Matt Yglesias

Poverty Will Always Be With Us Until We Do Something About It

Charles Krauthammer scoffs at the idea of spending money on ensuring that poor people have health care with the observation that “Poverty and disease and social ills will always be with us” so we might as well spend our money on space exploration. Ezra Klein says “That’s true. But the degree to which they’re with us is directly dependent on where we spend those billions.”

I think even that concedes too much. I wish this chart actually started at zero, but the point should be clear either way. It shows the poverty rate in the United States:

What happened? Well, public policy happened. In the 1960s, federal domestic programs got more ambitious, especially with regard to senior citizens. And the poverty rate went down, with the declines concentrated among the seniors who were the main targets of the spending. The extent of poverty is very much subject to our control. Disease, presumably, really will always be with us. But still, polio isn’t with us anymore. Nor is smallpox.

Albert Hirschman wrote a book called The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy. Of the three, I think “futility” is the most pernicious and in some ways the easiest to knock down. It sounds very wise to observe that problems are unsolvable. But even though change is hard, it’s very much possible.

Why is Charles Krauthammer on the TNR Masthead?

The New Republic’s Christopher Orr has a nice catch:

“[A]fter treating this popular revolution as an inconvenience to the real business of Obama-Khamenei negotiations, the president speaks favorably of ’some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election.’ Where to begin? ‘Supreme Leader’? Note the abject solicitousness with which the American president confers this honorific on a clerical dictator.” — Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, June 19

“And the president has said ‘I have seen in Iran’s initial reaction from the supreme leader.’ He is using an honorific to apply to a man whose minions out there are breaking heads, shooting demonstrators, arresting students, shutting the press down, and basically trying to suppress a popular democratic revolution.” — Charles Krauthammer, Fox News All Stars, June 16

“Look, these were sham elections from the beginning. In a real democracy, you can have a change of power as a result. That was not going to happen in Iran. The mullahs are in charge. Khamenei, the supreme leader, remains in charge.” — Charles Krauthammer, Fox News All Stars, June 12

It’s well-established at this point that Fred Hiatt and his superiors have contempt for the readers of the Washington Post and don’t mind using their editorial real estate to misinform the public. But as Brad DeLong points out it continues to be mysterious why Krauthammer is listed as a Contributing Editor on the TNR masthead. The title is, to be sure, merely an honorific. But that only further raises the question of why the magazine would want to honor a writer for whom the rest of the staff seems—appropriately—to have so little respect.

On the merits, I think there’s never before been a taboo against describing foreign leaders, even nasty ones, with their proper titles. Hitler was The Fuhrer, Mussolini was Il Duce.

Rep Ackerman Clarifies Position: Supports Peace, Supports Obama, Supports Settlement Freeze

Americans for Peace Now has an important story clarifying the views of Rep Gary Ackerman (D-NY) on the Obama administration’s push for peace between Israel and the Palestinians:

On the heels of this morning’s historic Obama speech in Cairo, Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) — the Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs’ Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia — issued a statement this afternoon entitled “ACKERMAN URGES FREEZE ON SETTLEMENT CONSTRUCTION, NOT GROWING FAMILIES.” (the text is not yet available online, so the document is copied at the end of this post).

The genesis of this statement is reports in the Jewish press last week that seemed to imply that Chairman Ackerman was endorsing so-called “natural growth” of settlements, and was thus breaking publicly with President Obama’s demand for a settlement freeze that includes “natural growth.” Earlier this week, an article in the Capitol Hill newspaper “Politico” used apparent Ackerman quotes to bolster its highly questionable thesis that even Democrats in Congress are urging Obama to “back off” on the settlement issue.

Well, whatever the Jewish press and Politico thought (or hoped) Ackerman’s views might be, today’s statement is clear: Chairman Ackerman is not saying families shouldn’t grow, or that people should not have babies, but he is saying that settlement construction must stop, period. This is the view that the Chairman, clearly and unequivocally, has articulated today. It is a welcome and important clarification from Chairman Ackerman.

I did an item critical of Ackerman based on that Politico report, so I feel a special obligation to correct the record. Ackerman, as a Jewish representative from a district with many Jewish constituents, has—like Rep Robert Wexler (D-FL)—an especially important role to play as an advocate for a progressive approach to the region. He should be the kind of member who signals to other members that it’s kosher to be against settlement expansion.

Meanwhile, it’s too bad that The Washington Post thinks its readers need to get commentary on this issue from the slipshod and dishonest Charles Krauthammer. Much better information is available at TAP Online where Gershom Gorenberg has a piece on the truth about settlement expansion, including the fact that “natural growth” apparently includes the ability of current residents of Israel proper to buy heavily subsidized housing in West Bank settlements.

The Ticking Time Bomb Slippery Slope

Torture apologists invariably wind up invoking outlandish “ticking time bomb” hypotheticals to justify their barbarous behavior. Wouldn’t you torture someone to prevent the imminent nuclear destruction of Los Angeles? Then if you say “yes” quickly they leap to, “so obviously Dick Cheney is right to think we should torture people in order to produce false confessions of Iraq/al-Qaeda links.”

But it’s just really hard to see any examples of this “ticking time bomb” scenario playing out in real life.

Steve Benen observes that given two weeks to think up a concrete example of the utility of torture, Charles Krauthammer came up with some very weak sauce. It seems that at some point in the 1980s, the IDF took a captive who they thought had knowledge of the location of an IDF corporal who was being held prisoner. The captive was tortured, he coughed up the location, and the IDF found the corporal there, already dead.

What I think this primarily illustrates is how quickly and severely this particular slippery slope slips. We start out saying we would be willing to torture someone in order to save the lives of millions. We end up saying we would be willing to torture someone in order to maybe save the life of one soldier. Needless to say, however, there are lots of situations in which better investigative methods might save one person’s life. Which brings me back to the point that the logic of the conservative view is that we ought to be torturing routinely in all walks of life.