Matt Yglesias

Elmendorf to CBO

Doug Elmendorf, formerly of all the major public sector economic policy institutions (specifically the Federal Reserve Board, U.S. Treasury Department, Council of Economic Advisors, and Congressional Budget Office) and then the Hamilton Project at Brookings, will replace Peter Orszag at CBO. Elmendorf’s a moderate Democrat who wins praise from Greg Mankiw. I liked this paper he co-authored on the Bush tax cuts some months ago which concluded that “the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts made most U.S. households worse off” while helping to further enrich the already richest.

Readers may be interested in this and this from him on TARP. I’d be interested to know what’s the nature of the norm that ensures that the CBO Director’s job seems to stay consistently in the hands of broadly respected moderates even during a time of massively increasing polarization inside the congress.

One also wonders if Elmendorf will continue the CBO blog and/or whether Orszag will be blogging from his new perch at OMB.

Treating the Symptoms

This move by pharmaceutical companies to stop handing out random trinkets to doctors seems like a pretty cynical move to me:

Starting Jan. 1, the pharmaceutical industry has agreed to a voluntary moratorium on the kind of branded goodies — Viagra pens, Zoloft soap dispensers, Lipitor mugs — that were meant to foster good will and, some would say, encourage doctors to prescribe more of the drugs.

No longer will Merck furnish doctors with purplish adhesive bandages advertising Gardasil, a vaccine against the human papillomavirus. Banished, too, are black T-shirts from Allergan adorned with rhinestones that spell out B-O-T-O-X. So are pens advertising the Sepracor sleep drug Lunesta, in whose barrel floats the brand’s mascot, a somnolent moth.

Doctors are well-paid professionals, none of them are going to seriously compromise patient care in exchange for a mug or a pen. But if you read Marcia Angell’s New York Review of Books article on the vast web of corruption between drug companies and medical professionals, you’ll see that mugs and pens have nothing to do with anything. We’re talking about serious cash. Things like a doctor who “failed to disclose approximately $500,000 he received from GlaxoSmithKline for giving dozens of talks promoting the company’s drugs.” Or this:

Senator Grassley found that Schatzberg controlled more than $6 million worth of stock in Corcept Therapeutics, a company he cofounded that is testing mifepristone—the abortion drug otherwise known as RU-486—as a treatment for psychotic depression. At the same time, Schatzberg was the principal investigator on a National Institute of Mental Health grant that included research on mifepristone for this use and he was coauthor of three papers on the subject.

This is big bucks, serious stuff. The branded mugs and such were, if anything, the achilles heel in the drug companies’ perversion of the process — patients could see the stuff, and the stuff has corporate logos on it. It’s a visual reminder that for all you know your doctor is prescribing courses of treatment that are in line with his financial interests rather than with your health interests. By adopting a new “no mugs” policy the companies are helping to re-obscure their financial relationships with doctors and at the same claim claiming to be cleaning up their act. It’s clever, but it’s not good.

More on Burris

Jack Balkin and Mark Tushnet argue that the Senate can, in fact, refuse to seat Roland Burris.

Meanwhile, since I don’t think I’ve said this before, we should all be clear that Burris and Bobby Rush are really behaving in an irresponsible manner here. It would have been the simplest thing on earth for Burris to just resist the temptations of higher office and say “no” to Blagojevich’s scheme here. It’s very hard to imagine that their actions over these past couple of days are advancing the cause of progressive politics or the interests of African-Americans. See also this, this, and this from Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Business Leaders Concern Troll About Outsourcing

Gary Shapiro, President and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, warns that card-check legislation and increased unionization could “force jobs overseas.” Elsewhere in the piece he extols the virtues of lowering trade barriers and shares other pearls of wisdom he gleaned while “driving from New Delhi to Agra.” It is, of course, hard to take this concern trolling about jobs shifting overseas all that seriously when one assumes the point of his “recent delegation of world technology leaders to India” was precisely to explore opportunities for shifting jobs overseas.

