Matt Yglesias

Smithsonian Vulcanologist Makes the Case for Volcano Monitoring

Kriston Capps speaks with Richard Wundermanm, volcanologist and museum specialist for the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History, about a variety of topics. They touch on Bobby Jindal’s attacks on Volcano monitoring:

The number was an order of magnitude too big compared to volcano monitoring. That number was for all kinds of other things as well. That’s only one mistake. The other, I think, incredible mistake is that it’s like so many other specialized kinds of hazards. It’s sort of like throwing stones when you live in a glass house. Here’s a guy who lives on the Gulf Coast, hurricane country. By the way, the Mississippi River—huge hazards from that as well. Floods, levees. And he’s worried about someone else getting money from a different kind of hazard. It’s incredible. That’s what I was struck by just listening to it.

Another thing I have to tell you is, as a government employee—when I say that, I’m speaking as a private citizen. The point is, there are many kinds of hazards. I happen to deal with volcanoes. They’re palpable to me. This is my stock in trade. Hurricanes are that to him, because he’s been around a few. I see this as a difference of opinion, but I also see, and many people have made this comment, that there’s an anti-science vein in that. In other words, I have a feeling he could have attacked some other branch of science. He just thought this one was an easy one to pick on, maybe because of the word “explosion” and that sort of thing.

I find it troubling when people don’t see the public good, the public health in this sort of thing. In the case of volcanoes, for example, Mount Pinatubo, about a million and a half dollars saved hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. property [at former U.S. Air Force station Clark Air Base] when it erupted. It’s very nice to know that it’s going to erupt! And it’s relatively cheap to do that kind of preventative, exploratory work, looking for symptoms before this crisis happens—to warn people to get their aircraft away from it, to take steps to be preventative. I’m afraid government isn’t very good at that. It’s sad. You can see when you see so many contentious people who are unwilling to spend money outside of their own particular area of concern. That’s what troubles me.

There’s a strong case to be made that the government systematically underinvests in the whole class of activities that, like volcano monitoring, involve preventing or mitigating the harm caused by unlikely events. The up-front expenditures, though small, are easy to mock. And the beneficiaries are often invisible precisely because the events in question are unlikely. The big one on this score is probably the possibility of an asteroid or meteor colliding with the earth. But volcanos count, too.

Ride the Train

My how times change: “Louisiana’s transportation department plans to request federal dollars for a New Orleans to Baton Rouge passenger rail service from the same pot of railroad money in the president’s economic stimulus package that Gov. Bobby Jindal criticized as unnecessary pork on national television Tuesday night.”

I love passenger rail, but it’s hard to see this as being high on the list of useful high-speed rail endeavors. The distance is right, but metro New Orleans is the country’s 50th largest metro area (bigger than Tuscon, smaller than Rochester, NY) and Baton Rouge is 67—smaller than Worcester, MA but bigger than El Paso. Which isn’t to deny that a quality rail link could be useful; only to observe that there are a large number of potential projects—basically everything on the existing HSR corridor list plus all kinds of littler things like Phoenix-Tuscon, Worcester-Boston, DC-Norfolk, DC-Richmond—that would seem like a better idea.

The Right’s Civil War

Predictions of a “conservative crack-up” tend to be a dime a dozen in American politics, and it rarely happens. But this month, I really do get the sense that we’re witnessing the opening rounds in a significant battle inside the conservative movement. The difference, it seems to me, is that you’re increasingly seeing actual politicians and people who are very close to the political arena getting into the fray. That’s difference from a question of a handful of disaffected conservative intellectuals or an intramural squabble between pundits. Here, for example, Utah Governor Jon Huntsman basically calls the congressional GOP a “very narrow party of angry people”:

Q: In December you talked about people 40 and under having a very different view on the environment. Is there a similar generational gap on gay rights?

A: You hit on the two issues that I think carry more of a generational component than anything else. And I would liken it a bit to the transformation of the Tory Party in the UK…They went two or three election cycles without recognizing the issues that the younger citizens in the UK really felt strongly about. They were a very narrow party of angry people. And they started branching out through, maybe, taking a second look at the issues of the day, much like we’re going to have to do for the Republican Party, to reconnect with the youth, to reconnect with people of color, to reconnect with different geographies that we have lost.

On Huntsman’s side, roughly speaking, I think you can also see Governor Charlie Crist of Florida and New York Times columnist David Brooks along with his merry band of reformist conservative pundits. Anchoring the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got Bobby Jindal of Louisiana leading a weird band of stimulus rejectionists. He’s being backed up by the House GOP’s quasi-official leaders Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich both of whom have taken the reality-defying view that Jindal’s speech yesterday was secretly brilliant. Guys like Eric Cantor and Mike Pence in the House and Jim DeMint and Mitch McConnell in the Senate have, likewise, really been digging in their heels on the idea that blanket oppositionism is the way to go. Thus far, though, you haven’t seen anyone on the Hill really take up the reformist banner. There’s the Senate’s troika of northeastern moderates, of course, but I think everyone agrees that they’re not the future of the American right. For the infighting to really become significant in a policy sense, you’d need some members of the House and Senate to try to put what Crist and Huntsman are talking about into practice.

