Congress

Stupid problems, stupid solutions

pnrj current events, public policy , , , , , ,

Oct 17 JDN 2459505

Krugman thinks we should Mint The Coin: Mint a $1 trillion platinum coin and then deposit it at the Federal Reserve, thus creating, by fiat, the money to pay for the current budget without increasing the national debt.

This sounds pretty stupid. Quite frankly, it is stupid. But sometimes stupid problems require stupid solutions. And the debt ceiling is an incredibly stupid problem.

Let’s be clear about this: Congress already passed the budget. They had a right to vote it down—that is indeed their Constitutional responsibility. But they passed it. And now that the budget is passed, including all its various changes to taxes and spending, it necessarily requires a certain amount of debt increase to make it work.

There’s really no reason to have a debt ceiling at all. This is an arbitrary self-imposed credit constraint on the US government, which is probably the single institution in the world that least needs to worry about credit constraints. The US is currently borrowing at extremely low interest rates, and has never defaulted in 200 years. There is no reason it should be worrying about taking on additional debt, especially when it is being used to pay for important long-term investments such as infrastructure and education.

But if we’re going to have a debt ceiling, it should be a simple formality. Congress does the calculation to see how much debt will be needed, and if it accepts that amount, passes the budget and raises the debt ceiling as necessary. If for whatever reason they don’t want to incur the additional debt, they should make changes to the budget accordingly—not pass the budget and then act shocked when they need to raise the debt ceiling.

In fact, there is a pretty good case to be made that the debt ceiling is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states in Section 4: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” This was originally intended to ensure the validity of Civil War debt, but it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to mean that all US public debt legally incurred is valid and thus render the debt ceiling un-Constitutional.

Of course, actually sending it to the Supreme Court would take a long time—too long to avoid turmoil in financial markets if the debt ceiling is not raised. So perhaps Krugman is right: Perhaps it’s time to Mint The Coin and fight stupid with stupid.

In search of reasonable conservatism

pnrj core principles, current events, ethics, politics, public policy , , , , ,

Feb 21JDN 2459267

This is a very tumultuous time for American politics. Donald Trump, not once, but twice was impeached—giving him the dubious title of having been impeached as many times as the previous 45 US Presidents combined. He was not convicted either time, not because the evidence for his crimes was lacking—it was in fact utterly overwhelming—but because of obvious partisan bias: Republican Senators didn’t want to vote against a Republican President. All 50 of the Democratic Senators, but only 7 of the 50 Republican Senators, voted to convict Trump. The required number of votes to convict was 67.

Some degree of partisan bias is to be expected. Indeed, the votes looked an awful lot like Bill Clinton’s impeachment, in which all Democrats and only a handful of Republicans voted to acquit. But Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial was nowhere near as open-and-shut as Donald Trump’s. He was being tried for perjury and obstruction of justice, over lies he told about acts that were unethical, but not illegal or un-Constitutional. I’m a little disappointed that no Democrats voted against him, but I think acquittal was probably the right verdict. There’s something very odd about being tried for perjury because you lied about something that wasn’t even a crime. Ironically, had it been illegal, he could have invoked the Fifth Amendment instead of lying and they wouldn’t have been able to touch him. So the only way the perjury charge could actually stick was because it wasn’t illegal. But that isn’t what perjury is supposed to be about: It’s supposed to be used for things like false accusations and planted evidence. Refusing to admit that you had an affair that’s honestly no one’s business but your family’s really shouldn’t be a crime, regardless of your station.

So let us not imagine an equivalency here: Bill Clinton was being tried for crimes that were only crimes because he lied about something that wasn’t a crime. Donald Trump was being tried for manipulating other countries to interfere in our elections, obstructing investigations by Congress, and above all attempting to incite a coup. Partisan bias was evident in all three trials, but only Trump’s trials were about sedition against the United States.

That is to say, I expect to see partisan bias; it would be unrealistic not to. But I expect that bias to be limited. I expect there to be lines beyond which partisans will refuse to go. The Republican Party in the United States today has shown us that they have no such lines. (Or if there are, they are drawn far too high. What would he have to do, bomb an American city? He incited an invasion of the Capitol Building, for goodness’ sake! And that was after so terribly mishandling a pandemic that he caused roughly 200,000 excess American deaths!)

