 update:

While the U.S. nuclear industry has continued to demonstrate improved operating performance, there remains significant uncertainty about the capital costs, and the cost of its financing, which are the main components of the cost of electricity from new nuclear plants.

The nuclear industry is eager to find ways for the US government to intervene in the market to resolve these issues, but the easiest way to do that is to actually have it undertaken by a publicly owned company.

These days EDF has been “privatized” in the kind of only-in-France way that many large French firms are private—it’s a standard Société Anonyme with shareholders, but the majority of shares are owned by the state. Areva, the engineering company that does the actual building, is also owned by the state. In Finland, there’s a somewhat problematic big nuclear project underway and the utility doing it Teollisuuden Voima Oy, also involves a hefty share of public ownership. In the United States, too, we used to build nuclear plants back when our economy was much more dirigiste.

At any rate, I have fairly equivocal views as to whether this is a good idea or not. But I think it should be seen for what it is. If you’re interested in reading more on the subject of nuclear power, I recommend the MIT interdisciplinary study on The Future of Nuclear Power.

Politics and Public Works

Paul Krugman wonders why we don’t just do direct public works like in the WPA:

You can make a pretty good case that just employing a lot of people directly would be a lot more cost-effective; the WPA and CCC cost surprisingly little given the number of people put to work. Think of it as the stimulus equivalent of getting the middlemen out of the student loan program.

So why aren’t we doing this? Politics, of course: government is the problem, not the solution, even when it is, you know, the solution, and cheaper than running things through the private sector.

Possibly the best way to think about this would be as an alternative to the repeated extensions of unemployment insurance payments. Instead of saying to people whose UI benefits are about to expire “just kidding, here’s an extension” we could say “you’ll keep getting checks but you need to show up at such-and-such a place and pick up trash in parks.” This would be somewhat more expensive than a UI extension—you’d need to pay for garbage bags and supervisors—but it would have less of a disemployment effect than UI extensions and we’d also get cleaner parks in the bargain. It’s a little bit perverse to be paying people to do nothing when there’s work that could use doing.

But a problem modern advanced economies have in advancing this sort of scheme is that the people already working in the public sector don’t want to be squeezed out by facing competition from quasi-unemployed engaged in public works schemes. In other words, the key stakeholders on various different sides of the equation prefer the inefficient choice of just cutting checks—it involves less debt for the “centrists,” less competition for public sector unions, and less arduous demands on the unemployed.

Congress-Centric Governance

One respect in which the United States differs quite sharply from most other democracies is in the extent to which the legislature shapes the details of policies. There’s a lot of variation from place to place, obviously, but in most democracies policies are really written by the executive branch in a collaboration between key cabinet members and civil servants. The legislature’s job is more-or-less to accept or reject these proposals. In America it doesn’t work like that. Even though it’s typical for staff talent to flow from the Hill to the White House and even though the professional staff resources of the executive branch far exceed those of the congress, the details of legislation are written by congress and then it’s left up to the White House to accept or reject the bills.

You can understand why a generation of Framers worried about the prospect that the President would make himself into a dictator thought this was a good way to arrange things, but it’s difficult to make the case that it improves the quality of public policy in the 21st century.

For example, here’s Congress helping the unemployed:

The bill, passed overwhelmingly by the House and headed to President Obama for his signature Friday, extends unemployment insurance benefits that were due to expire and renews an $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers, while also expanding it to cover many other home purchases.

In other words, to get a pretty good measure (extended unemployment benefits) passed, congress saw fit to both extend and expand the not-very-smart home buyers tax credit. Notably, the lack of merit to the home buyers tax credit is not particularly controversial in the policy domain. It’s just one of those things that a certain number of Republican members are obsessed with, notwithstanding the lack of support from conservative economists, and that Democratic members are happy to go along with, again notwithstanding the lack of support from progressive economists.

And as Kevin Drum points out things got even nuttier:

Why? Because even though Republicans were allowed to tack on a tax cut to the bill as the price of getting it passed, they decided to filibuster anyway unless they were also allowed to include an anti-ACORN amendment. Seriously. A bit of ACORN blustering to satisfy the Palin-Beck crowd is the reason they held up a bill designed to help people who are out of work in the deepest recession since World War II.

Meanwhile Tyler Cowen reports back from a meeting at the Treasury Department:

I worry less than did some of the other bloggers about the Treasury awareness of major economic problems going forward. As governmental institutions go, Treasury has a real incentive to a) worry about the fiscal future, and b) worry about worst-case scenarios, including for financial institutions. Their daily interaction with the bond market gives them a longer time horizon and a more economics-friendly perspective than most of their bureaucratic counterparts. The problem is Congress. For instance if someone at Treasury had a Yves Smith view of the banking system, they could not much act on it.