But credibility aside these concerns are hard to square with the data. Consider this page where you’ll learn that union density is 80 percent in Denmark, 74 percent in Finland, 46 percent in Luxembourg, 35 percent in Ireland, and 25 percent in Switzerland compared to just 12 percent in the United States. These are all very small countries that depend much more highly on foreign trade than does the United States. And yet despite their much larger proportion of union members, none of these countries have seen their employment all drift overseas.

Countries don’t become prosperous by having extremely low wages. Countries have low wages because they’re poor. Countries prosper by having reasonable quality infrastructure and a reasonably healthy and well-educated population. Unions can neither magically create wealth out of thin air, but neither can they magically destroy wealth. What they can do is influence at the margin the way wealth is distributed — a bit more to the workforce and somewhat less to the managers and the shareholders. That’s why people who represent the interests of managers and shareholders don’t like them. It’s a perfectly understandable sentiment, but not one that the broader public should find persuasive.

Blago’s Tactics

Ezra Klein quotes Dan Conley on what Blago’s trying to accomplish:

The appointment of Burris is a pure impeachment-defense tactic from Blagojevich. First, he’s making a public case that no crime was actually committed. If Burris was appointed without any quid pro quo (highly likely, since Burris has no great wealth or influence), then Blagojevich can argue that all the talk about other possible appointments were just that — talk. And talk is not a crime. Is anyone going to buy that? Well, even if only ten percent of Illinois voters buy it, Blagojevich will have doubled his support, so why not? There’s a certain freedom in nearly complete unpopularity.

But second, and more important for Blagojevich’s survival plans, he’s chosen to play the race card. To anyone who thought that the election of Barack Obama would diminish the power of racial politics, today’s press conference was depressing — especially the appalling spectacle of Rep. Bobby Rush using the word “lynch” in reference to criticism of Burris, then Blagojevich repeating the phrase while wagging a finger at the press corp on the way out of the room. For a Governor looking to rally support in the House and Senate to avoid impeachment or convinction, it’s a smart move. A combination of African American and Latino Senators could be sufficient to save Blagojevich from a conviction in the Illinois Senate. It probably won’t work, but Blagojevich has few options left.

I really wouldn’t underplay what’s in the first paragraph. If you read Patrick Fitzgerald’s official complaint against Blagojevic, I think you’ll reach the conclusion that the criminal case against him on the Senate seat issue isn’t very strong. There’s other, better stuff in the indictment, but that particular charge seems to have been brought somewhat prematurely. I’d say that was a reasonable use of a prosecutor’s discretion — actually sitting on the wiretap until the seat had already been auctioned off would not have served the public interest. But it means Fitzgerald is moving forward with a relatively weak charge.

Under the circumstances, for Blago to have granted everyone’s requests for him to leave the seat unfilled would have been something of an admission of guilt. Conversely, making an appointment and making it a clean one — a qualified guy who’s not discussed on any of the wiretaps and who isn’t offering any bribes — has a lot of exculpatory power in terms of mounting a criminal defense.

The whole thing, however, serves as a reminder that this problem is a problem in the first instance for the Illinois legislature. The criminal justice system, quite rightly, moves deliberately and requires certain standards of evidence. But a political process such as an impeachment can move at a different pace and can properly employ different standards. And faced with this sort of public corruption the imperative isn’t on getting the guy to do jail time, it’s on getting the guy out of office so the people of Illinois can have a real governor. It’s a bit bizarre that it’s taking them so long — they need to hurry up and remove the man from office.

Bubble Trouble

Paul Krugman has a graph of price-rent ratios normalized so that the 2000 level is defined as 100:

One interesting thing about this is that you could have been looking at this data in May 2002 and decided that Las Vegas real estate was overvalued. And I think someone who thought that will be vindicated over time. But at the same time, you could have looked at this data in May 2002, bought property in Las Vegas, and sold it five years later for a healthy profit. You could even have waited for the Las Vegas market to be clearly on the downswing and still made plenty of money. Which is part of the general problem with bubble psychology — the mere fact that a bubble is under way doesn’t necessarily make it irrational to hop on the bandwagon.