Temperamentally, I like to compromise. I want as many people to be happy as possible, even if that means not always getting exactly what I would personally prefer. I wanted to believe that there were reasonable conservatives in our government, professional statespersons with principles who simply had honest disagreements about various matters of policy. I can now confirm that there are at most 7 such persons in the US Senate, and at most 10 such persons in the US House of Representatives. So of the 261 Republicans in Congress, no more than 17 are actually reasonable statespersons who do not let partisan bias override their most basic principles of justice and democracy.

And even these 17 are by no means certain: There were good strategic reasons to vote against Trump, even if the actual justice meant nothing to you. Trump’s net disapproval rating was nearly the highest of any US President ever. Carter and Bush I had periods where they fared worse, but overall fared better. Johnson, Ford, Reagan, Obama, Clinton, Bush II, and even Nixon were consistently more approved than Trump. Kennedy and Eisenhower completely blew him out of the water—at their worst, Kennedy and Eisenhower were nearly 30 percentage points above Trump at his best. With Trump this unpopular, cutting ties with him would make sense for the same reason rats desert a sinking ship. And yet somehow partisan loyalty won out for 94% of Republicans in Congress.

Politics is the mind-killer, and I fear that this sort of extreme depravity on the part of Republicans in Congress will make it all too easy to dismiss conservatism as a philosophy in general. I actually worry about that; not all conservative ideas are wrong! Low corporate taxes actually make a lot of sense. Minimum wage isn’t that harmful, but it’s also not that beneficial. Climate change is a very serious threat, but it’s simply not realistic to jump directly to fully renewable energy—we need something for the transition, probably nuclear energy. Capitalism is overall the best economic system, and isn’t particularly bad for the environment. Industrial capitalism has brought us a golden age. Rent control is a really bad idea. Fighting racism is important, but there are ways in which woke culture has clearly gone too far. Indeed, perhaps the worst thing about woke culture is the way it denies past successes for civil rights and numbs us with hopelessness.

Above all, groupthink is incredibly dangerous. Once we become convinced that any deviation from the views of the group constitutes immorality or even treason, we become incapable of accepting new information and improving our own beliefs. We may start with ideas that are basically true and good, but we are not omniscient, and even the best ideas can be improved upon. Also, the world changes, and ideas that were good a generation ago may no longer be applicable to the current circumstances. The only way—the only way—to solve that problem is to always remain open to new ideas and new evidence.

Therefore my lament is not just for conservatives, who now find themselves represented by craven ideologues; it is also for liberals, who no longer have an opposition party worth listening to. Indeed, it’s a little hard to feel bad for the conservatives, because they voted for these maniacs. Maybe they didn’t know what they were getting? But they’ve had chances to remove most of them, and didn’t do so. At best I’d say I pity them for being so deluded by propaganda that they can’t see the harm their votes have done.

But I’m actually quite worried that the ideologues on the left will now feel vindicated; their caricatured view of Republicans as moustache-twirling cartoon villains turned out to be remarkably accurate, at least for Trump himself. Indeed, it was hard not to think of the ridiculous “destroying the environment for its own sake” of Captain Planet villains when Trump insisted on subsidizing coal power—which by the way didn’t even work.

The key, I think, is to recognize that reasonable conservatives do exist—there just aren’t very many of them in Congress right now. A significant number of Americans want low taxes, deregulation, and free markets but are horrified by Trump and what the Republican Party has become—indeed, at least a few write for the National Review.

The mere fact that an idea comes from Republicans is not a sufficient reason to dismiss that idea. Indeed, I’m going to say something even stronger: The mere fact that an idea comes from a racist or a bigot is not a sufficient reason to dismiss that idea. If the idea itself is racist or bigoted, yes, that’s a reason to think it is wrong. But even bad people sometimes have good ideas.

The reasonable conservatives seem to be in hiding at the moment; I’ve searched for them, and had difficulty finding more than a handful. Yet we must not give up the search. Politics should not appear one-sided.

Trump is finally being impeached

pnrj current events, ethics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Post 310 Oct 6 JDN 2458763

Given that there have been efforts to impeach Trump since before he took office (which is totally unprecedented, by the way; while several others have committed crimes and been impeached while in office, no other US President has gone into office with widespread suspicion of mass criminal activity), it seems odd that it has taken this long to finally actually start formal impeachment hearings.

Why did it take so long? We needed two things to happen: One, absolutely overwhelming evidence of absolutely flagrant crimes, and two, a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.