The Intra-Republican Fight

The delivery of Bobby Jindal’s speech Tuesday night was so bad that my first instinct was to focus on that. But David Brooks, as seen in this clip below from PBS, went straight to it:

There’s an intra-Republican debate. Some people say the Republican Party lost it’s way because it got too moderate. Some people say got too weird, too conservative. He [Jindal] thinks they got too moderate and so he’s making that case. I think it’s insane, and I just think it’s a disaster for the party; I just think it’s unfortunate right now.

I would be a bit more optimistic than Brooks about the political merits of the hard-right agenda. This certainly isn’t where the country is right now but it’s not so unreasonable to think that things might change. I think we’ll be growing again in late 2012 and Obama will probably get re-elected no matter Republicans say or do. But it’s possible that things will really go off the rails and we’ll have a years-long L-shaped recession in which case if what the opposition party has to offer is hard-right nihilism, then hard-right nihilism is what the voters will embrace. The problem with the “Republicans must become more conservative” viewpoint is that it’s bad for the country. Ultimately, both parties matter. And neither party is ever going to be perfect—beyond ideology, there’s a lot of corruption, self-dealing, interest-group mucking around, etc. To have good policy on a sustained basis required both parties to have some level of interest in good policy.

The Case for Volcano Monitoring

Andrew Thompson has a nice piece up explaining what the deal is with the volcano monitoring funding that Bobby Jindal deems so objectionable:

The $140 million to which Jindal referred is actually for a number of projects conducted by the United States Geological Survey, including volcano monitoring. This monitoring is aimed at helping geologists understand the inner workings of volcanoes as well as providing warnings of impending eruptions, in the United States and in active areas around the world where U.S. military bases are located, such as the Philippines.

Among the scenarios in which the USGS’s monitoring can assist – the catastrophic eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, which killed 57 people (including a geologist monitoring the mountain) and was the deadliest and costliest volcanic eruption in U.S. history ($2.74 billion in 2007 dollars). This event was preceded by thousands of earthquakes in the two months before the volcano blew its top; some of these prompted the Governor of Washington to declare a state of emergency and many residents were evacuated from a designated danger zone. [...]

Volcano monitoring likely saved many lives – and significant money – in the case of the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines (where the United States has military bases) [...] The USGS spent less than $1.5 million monitoring the volcano and was able to warn of the impending eruption, which allowed authorities to evacuate residents, as well as aircraft and other equipment from U.S. bases there. The USGS estimates that the efforts saved thousands of lives and prevented property losses of at least $250 million (considered a conservative figure).

But, look, the Bush administration did a terrible job handling disaster relief at Katrina, so what we need is for the government to just not try at all to stave off these problems. That’s just common sense.

Fox News Panel Pans Jindal

I thought Bobby Jindal was a weird choice for the SOTU response. Everybody knows these things usually don’t go well. Why make the national introduction of your erstwhile rising star a situation in which he has an 80% chance of sucking? And it’s also strange to give it to a 2012 primary candidate—seems like you’re playing favorites. At any rate, I thought the base might like Jindal’s text, but eve the Fox News panel couldn’t stomach the delivery:

I thought Alex Massie had a great react piece to the main speech, capturing the atmosphere and the larger significance of the moment.

Jindal’s Debt Analogy

Based on the RNC’s leaked excerpts from Bobby Jindal’s forthcoming speech, this seems to be the key argument:

Democratic leaders say their legislation will grow the economy. What it will do is grow the government, increase our taxes down the line, and saddle future generations with debt. Who among us would ask our children for a loan, so we could spend money we do not have, on things we do not need? That is precisely what the Democrats in Congress just did. It’s irresponsible. And it’s no way to strengthen our economy, create jobs, or build a prosperous future for our children

The first thing to observe is that this doesn’t even begin to resemble a macroeconomic argument. The moral of Jindal’s parable, is basically that’s it’s per se wrong to implement policies that increase the national debt. That doing is “irresponsible” due to the burden it places on “our children.” But of course someone who actually believed that it’s per se wrong to implement policies that increase the national debt would have opposed the 2001 Bush tax cuts. He would have opposed the 2003 Bush tax cuts. He would have opposed the invasion of Iraq. And he would most certainly not be calling for the extension of the Bush tax cuts. But none of that sounds to me like a description of Bobby Jindal.