Seating Burris

Scott Lemieux observes that what the Senate Democrats are threatening to do in refusing to seat Roland Burris is probably illegal:

The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 (and 8-0 among justices deciding on the merits) in Powell v. McCormack that “in judging the qualifications of its members, Congress is limited to the standing qualifications prescribed in the Constitution.”

This is to say that Congress gets to offer definitive rulings on, say, a dispute over whether or not a Senator is really 35. But nobody disputes that Blagojevic is governor of Illinois. And nobody disputes that the Illinois Senate seat is vacant. And nobody disputes that the governor of Illinois is supposed to fill Illinois Senate vacancies. And nobody disputes that Burris was chosen by Blagojevic. And nobody disputes that Burris possesses the standing qualifications prescribed in the constitution. So it seems to me that unless the Senate has some reason to believe that Burris did something corrupt to obtain the seat, there’s neither grounds for expelling him nor for refusing to seat him.

On top of all that, I would have to say that Powell seems like a correctly decided case and that it would be right to apply the precedent to Burris’ case. It’s fine to say that the honorable course for Burris would be to have refused the appointment, but that’s different from saying that the Senate should be able to refuse to seat him merely because having him there would be politically awkward. Giving the Congress the power to arbitrarily exclude duly elected or appointed members seems like a seriously bad idea the more I think about it.

Additional observations: It’s weird for the Senate to get holier-than-thou about this given that one sitting senator is a family values advocate with a taste for hookers and that there was a bipartisan love-in staged on the occasion of Ted Stevens, convicted felon, departing from the Senate. If these guys can get weepy about Stevens, surely they can handle the vague air of impropriety hanging around Burris.

Also — this thing with governor’s appointing senators is one more of the various procedures of American government that makes no sense. Vacancies should be filled by special election.

Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded

I think trying to build housing in shopping malls is a potentially promising idea. It’s a reminder that I’ve been meaning for a while to write a post about separating the idea of “walkable urbanism” from the idea of “living in a city.” A city is, of course, a political concept. But walkable urbanism is a geographical and lifestyle concept. In the DC area, walkable urbanism exists in the parts of Arlington County that lie along the Blue and (especially) Orange line corridors as well as near the Silver Spring and Bethesda Metro stations in Montgomery County even though those places are “in the suburbs.” And parts of the city don’t exhibit the features of walkable urbanism. And by the same token, traditionally a great deal of walkable urbanism took place in small towns rather than in cities, and also in small cities (see Douglas Rae’s account of New Haven) and “streetcar suburbs” rather than big cities.

All of which is a throat-clearing way of saying that if we see a big increase in the amount of walkable urbanism available to American families, an awful lot of it will probably exist outside the city limits of the municipalities that form the hubs of our metropolitan area. That will mean, yes, converting existing elements of the build environment rather than simply abandoning everything and trying to get everyone to move willy-nilly into downtown Cleveland. In other words — more housing in malls.

But I wanted to end with the observation that I got this item via Felix Salmon who introduced it thusly:

Do you want to live within easy walking distance of shops, restaurants, and other such amenities? Do you want to live in a condo with a doorman, its own private grounds, a screening room, and similar bells and whistles? Up until now, answering “yes” to such questions meant that you had to live in the city — something which many people don’t like doing (dirt, smells, noise, bad schools, you know the drill) and which in any case is often very expensive.

This is like saying that most Americans don’t like BMWs — after all, they’re so damn expensive. Obviously, some people really do have an extremely strong preference for a sizable yard and driving-oriented lifestyle. But equally obviously, people respond to prices and living in desirable urbanist areas is “often very expensive.” That reflects both the intrinsic appeal that such areas have to many people and the short supply that they’re in. This is one of the reasons why we need to build more communities featuring walkable urbanism.