This is how divided America has become. If the Republicans were really a mainstream center-right party as they purport to be, they would have supported impeachment just as much as the Democrats, we would have impeached Trump in 2017, and he would have been removed from office by 2018. But in fact they are nothing of the sort. The Republicans no longer believe in democracy. The Democrats are a mainstream center-right party, and the Republicans are far-right White-nationalist crypto-fascists (and less ‘crypto-‘ all the time). After seeing how they reacted to his tax evasion, foreign bribes, national security leaks, human rights violations, obstruction of justice, and overall ubiquitous corruption and incompetence, by this point it’s clear that there is almost nothing that Trump could do which would make either the voter base or the politicians of the Republican Party turn against him—he may literally be correct that he could commit a murder in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue. Maybe if he raised taxes on billionaires or expressed support for Roe v. Wade they would finally revolt.

Even as it stands, there is good reason to fear that the Republican-majority Senate will not confirm the impeachment and remove Trump from office. The political fallout from such a failed impeachment is highly uncertain. So far, markets are taking it in stride; it may even turn out to be good for the economy. (Then again, a good economy may be good for Trump in 2020!) But at this point the evidence is so damning that if we don’t impeach now, we may never impeach again; if this isn’t enough, nothing is. (The Washington Examiner said that months ago, and may already have been right; but the case is even stronger now.)

So, the most likely scenario is that the impeachment goes through the House, but fails in the Senate. The good news is that if the Republicans do block the impeachment, they’ll be publicly admitting that even charges this serious and this substantiated mean nothing to them. Anyone watching who is still on the fence about them will see how corrupt they have become.

After that, this is probably what will happen: The impeachment will be big news for a month or two, then be largely ignored. Trump will probably try to make himself a martyr, talking even louder about ‘witch hunts’. He will lose popularity with a few voters, but his base will continue to support him through thick and thin. (Astonishingly, almost nothing really seems to move his overall approval rating.) The economy will be largely unaffected, or maybe slightly improve. And then we’ll find out in the 2020 election whether the Democrats can mobilize enough opposition to Trump, and—just as importantly—enough support for whoever wins the primaries, to actually win this time around.

If by some miracle enough Republicans find a moral conscience and vote to remove Trump from office, this means that until 2020 we will have President Mike Pence. In a sane world, that in itself would sound like a worst-case scenario; he’s basically a less-sleazy Ted Cruz. He is misogynistic, homophobic, and fanatically religious. He is also a partisan ideologue who toes the party line on basically every issue. Some have even argued that Pence is worse than Trump, because he represents the same ideology but with more subtlety and competence.

But subtlety and competence are important. Indeed, I would much rather have an intelligent, rational, competent ideologue managing our government, leading our military, and controlling our nuclear launch codes than an idiotic, narcissistic, impulsive one. Pence at least can be trusted to be consistent in his actions and diplomatic in his words—two things which Trump has absolutely never been.

Indeed, Pence’s ideological consistency has benefits; unlike Trump, he reliably supports free trade and his fiscal conservatism actually seems genuine for once. Consistency in itself has value: Life is much easier, and the economy is much stronger, when the rules of the game remain the same rather than randomly lurching from one extreme to another.

Pence is also not the pathological liar that Trump is. Yes, Pence has lied many times (only 22% of his statements were evaluated by PolitiFact as “Mostly True” or “True”, and 30% were “False” or “Pants on Fire”). But Trump lies constantly. A mere 14% of Trump’s statements were evaluated by Trump as “Mostly True” or “True”, while 48% were “False” or “Pants on Fire”. For Bernie Sanders, 49% were “Mostly True” or better, and only 11% were “False”, with no “Pants on Fire” at all; for Hillary Clinton, 49% were “Mostly True” or better, and only 10% were “False”, with 3% “Pants on Fire”. People have tried to keep running tallies of Trump’s lies, but it’s a tall order: The Washington Post records over 12,000 lies since he took office less than three years ago. Four thousand lies a year. More than ten every single day. Most people commit lies of omission or say ‘white lies’ several times per day (depending on who you ask, I’ve seen everything from an average of 2 times per day to an average of 100 times per day), but that’s not what we’re talking about here. These are consequential, outright statements of fact that aren’t true. And these are not literally everything he has said that wasn’t true; they are only public lies with relevance to policy or his own personal record. Indeed, Trump lies recklessly, stupidly, pointlessly, nonsensically. He seems like a pathological liar, or someone with dementia who is confabulating to try to fill gaps in his memory. (Indeed, a lot of his behavior is consistent with dementia, and similar to how Reagan acted in the early days of his Alzheimer’s.) At least if Pence takes office, we’ll be able to believe some of what he says.