Which leaves us with the narrower point that “things we do not need” is actually doing all the work in the analogy. But which things? People who get laid off at a time of generally contracting employment really do need unemployment insurance money. I’m sure these people would prefer to get a job, but when the total number of jobs is decreasing that’s just very difficult. Similarly, families who qualify for food stamps are genuinely poor enough to need assistance to put reasonably nutritious food on the family table. States quite certainly do need financial assistance to avoid needing to furlough workers—cops, teachers, firefighters—and keep up their basic facilities. Everyone agrees that the country faces a shortfall in infrastructure. The overall macroeconomic situation is unquestionably poor. And nobody can deny that conventional monetary policy has nothing more to offer us. This is stuff we need. You can quibble around the margins, of course. The $500 billion or so of spending in the package isn’t the exact $500 billion in spending I would have written. But broadly speaking, it’s spending on useful stuff at a time when spending is needed.

Does the GOP Governors Split Foreshadow the Party’s Future?

Robert Pear and J. David Goodman take to the pages of The New York Times with the provocative notion that the debate between Republican governors over the stimulus package “will go a long way toward shaping how the national party redefines itself in the wake of its election defeats of recent years”.

I’m not really sure how true that is. The issues posed by the stimulus bill are only tangentially related to those of “ordinary” politics. But if this is the future, then it’s a bit hard to see it playing out well for Republicans:

For some — mostly Democrats but also a few prominent moderate Republicans — the bill represents an admittedly imperfect but desperately needed infusion of cash that will help them avert thousands of layoffs.

For others — predominantly conservative Southern Republicans — the flaws partly outweigh the benefits. And for those with presidential aspirations, the strong stance in opposition to the Obama administration may be seen as a way to stand out and stake a claim to leadership.

If it’s true that the only kind of politics that will play in a GOP presidential primary is the kind of politics that plays in Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina but not California or Florida (!) then it’s just hard to see how Republicans get to a majority. At the same time, I recall having read a lot of commentary about how the rise of Iraq War opponents such as Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, and Barack Obama was going to doom the Democrats to some kind of big city oblivion. Instead, well, we got what we have.

I think the main lesson this teaches us is of the transcendent importance of events in political matters. Opposition to the Iraq War was fairly unpopular at one point, but as time when on it became a majority position far outside of Vermont and the Bay Area. At the moment, opposition to the stimulus only seems politically tenable in the Deep South and the Mormon belt. But public opinion on the economy is quite different today from where it was 18 months ago. Why? Well, obviously because the actual situation changed. And 18 months from now—and 18 months from then—things will likely change again. They might change in such a way as to make the stimulus skeptics look utterly discredited or they come to seem rather prescient to some people.

But even if the Jindal/Sanford/Barbour line does come to be more popular in the future, there’s still the question of what you’re going to be for along with what you’re against. And as Joe Klein observes, what Jindal seems to be for is tax cuts for wealth individuals. I don’t have that high an estimation of the public’s memory and I could see people yearning for a returning to the failed economic strategies of the Bush years in 2016 or 2020, but I think it strains credulity to think that voters will have forgotten by 2010 or 2012 that this is a governing philosophy that’s been tried and found wanting.

Bobby Jindal’s Hostages

There’s been some talk about a clutch of very conservative Republican governors from the South, led by Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, “turning down” federal stimulus money. This is mostly nonsense—they’re all actually taking the vast majority of the money and in most cases there’s no real option of declining. But Jindal seems to be genuinely putting the meat on the bones of one aspect of this refusenikery by declining to change Louisiana law in such a way as to make its citizens eligible for extended unemployment insurance benefits. The nominal reason for this is that Jindal is claiming that taking the money would lead to a tax increase on Louisiana businesses, but his reasoning is hard to follow. Ryan Powers observes:

But it is not clear why participating in the expanded unemployment insurance program would result in tax increases for business. By Jindal’s own estimate, the recovery package would have funded his state’s unemployment expansion for three years, at which point the state could — if it chose to do so — phase out the program.

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin suggested earlier today, perhaps Jindal’s presidential ambitions are “clouding” his judgement. “I think he’s been tapped as the up-and-coming Republican to petition a run for president the next time it goes around. So he has a certain vernacular, and a certain way he needs to talk right now,” Nagin said.

My other thought is that there may be a “beggar thy neighbor” strategy going on here. If Louisiana makes its unemployment benefits less generous than what’s available in other states, then maybe unemployed citizens will leave Louisiana for Texas and other neighboring states, thus creating an artificial appearance of an improved economic situation. It would be the equivalent of Mike Bloomberg fighting poverty by demolishing all the low-income housing in New York and hoping the poor people all move elsewhere.