Talking Trash

John Judis is a mensch:

I want to take issue with Martin Peretz’s description of my former colleague Spencer Ackerman’s articles as “trash.” Maybe I am sensitive because Spencer co-authored several with me, including a piece of the Bush administration’s deception about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (“The First Casualty”), which Marty praised at the time. Spencer also co-authored a terrific profile of Dick Cheney with current editor Frank Foer (“What Dick Cheney Really Believes,” November 20, 2003). But Spencer wrote much on his own, including regular commentary on the Iraq war for The New Republic’s website, during which he changed, like others at the magazine, from a supporter to opponent of the decision to go to war. I particularly remember an outstanding cover story Spencer wrote on American Muslims. I would like to link to it, but the links to our archives are broken. It was, called “Religious Protection: Why American Muslims haven’t turned to Terrorism,” and appeared Dec. 12, 2005.

Any editor worth his salt would consider having helped Spencer launch his career a proud accomplishment.

The Year in Cities

Interesting concept from Jason Kottke who’s listing all the cities he’s been to in 2008. My list (not counting places I just drove through or switched planes in) with asterixes for places I’d never been before:

• Washington, DC.
• New York, NY.
• Los Angeles, CA.
• Claremont, CA.*
• Riverside, CA.
• Tuscon, AZ*
• Austin, TX.*
• Miami, FL.
• Chicago, IL.
• Geneva, Switzerland.*
• Helsinki, Finland.*
• Kitty Hawk, NC.
• Minneapolis, MN.*
• Las Vegas, NV.*
• Baltimore, MD.

All told, I think I did more traveling this year than I had in some time which at times got exhausting (those were three separate trips to Southern California) but overall I found incredibly fun and interesting. I’m still very eager to get to the Pacific Northwest at some point as I’ve never been to Portland, Seattle, or Vancouver and not to the Bay Area since I was a little kid. That or, you know, Asia.

UPDATE: And Cambridge, MA! Apologies to SR my host in that fine town.

In The Long Run…

Cato’s Chris Edwards offers his proposal for warding off depression: “What Obama should do is a pass a large corporate tax rate cut, which would spur long-run growth.” Yes, neo-Hooverism taken to new and exciting heights allowing everyone to dust off the Keynes line about how in the long-run we’re all dead in an appropriate context. Long-run growth is important, but it’s not going to be worth anything unless we get out of the downward spiral that’s facing us immediately.

Meanwhile, what we actually need is corporate tax reform — close loopholes, grow the tax base, and lower the tax rate.

The Ambiguous Legacy

Ed Kilgore has a really interesting post on Southern political history that gets into the winding and complicated manner in which racial politics has interacted with other issues in Dixie:

But there any “seamless web of reaction” theory about the South begins to break down. The two decades after the Compromise were characterized by savage political warfare across the region between supporters and opponents of capitalist development and corporate subsidies. And no one embraced the Lost Cause of the Confederacy myth more than the southern Populists, who viewed antebellum southern “civilization,” accurately, as anti-capitalist. The great southern Populist Tom Watson of Georgia, who once called himself a “red socialist through and through,” and who did actual jail time in opposing U.S. entry into the “imperialist” World War I, was a disciple of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens and an unequalled romaniticizer of the Lost Cause.

This period also illustrated the highly ambiguous nature of the race issue in the South. The Populists initially appealed to African-American voters, but eventually championed disenfranchisement of blacks as the only way to build a class-based political movement among whites. And while hardly any notable white political figure in the South in this era was anything less than a thoroughgoing racist, the “New South” apostles, and the “Bourbon Democrats” who succeeded them and characterized one element of the Southern Democracy right on up to the Civil Rights Movement, often postured as paternalistic defenders of African-Americans against the violence of redneck populists.

One thing I might add is that perhaps the defining picture of contemporary southern politics is that this sort of thing has ceased to be the case. Overall, the region is clearly — like the rest of the country — much more progress on racial matters than it was during Watson’s time. But unlike in the past, basic left-right economic issue disputes are now very closely aligned with people’s attitudes toward racial questions. In general, over time American politics as a whole has shifted from a two-dimensional conflict to one-dimensional conflict and this has had particularly acute consequences in southern states where racial polarization in attitudes is higher-than-average and where you often see an unusually large black population. But this world is actually a consequence of the Civil Rights era that replaced an earlier, more complicated dynamic.