Of course, Pence won’t be much better on some of the most important issues, such as climate change. When asked how important he thinks climate change is and what should be done about it, Pence always gives mealy-mouthed, evasive responses—but at least he doesn’t make up stories about windmills getting special permits to kill endangered birds.

I admit, choosing Pence over Trump feels like choosing to get shot in the leg instead of the face—but that’s really not a difficult choice, is it?

Government shutdowns are pure waste

pnrj current events, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , ,

Jan 6 JDN 2458490
At the time of writing, the US federal government is still shut down.

The US government has been shut down in this way 22 times—all of them since 1976. Most countries don’t do this. The US didn’t do it for most of our history. Please keep that in mind: This was an entirely avoidable outcome that most countries never go through.

The consequences of a government shutdown are pure waste on an enormous scale. Most government employees get furloughed without pay, which means they miss their credit card and mortgage payments while they wait for their back pay after the shutdown ends. (And this one happened during Christmas!) Contractors have it even worse: They get their contracts terminated and may never see the money they were promised. This has effects on our whole economy; the 2013 shutdown removed a full $24 billion from the US economy, and the current shutdown is expected to drain $6 billion per week. The government itself is taking losses of about $1 billion per week, mostly in the form of unpaid and unaudited taxes.

I personally don’t know what’s going to happen to an NSF grant proposal I’ve been writing for several weeks: Almost the entire NSF has been furloughed as “non-essential” (most of the military remains operative; almost all basic science gets completely shut down—insert comment about the military-industrial complex here), and in 2013 some of the dissertation grants were outright canceled because of the shutdown.

Why do these shutdowns happen?

A government shutdown occurs when the omnibus appropriations bill fails to pass. This bill is essentially the entire US federal budget in a single bill; like any other bill, it has to be passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President.

For some reason, our government decided that if this process doesn’t happen on schedule, the correct answer is to shut down all non-essential government services. This is a frankly idiotic answer. The obviously correct solution is that if Congress and the President can’t agree on a new budget, the old budget gets renewed in its entirety with a standard COLA inflation adjustment. This really seems incredibly basic: If the government can’t agree on how to change something, the status quo should remain in effect until they do. And the status quo is an inflation-adjusted version of the existing budget.

This particular shutdown occurred because of Donald Trump’s brinksmanship on the border wall: He demanded at least $5 billion, and the House wouldn’t give it to him.

It won’t be much longer before we’ve already lost more money on the shutdown than that $5 billion; this may tempt you to say that the House should give in. But the wall won’t actually do anything to make our nation safer or better, and building it would displace thousands of people by eminent domain and send an unquestionable signal of xenophobia to the rest of the world. Frankly it sickens me that there were not enough principled Republicans to stand their ground against Trump’s madness; but at least there are now Democrats standing theirs.

Make no mistake: This is Trump’s shutdown, and he said so himself. The House even offered to do what should be done by default, which is renew the old budget while negotiations on the border wall continue—Trump refused this offer. And Trump keeps changing his story with every new tweet.

But the real problem is that this is even something the President is allowed to do. Vetoing the old budget should restore the old budget, not furlough hundreds of thousands of workers and undermine government services. This is a ludicrous way to organize a government, and seems practically designed to make our government as inefficient, wasteful, and hated as possible. This was an absolutely unforced error and we should be enacting policy rules that would prevent it from ever happening again.

9/11, 14 years on—and where are our civil liberties?

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JDN 2457278 (09/11/2015) EDT 20:53

Today is the 14th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. A lot has changed since then—yet it’s quite remarkable what hasn’t. In particular, we still don’t have our civil liberties back.

In our immediate panicked response to the attacks, the United States passed almost unanimously the USA PATRIOT ACT, giving unprecedented power to our government in surveillance, searches, and even arrests and detentions. Most of those powers have been renewed repeatedly and remain in effect; the only major change has been a slight weakening of the NSA’s authority to use mass dragnet surveillance on Internet traffic and phone metadata. And this change in turn was almost certainly only made because of Edward Snowden, who is still forced to live in Russia for fear of being executed if he returns to the US. That is, the man most responsible for the only significant improvement in civil liberties in the United States in the last decade is living in Russia because he has been branded a traitor. No, the traitors here are the over one hundred standing US Congress members who voted for an act that is in explicit and direct violation of the Constitution. At the very least every one of them should be removed from office, and we as voters have the power to do that—so why haven’t we? In particular, why are Dan Lipinski and Steny Hoyer, both Democrats from non-southern states who voted every single time to extend provisions of the PATRIOT ACT, still in office? At least Carl Levin had the courtesy to resign after sponsoring the act allowing indefinite detention—I hope we would have voted him out anyway, since I’d much rather have a Republican (and all the absurd economic policy that entails) than someone who apparently doesn’t believe the Fourth and Sixth Amendments have any meaning at all.