Given the system we have, one not only can but must call out individual senators and members of congress for acts of policy malfeasance. But in a structural sense, the congress is simply not well set-up to produce technically sound ways of achieving policy objectives. This is generally recognized by members of congress themselves in the abstract, who tend to suggest the appointment of outside commissions of various sorts as a way to deal with problems, but the recognition is rarely put into practice in a day-to-day sense. In principle, however, rather than an endless stream of talk about creating new ad hoc commissions you could seek some structural shift in congress’ role in policy design.

Unemployment Passes 10 Percent

More bad news on the labor market front:

Takeaways: One, people need to stop worrying about inflation. Two, the federal government should deploy more aid to state and local governments. Three, instead of easing up on the easing of monetary policy the Fed needs to ease even more, probably by taking some advice from Scott Sumner about ways this is possible.

Nelson: Bad Economy Means We Should Wreck Economy, Destroy Planet, Let Health Care Languish

I suspect we’re going to be hearing a lot more of this sort of thing in the weeks to come:

Democrat Ben Nelson, a Senator from Nebraska, said the slumping economy and rising joblessness will be factors as Congress considers climate change and health care legislation. They are also driving concerns about the budget deficit, which widened to a record $1.42 trillion in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, he said.

“When the economy’s not strong there’s a lot of interest in controlling spending,” Nelson said.

This really makes no sense. If Nelson thinks the health care and climate legislation before congress would have a ruinous economic impact or something, then of course he shouldn’t vote for either bill. But that’s independent of the current state of the labor market. In reality, neither bill will have much of any impact on a 12-18 month time horizon since their provisions take time to phase-in. Both are aimed at long-term problems—the economic devastation wreaked by an out-of-control health care system and the environmental devastation wreaked by out-of-control greenhouse gas pollution. There’s never a perfect day to tackle a long-run problem, but delaying action doesn’t help the economy in the short-run and only makes it harder to tackle the problem.

On controlling spending, this is nuts. With the economy weak Nelson wants to do . . . what? Lay off teachers? Halt infrastructure projects? Make sure that kids whose parents are unemployed end up malnourished? The economy is suffering from a catastrophic collapse in overall spending with households, businesses, states, and municipalities all pulling back. If the federal government pulls back too we’re going to go down the drain.

Billionaires for Right-Wing Populism

One under-discussed element of the recent upsurge of right-wing populism in the form of “tea parties” and such is how much of it is directly underwritten by the wealthiest people in America. David Koch and Charles Koch of Koch Industries, for example, are #37 and #38 on the Forbes 400 list. They’re also major donors to a number of right-wing causes, including Americans for Prosperity, which is chaired by David. And as several AFPers were willing to discuss with my colleague Lee Fang yesterday, that Koch money helped pay for 40 buses to bring people to the tea parties free of charge, doughnuts, signs, etc.:

A free bus and a free sign, of course, won’t create any turnout unless there’s some genuine level of interest in spending the day protesting in Washington, DC. But still, organizing rallies isn’t easy and it’s made easier when you have well-financed organizers. Which is precisely what AFP and the Kochs are giving the tea party movement.

Rooting for the Mediocre

I’m reading Bill Simmons’ The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy. It’s a lot of fun, and something most NBA fans should enjoy, albeit full of analytical claims I disagree with. One of the most interesting of those claims is a kind of meta-claim he makes near the beginning of the book attributing to himself extra-normal insight from his youth spent as a Celtics fan. It was from watching the truly great teams like the Celtics and the truly great players like Larry Bird that you come to really understand the game since those are the guys who, themselves, understand the game best.

I think this is kind of backwards. You sentimentalize teams you root for, and if you root for a team that’s really good—the Celtics or the Lakers or the Yankees (or the Canadiens?)—you wind up sentimentalizing success. And since the point of a sports competition is to win the games, sentimentalizing success gets people extremely confused. Thus we wind up hearing an awful lot in the book about “character” and how you need good character guys to win. If you’re a Celtics fan, this probably makes a lot of emotional success. The Spurs succeeded in the 2000s because of their great character guys. They were good people. Which means that the Celtics won all those championships because they were such good people. But of course I don’t want to say that the Knicks teams I rooted for in the nineties lost because of “bad character.” So more prosaic ideas come to mind—for example, by the time the team peaked Patrick Ewing was already on the old side and even at peak Ewing, though very good, was never the top big man in the association.

I think common sense is that you understand a sport by watching the best teams play it without having a strong rooting interest. Just watching, relatively dispassionately, to see the best athletes in the world go at it. To wax poetic you need to be “the listener who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Otherwise you get too hung up on the idea that the ‘86 Celtics were better than the ‘96 Bulls (something that all and only people from Boston seem to think) and start twisting your whole worldview around to accommodate that conclusion.