Requests Thread

What’s on your mind as we hurtle toward the inevitable drunkenness of tomorrow?

Question of the Day

Spencer Ackerman asks the tough questions:

Is comparing Bush to Sarah Palin more insulting to Bush or to Palin?

I’m going to say “more insulting to Palin.” Palin’s something of a laughingstock, but Bush is a villain. I mean, he wrecked the world economy, he led to millions of Iraqis being forced to flee their homes, he’s a total disaster and a disgrace. Palin gave bad answers in TV interviews. There’s no real comparison.

Iraqi Leader Condemn Israel

Turning the microphone over to Matt Duss:

Of the various premises on which the U.S. invasion of Iraq was sold to the American people, one of the most bizarre was that a post-Saddam Iraqi government would be friendly to Israel. As with claims about WMD and Al Qaeda connections, this one has proved to be a work of imagination.

Just as they did during Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah, Iraq’s leaders are now showing where their true sympathies lie. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Da’wa Party “issued a statement condemning the attacks and calling on Islamic countries to cut relations with Israel and end all ’secret and public talks’ with it.”

He’s got more in this vein. It’s always been a bit odd that those most inclined to tout their credentials as would-be spreaders of democracy throughout the Arab world are also those least inclined to be at all sensitive to actual Arab public opinion.

Blago Appoints Burress

Wow. Despite requests from essentially everybody to avoid appointing a senator to fill Barack Obama’s senate seat, Ron Blagojevic has decided to tap Illinois Attorney-General Roland Burris to the seat. Back in 2002, Burris ran against Blagojevic in the primary with Obama’s support. The Senate Democrats aren’t happy:

The Democratic leaders of the Senate repeated that view on Tuesday, issuing a statement saying it was “truly regrettable that despite requests from all 50 Democratic Senators and public officials throughout Illinois, Governor Blagojevich would take the imprudent step of appointing someone to the United States Senate who would serve under a shadow and be plagued by questions of impropriety.”

The statement continued, “We say this without prejudice toward Roland Burris’s ability, and we respect his years of public service. But this is not about Mr. Burris; it is about the integrity of a governor accused of attempting to sell this United States Senate seat. Under these circumstances, anyone appointed by Gov. Blagojevich cannot be an effective representative of the people of Illinois and, as we have said, will not be seated by the Democratic Caucus.”

The leaders concluded by saying the appointment was “unfair to Mr. Burris, it is unfair to the people of Illinois and it will ultimately not stand.” They called on the governor once again to resign.

What a weird development. Part of the shame of it is that Burris seems like a perfectly well-qualified choice, but the circumstances put him under an unavoidable cloud of suspicion.

Wanted: Better Buses

Cavan Wilk posts a DC area transit wish-list for both the near- and the short-term. But he leaves off what I think is one of the very most promising things a city like ours can do — improve bus service. Unlike rail projects, bus improvements can be feasibly undertaken in piecemeal ways rather than in quantum leaps. You can buy a few more vehicles and increase service frequency. You can add bus lanes just on parts of routes. You can build a handful of bulb-outs to speed boarding. Nothing needs to be done in gigantic, multibillion dollar leaps. And relative to rail, buses are disproportionately likely to be used by full-time residents (as opposed to tourists) and by poor people both of which are appropriate targets for our disproportionate concern.

One particular low cost thing that would improve DC’s bus service would be to redesign the little schedule cards that are posted at most bus stops. The way this information is currently displayed in DC does not reflect state-of-the-art thinking and should be changed. They should probably also consider eliminating stops on many lines so as to allow buses to run the route more quickly and therefore also arrive more often. Rather than walking two blocks and waiting five minutes for the bus which then moves slowly to your destination I think most people would rather walk five blocks, wait one minute for the bus, and then get where you’re going quickly. Beyond that — bus lanes, bulb-outs, more buses, better shelters — it’s all pretty obvious what would make for better bus service. It’s mostly an issue of financial and political commitment, but it can do a lot to improve quality of life in the area.