We have become inured to this loss of liberty; it feels natural or inevitable to us. But these are not minor inconveniences; they are not small compromises. Giving our government the power to surveil, search, arrest, imprison, torture, and execute anyone they want at any time without the system of due process—and make no mistake, that is what the PATRIOT ACT and the indefinite detention law do—means giving away everything that separates us from tyranny. Bypassing the justice system and the rule of law means bypassing everything that America stands for.

So far, these laws have actually mostly been used against people reasonably suspected of terrorism, that much is true; but it’s also irrelevant. Democracy doesn’t mean you give the government extreme power and they uphold your trust and use it benevolently. Democracy means you don’t give them that power in the first place.

If there’s really sufficient evidence to support an arrest for terrorism, get a warrant. If you don’t have enough evidence for a warrant, you don’t have enough evidence for an arrest. If there’s really sufficient evidence to justify imprisoning someone for terrorism, get a jury to convict. If you don’t have enough evidence to convince a jury, guess what? You don’t have enough evidence to imprison them. These are not negotiable. They are not “political opinions” in any ordinary sense. The protection of due process is so fundamental to democracy that without it political opinions lose all meaning.

People talk about “Big Government” when we suggest increasing taxes on capital gains or expanding Medicare. No, that isn’t Big Government. Searching without warrants is Big Government. Imprisoning people without trial is Big Government. From all the decades of crying wolf in which any policy someone doesn’t like is accused of being “tyranny”, we seem to have lost the ability to recognize actual tyranny. I hope you understand the full force of my meaning when I say that the PATRIOT ACT is literally fascist. Fascism has come to America, and as predicted it was wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

In this sort of situation, a lot of people like to quote (or misquote) Benjamin Franklin:

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

With the qualifiers “essential” and “temporary”, this quote seems right; but a lot of people forget them and quote him as saying:
“Those would give up liberty to purchase safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

That’s clearly wrong. We do in fact give up liberty to purchase safety, and as well we should. We give up our liberty to purchase weapons-grade plutonium; we give up our liberty to drive at 220 mph. The question we need to be asking is: How much liberty are we giving up to gain how much safety?

Spoken like an economist, the question is not whether you will give up liberty to purchase safety—the question is at what price you’re willing to make the purchase. The price we’ve been paying in response to terrorism is far too high. Indeed, the price we are paying is tantamount to America itself.

As horrific as 9/11 was, it’s important to remember: It only killed 3,000 people.

This statement probably makes you uncomfortable; it may even offend you. How dare I say “only”?

I don’t mean to minimize the harm of those deaths. I don’t mean to minimize the suffering of people who lost friends, colleagues, parents, siblings, children. The death of any human being is the permanent destruction of something irreplaceable, a spark of life that can never be restored; it is always a tragedy and there is never any way to repay it.

But I think people are actually doing the opposite—they are ignoring or minimizing millions of other deaths because those deaths didn’t happen to be dramatic enough. A parent killed by a heart attack is just as lost as a parent who died in 9/11. A friend who died of brain cancer is just as gone as a friend who was killed in a terrorist attack. A child killed in a car accident is just as much a loss as a child killed by suicide bombers. If you really care about human suffering, I contend that you should care about all human suffering, not just the kind that makes the TV news.

Here is a list, from the CDC, of things that kill more Americans per month than terrorists have killed in the last three decades:

Heart disease: 50,900 per month

Cancer: 48,700 per month

Lung disease: 12,400 per month

Accidents: 10,800 per month

Stroke: 10,700 per month

Alzheimer’s: 7,000 per month

Diabetes: 6,300 per month

Influenza: 4,700 per month

Kidney failure: 3,900 per month

Terrorism deaths since 1985: 3,455
Yes, that’s right; influenza kills more Americans per month (on average; flu is seasonal, after all) than terrorism has killed in the last thirty years.
And for comparison, other violent deaths, not quite but almost as many per month as terrorism has killed in my entire life so far:
Suicide: 3,400 per month

Homicide: 1,300 per month

Now, with those figures in mind, I want you to ask yourself the following question: Would you be willing to give up basic, fundamental civil liberties in order to avoid any of these things?