By Request: Personnel Quality

I liked NS’s other question too:

Why is “finding better teachers” such a preoccupation among self-described education reformers? Of course, we’d have a better education system if our teachers were better. We’d also have a better military if our soldiers were better and a better health care system if our doctors and nurses were better. Why is education the only policy area where “find better people” is treated as a workable solution?

With regard to soldiers, I would reject the premise. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War there was a very low level of interest in joining the United States military and consequently in order to maintain the required overall force size it was necessary to make recruiting standards quite low and to be pretty lax about who you would keep on. The rebuilding of the quality of the personnel employed by the military over the course of the 1980s and 1990s is one of the great prides of the officers who were involved. And when the Iraq War was leading to a personnel crunch and moves toward diluting recruiting standards there was, rightly, a great deal of hand-wringing over it. Concern about personnel quality is also one of, if not the, main reason why the military brass is generally very hostile to the idea of conscription and this is also why we’ve encouraged our NATO allies to abolish conscript and build smaller, higher-quality, more professionalized forces.

Quality of personnel should always be a concern across public services. Some cities, for example, have trouble offering police officers salaries that are as high as what’s offered in neighboring suburbs. This tends to lead to problems with the quality of the staff available to urban police departments which, in turn, makes it more difficult to keep crime under control.

With regard to teachers, though, it’s worth trying to be more specific since the debate has focused on a couple of particular points. In the United States, we tend to require teachers to do a lot of preemptive qualifying in terms of getting themselves certified. And then after a few years of teaching, they become eligible for tenure status. But we do have some fairly extensive experience with teachers going into the classroom without traditional certification. And the evidence suggests that such teachers are basically just as effective as the teachers who do have the traditional certification. The evidence also suggests that while teachers tend to get a lot more effective after their first couple of years of experience, they don’t get more and more and more effective as further time passes. Thus, the general shape of the teacher quality reform proposals is to (a) relax the preemptive screening so as to make it easier for anyone with a college degree to get into the classroom, (b) make the tenure decision more strictly tied to student achievement, and then (c) take advantage whatever increase in your potential labor force step (a) has given you to make it possible to in step (b) dump the bottom X% of the worst-performing teachers. To all of this I would be strongly inclined to add (d) start paying people more to further increase the size of the labor pool and make step (c) all the more effective.

But the need to have good people doing important public services is by no means unique to teaching and it certainly applies to the military.

By Request: Gentrification

NS asks:

How do you feel about the negative aspects of urban gentrification? You write a good deal about urban planning, but I haven’t read your take on this phenomenon.

I try not to use the word “gentrification” because I think the term obscures more than it clarifies, and tends to cover a widely disparate array of situations. But I do have a lot of thoughts on the matter.

One set of complaints about gentrification are the complaints we should dismiss out of hand from what amount to first-wave gentrifiers. I’ve been known to indulge in such complaining myself, and it’s mostly an inevitable brand of nostalgia, but it shouldn’t be taken seriously. The way this works is that you might move to, say, the U Street area when you’re 23 just as businesses were first starting to open. And then you wake your eyes up a few years later and realize that the cat is out of the bag, so to speak. That more stuff has opened, including some distinctly non-cool new big residential developments, and that the bars are crowded and in general you no longer count as edgy or distinctive for living there. Folks are always going to make these kind of noises, but it shouldn’t be taken seriously.

But a much more reasonable complaint concerns the problem of affordable housing. If there’s a crappy neighborhood somewhere — bad schools, high crime, few retail options, poor transportation links to job markets — you would like policy to improve the neighborhood. But in an ideal world, improving the neighborhood should actually improve the lives of many of the people who currently live in the neighborhood. The fear is that improving the neighborhood actually just means making it the case that the people who live there will no longer be able to afford to live there. This is a very real concern, but I hasten to add that a lot of the most commonly proposed countermeasures aren’t very effective or are at times counterproductive.

The main thing you need to do is recognize that this kind of bad gentrification is a relative scarcity issue. It’s very expensive to live in low-crime walkable transit-accessible neighborhoods featuring good public schools because housing in such neighborhoods is in short supply. To reduce the cost of housing in such neighborhoods there are a few things you need to do. One is that where you have neighborhoods with some of those characteristics you need to allow for denser construction of housing units. Another is that you need to work on the social policy problems of crime and school performance in existing walkable urban neighborhoods. And a third is that you need to build more transit lines and transit nodes and ensure that such nodes as exist have “smart” (i.e., dense, walkable, mixed use) development around them. And a fourth is to not waste the opportunities that we have — there’s a giant open-air parking lot right by the Rhode Island Avenue Metro Station in DC, which is just a dumbly low-intensity use of land adjacent to scarce Metro stations.

Long story short, the greatest villains of these kinds of stories aren’t the gentrifiers so much as the folks living in the already very nice areas who’ve tried to “pull up the ladder” and boost their own property values by choking development in the parts of the metro area where they live.

A gentrification phenomenon that sort of mixes the two kinds of concerns is that there’s a tendency for a neighborhood that gets far enough along the gentrification cycle to stop having “cool,” interesting stores, bars, and restaurants. This needs to be understood as a consequence of high retail rents. Simply put, it’s much easier to run an interesting retail business in places where rents are low. This is one of the main reasons why most of the best Asian food in the DC area is in random strip malls in Northern Virginia — both the central city retail space and the prime NoVa mall space are too expensive. Very high rents lead to homogenization, chains, mediocrity, high prices, etc. To some extent this is unavoidable, but it certainly counts as a reason why cities should try to ensure that there’s ample space zoned for retail and not stifle people with unduly burdensome business licensing rules. Your city will be more fun if you make it relatively cheap and easy to open stores.

The “Magic Negro” Party

Back during the Republican presidential primaries, there was a lot of sentiment that sure Rudy Giuliani was a baby-killer and didn’t hate gays, and sure he lacked relevant qualifications for the presidency, and sure he seemed to be involved in a bit of corruption and cronyism, but, hey, he pissed off a lot of liberals so he must be doing something right. I think that’s the spirit in which you have to understand the boost being given to RNC Chair candidate Chip Saltsman by the fact that he’s a bit racist:

The controversy surrounding a comedy CD distributed by Republican National Committee chair candidate Chip Saltsman has not torpedoed his bid and might have inadvertently helped it.

Four days after news broke that the former Tennessee GOP chairman had sent a CD that included a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” to the RNC members he is courting, some of those officials are rallying around the embattled Saltsman, with a few questioning whether the national media and his opponents are piling on.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of modern American conservatism is that it believes in a curious concept of “color blindness.” In this view, racism is bad. But absent truly egregious behavior, it’s not something you’d really get all that upset about nor is it something you should be really attuned do. But so-called “political correctness” — meaning something like anti-racism that’s gone too far — is a really serious problem. Any hint of political correctness is worth getting upset about. And the views of actual members of racial minorities as to what is and isn’t racist should be completely discounted. Rather than saying that the prudent and decent white person will steer a mile clear of racist activity — sending out “Barack the Magic Negro” CDs, for example — the best course of action is to deliberately drive straight at the line and then get really upset at anyone who says you’ve crossed it.

Peretz: Arabs are Incapable of Civilization

It’s strange the kind of sentiments you see considered acceptable among liberal magazine editors-in-chief like TNR’s Martin Peretz:

Whether the Gaza Palestinians can ever have a truly civil society is another question, the answer to which — given the Arab societies that surround them — is probably ‘no.’

Okay then. In some ways, it’s good to see these sentiments laid out plainly. Disputes between a dominant and subordinate ethnic or religious group are hardly rare in the world. Kurds want independence from Iraq and from Turkey, but Turks and Arabs don’t want to give it to them. But the way these things normally go is that Turkey says Turkish-born Kurds are Turks. They’re citizens of Turkey and carry Turkish passports. This is unsatisfying to Turkey’s Kurdish population, who’s been mistreated in a variety of ways and has various grievances. But you can at least process what the Turkish view of the matter is. With the Palestinians it’s different. They’re not Israeli citizens with Israeli passports, but they’re not citizens of Palestine with Palestinian passports. They’re just a subordinate people. It’s a highly unorthodox situation.