Would you want the government to be able to arrest you and imprison you without trial for eating too many cheeseburgers, so as to reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke?

Would you want the government to monitor your phone calls and Internet traffic to make sure you don’t smoke, so as to avoid lung disease? Or to watch for signs of depression, to reduce the rate of suicide?

Would you want the government to be able to use targeted drone strikes, ordered directly by the President, pre-emptively against probable murderers (with a certain rate of collateral damage, of course), to reduce the rate of homicide?

I presume that the answer to all the above questions is “no”. Then now I have to ask you: Why are you willing to give up those same civil liberties to prevent a risk that is three hundred times smaller?

And then of course there’s the Iraq War, which killed 4,400 Americans and at least 100,000 civilians, and the Afghanistan War, which killed 3,400 allied soldiers and over 90,000 civilians.

In response to the horrific murder of 3,000 people, we sacrificed another 7,800 soldiers and killed another 190,000 innocent civilians. What exactly did that accomplish? What benefit did we get for such an enormous cost?

The people who sold us these deadly wars and draconian policies did so based on the threat that terrorism could somehow become vastly worse, involving the release of some unstoppable bioweapon or the detonation of a full-scale nuclear weapon, killing millions of people—but that has never happened, has never gotten close to happening, and would be thousands of times worse than the worst terrorist attacks that have ever actually happened.

If we’re worried about millions of people dying, it is far more likely that there would be a repeat of the 1918 influenza pandemic, or an accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon, or a flashpoint event with Russia or China triggering World War III; it’s probably more likely that there would be an asteroid impact large enough to kill a million people than there would be a terrorist attack large enough to do the same.

As it is, heart disease is already killing millions of people—about a million every two years—and we aren’t so panicked about that as to give up civil liberties. Elsewhere in the world, malnutrition kills over 3 million children per year, essentially all of it due to extreme poverty, which we could eliminate by spending between a quarter ($150 billion) and a half ($300 billion) of our current military budget ($600 billion); but we haven’t even done that even though it would require no loss of civil liberties at all.

Why is terrorism different? In short, the tribal paradigm.

There are in fact downsides to not being infinite identical psychopaths, and this is one of them. An infinite identical psychopath would simply maximize their own probability of survival; but finite diverse tribalists such as we underreact to some threats (such as heart disease) and overreact to others (such as terrorism). We’ll do almost anything to stop the latter—and almost nothing to stop the former.

Terrorists are perceived as a threat not just to our individual survival like heart disease or stroke, but a threat to our tribe from another tribe. This triggers a deep, instinctual sense of panic and hatred that makes us willing to ignore principles we would otherwise uphold and commit acts of violence we would otherwise find unimaginable.

Indeed, it’s precisely that instinct which motivates the terrorists in the first place. From their perspective, we are the other tribe that threatens their tribe, and they are therefore willing to stop at nothing until we are destroyed.

In a fundamental way, when we respond to terrorism in this way we do not defeat them—we become them.
If you ask people who support the PATRIOT ACT, it’s very clear that they don’t see themselves as imposing upon the civil liberties of Americans. Instead, they see themselves as protecting Americans (our tribe), and they think the impositions upon civil liberties will only harm those who don’t count as Americans (other tribes). This is a pretty bizarre notion if you think about it carefully—if you don’t need a warrant or probable cause to imprison people, then what stops you from imprisoning people who aren’t terrorists?—but people don’t think about it carefully. They act on emotion, on instinct.

The odds of terrorists actually destroying America by killing people are basically negligible. Even the most deadly terrorist attack in recorded history—9/11—killed fewer Americans than die every month from diabetes, or every week from heart disease. Even the most extreme attacks feared (which are extremely unlikely) wouldn’t be any worse than World War II, which of course we won.

But the odds of terrorists destroying America by making us give up the rights and freedoms that define us as a nation? That’s well underway.

The terrible, horrible, no-good very-bad budget bill

pnrj public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457005 PST 11:52.

I would have preferred to write about something a bit cheerier (like the fact that by the time I write my next post I expect to be finished with my master’s degree!), but this is obviously the big news in economic policy today. The new House budget bill was unveiled Tuesday, and then passed in the House on Thursday by a narrow vote. It has stalled in the Senate thanks in part to fierce—and entirely justified—opposition by Elizabeth Warren, and so today it has been delayed in the Senate. Obama has actually urged his fellow Democrats to pass it, in order to avoid another government shutdown. Here’s why Warren is right and Obama is wrong.