And it’s one I imagine would be a good deal easier to maintain belief in the justice of if you’re able to back it up with some dehumanizing concepts about the inherent limits of Palestinians to go alongside your security rationales.

Forgot About Pre-K

I mostly support what Michelle Rhee is trying to do with the DC Public Schools, but the neglect of preschool programs as a vital element in improving student performance in the district is hard to forgive. A certain type of person isn’t interested in any education improvements that don’t involve picking fights with teacher’s unions, and this seems to me like perhaps an example of Rhee suffering from that affliction.

State Aid

Paul Krugman makes the case for federal fiscal aid to state and local governments. But I also wanted to highlight this more general point:

In fact, the true cost of government programs, especially public investment, is much lower now than in more prosperous times. When the economy is booming, public investment competes with the private sector for scarce resources — for skilled construction workers, for capital. But right now many of the workers employed on infrastructure projects would otherwise be unemployed, and the money borrowed to pay for these projects would otherwise sit idle.

And shredding the social safety net at a moment when many more Americans need help isn’t just cruel. It adds to the sense of insecurity that is one important factor driving the economy down.

It’s important to recognize these points. There’s a certain line of sentimentalist moralism that holds that amidst a general economic downturn, it’s somehow improper for anyone or any institution to be spending money — we ought to be all tightening our belts and battening down the hatches for the lean years. And one needs to understand that things don’t work that way. It’s actually good for institutions that have the capacity to keep spending money — the public sector chief among them — to take advantage of the falling cost of a lot of stuff to expand their operations. That’s how you pull out of a recession. If everyone cuts back, then everyone just keeps cutting back.

Distributing the Surplus

To agree with Scott Lemieux it’s important to understand that whatever good arguments there may be for salary caps in professional sports, the “populist” line of argument that rails against the evils of athletes earning windfalls in a world of injustice makes the least sense. Successful sports franchises generate a ton of revenue since a lot of fans are interested in them. That revenue will inevitably wind up getting split up between the owners of teams and their various employees. Artificially limiting the salaries available to one sub-set of employees — the players — simply means more of the money will wind up in the hands of the owners and the coaches.

Meanwhile, the level of competitive balance in a given sport is generally determined by factors other than the presence or absence of a salary cap. As it happens, uncapped sports like Major League Baseball and many European soccer leagues have more balance than does the NBA or the NFL. Which isn’t because caps cause imbalance, but rather seems to relate to intrinsic features of the spots. Basketball leagues are relatively unbalanced everywhere you look.

By Request: Pasta Mia

NattyB has an unusual question:

Why do yuppies like to line up for food?

Like seriously, is Pasta Mia in Adams Morgan that good? Or is it just some trendy boho fad.

Keeping in mind that I’m speaking only for myself, I think the main attraction with Pasta Mia isn’t that it’s “that good” but that it’s good and it’s cheap relative to the portion sizes. That and the fact that it’s in Adams-Morgan where a lot of people like to go out but there aren’t a ton of good dining options. Personally, I have up the whole going out in Adams-Morgan habit years ago, and probably haven’t been to Pasta Mia since 2004, but that’s my recollection of the appeal.

The other thing Pasta Mia has going for it is a relative lack of competition. Since A.V. Risorante Italiano closed there’s nothing else in the main part of the city existing in that kind of casual Italian/Italian-American culinary space. That’s too bad, because this is a style of food that lots of people like to eat. Now in some respects that’s okay because these pasta dishes are probably something a lot of us are relatively comfortable cooking for ourselves at home, but still it’s a real gap in the city’s culinary landscape. A lot’s been done in recent years to bring new restaurants online specifically in the pizza genre but pasta is good, too!