You know the saying “You can’t negotiate with terrorists!”? Well, in practice that’s not actually true—we negotiate with terrorists all the time; the FBI has special hostage negotiators for this purpose, because sometimes it really is the best option. But the saying has an underlying kernel of truth, which is that once someone is willing to hold hostages and commit murder, they have crossed a line, a Rubicon from which it is impossible to return; negotiations with them can never again be good-faith honest argumentation, but must always be a strategic action to minimize collateral damage. Everyone knows that if you had the chance you’d just as soon put bullets through all their heads—because everyone knows they’d do the same to you.

Well, right now, the Republicans are acting like terrorists. Emotionally a fair comparison would be with two-year-olds throwing tantrums, but two-year-olds do not control policy on which thousands of lives hang in the balance. This budget bill is designed—quite intentionally, I’m sure—in order to ensure that Democrats are left with only two options: Give up on every major policy issue and abandon all the principles they stand for, or fail to pass a budget and allow the government to shut down, canceling vital services and costing billions of dollars. They are holding the American people hostage.

But here is why you must not give in: They’re going to shoot the hostages anyway. This so-called “compromise” would not only add $479 million in spending on fighter jets that don’t work and the Pentagon hasn’t even asked for, not only cut $93 million from WIC, a 3.5% budget cut adjusted for inflation—literally denying food to starving mothers and children—and dramatically increase the amount of money that can be given by individuals in campaign donations (because apparently the unlimited corporate money of Citizens United wasn’t enough!), but would also remove two of the central provisions of Dodd-Frank financial regulation that are the only thing that stands between us and a full reprise of the Great Recession. And even if the Democrats in the Senate cave to the demands just as the spineless cowards in the House already did, there is nothing to stop Republicans from using the same scorched-earth tactics next year.

I wouldn’t literally say we should put bullets through their heads, but we definitely need to get these Republicans out of office immediately at the next election—and that means that all the left-wing people who insist they don’t vote “on principle” need to grow some spines of their own and vote. Vote Green if you want—the benefits of having a substantial Green coalition in Congress would be enormous, because the Greens favor three really good things in particular: Stricter regulation of carbon emissions, nationalization of the financial system, and a basic income. Or vote for some other obscure party that you like even better. But for the love of all that is good in the world, vote.

The two most obscure—and yet most important—measures in the bill are the elimination of the swaps pushout rule and the margin requirements on derivatives. Compared to these, the cuts in WIC are small potatoes (literally, they include a stupid provision about potatoes). They also really aren’t that complicated, once you boil them down to their core principles. This is however something Wall Street desperately wants you to never, ever do, for otherwise their global crime syndicate will be exposed.

The swaps pushout rule says quite simply that if you’re going to place bets on the failure of other companies—these are called credit default swaps, but they are really quite literally a bet that a given company will go bankrupt—you can’t do so with deposits that are insured by the FDIC. This is the absolute bare minimum regulatory standard that any reasonable economist (or for that matter sane human being!) would demand. Honestly I think credit default swaps should be banned outright. If you want insurance, you should have to buy insurance—and yes, deal with the regulations involved in buying insurance, because those regulations are there for a reason. There’s a reason you can’t buy fire insurance on other people’s houses, and that exact same reason applies a thousandfold for why you shouldn’t be able to buy credit default swaps on other people’s companies. Most people are not psychopaths who would burn down their neighbor’s house for the insurance money—but even when their executives aren’t psychopaths (as many are), most companies are specifically structured so as to behave as if they were psychopaths, as if no interests in the world mattered but their own profit.

But the swaps pushout rule does not by any means ban credit default swaps. Honestly, it doesn’t even really regulate them in any real sense. All it does is require that these bets have to be made with the banks’ own money and not with everyone else’s. You see, bank deposits—the regular kind, “commercial banking”, where you have your checking and savings accounts—are secured by government funds in the event a bank should fail. This makes sense, at least insofar as it makes sense to have private banks in the first place (if we’re going to insure with government funds, why not just use government funds?). But if you allow banks to place whatever bets they feel like using that money, they have basically no downside; heads they win, tails we lose. That’s why the swaps pushout rule is absolutely indispensable; without it, you are allowing banks to gamble with other people’s money.

What about margin requirements? This one is even worse. Margin requirements are literally the only thing that keeps banks from printing unlimited money. If there was one single cause of the Great Recession, it was the fact that there were no margin requirements on over-the-counter derivatives. Because there were no margin requirements, there was no limit to how much money banks could print, and so print they did; the result was a still mind-blowing quadrillion dollars in nominal value of outstanding derivatives. Not million, not billion, not even trillion; quadrillion. $1e15. $1,000,000,000,000,000. That’s how much money they printed. The total world money supply is about $70 trillion, which is 1/14 of that. (If you read that blog post, he makes a rather telling statement: “They demonstrate quite clearly that those who have been lending the money that we owe can’t possibly have had the money they lent.” No, of course they didn’t! They created it by lending it. That is what our system allows them to do.)

And yes, at its core, it was printing money. A lot of economists will tell you otherwise, about how that’s not really what’s happening, because it’s only “nominal” value, and nobody ever expects to cash them in—yeah, but what if they do? (These are largely the same people who will tell you that quantitative easing isn’t printing money, because, uh… er… squirrel!) A tiny fraction of these derivatives were cashed in in 2007, and I think you know what happened next. They printed this money and now they are holding onto it; but woe betide us all if they ever decide to spend it. Honestly we should invalidate all of these derivatives and force them to start over with strict margin requirements, but short of that we must at least, again at the bare minimum, have margin requirements.

Why are margin requirements so important? There’s actually a very simple equation that explains it. If the margin requirement is m, meaning that you must retain a portion m between 0 and 1 of the loans you make as reserves, the total amount of money supply that can be created from the current amount of money M is just M/m. So if margin requirements were 100%—full-reserve banking—then the total money supply is M, and therefore in full control of the central bank. This is how it should be, in my opinion. But usually m is set around 10%, so the total money supply is 10M, meaning that 90% of the money in the system was created by banks. But if you ever let that margin requirement go to zero, you end up dividing by zero—and the total amount of money that can be created is infinite.

To see how this works, suppose we start with $1000 and put it in bank A. Bank A then creates a loan; how big they can make the loan depends on the margin requirement. Let’s say it’s 10%. They can make a loan of $900, because they must keep $100 (10% of $1000) in reserve. So they do that, and then it gets placed in bank B. Then bank B can make a loan of $810, keeping $90. The $810 gets deposited in bank C, which can make a loan of $729, and so on. The total amount of money in the system is the sum of all these: $1000 in bank A (remember, that deposit doesn’t disappear when it’s loaned out!), plus the $900 in bank B, plus $810 in bank C, plus $729 in bank D. After 4 steps we are at $3,439. As we go through more and more steps, the money supply gets larger at an exponentially decaying rate and we converge toward the maximum at $10,000.

The original amount is M, and then we add M(1-m), M(1-m)^2, M(1-m)^3, and so on. That produces the following sum up to n terms (below is LaTeX, which I can’t render for you without a plugin, which requires me to pay for a WordPress subscription I cannot presently afford; you can copy-paste and render it yourself here):

\sum_{k=0}^{n} M (1-m)^k = M \frac{1 – (1-m)^{n+1}}{m}

And then as you let the number of terms grow arbitrarily large, it converges toward a limit at infinity:

\sum_{k=0}^{\infty} M (1-m)^k = \frac{M}{m}

To be fair, we never actually go through infinitely many steps, so even with a margin requirement of zero we don’t literally end up with infinite money. Instead, we just end up with n M, the number of steps times the initial money supply. Start with $1000 and go through 4 steps: $4000. Go through 10 steps: $10,000. Go through 100 steps: $100,000. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger, until that money has nowhere to go and the whole house of cards falls down.

Honestly, I’m not even sure why Wall Street banks would want to get rid of margin requirements. It’s basically putting your entire economy on the counterfeiting standard. Fiat money is often accused of this, but the government has both (a) the legitimate authority empowered by the electorate and (b) incentives to maintain macroeconomic stability, neither of which private banks have. There is no reason other than altruism (and we all know how much altruism Citibank and HSBC have—it is approximately equal to the margin requirement they are trying to get passed—and yes, they wrote the bill) that would prevent them from simply printing as much money as they possibly can, thus maximizing their profits; and they can even excuse the behavior by saying that everyone else is doing it, so it’s not like they could prevent the collapse all by themselves. But by lobbying for a regulation to specifically allow this, they no longer have that excuse; no, everyone won’t be doing it, not unless you pass this law to let them. Despite the global economic collapse that was just caused by this sort of behavior only seven years ago, they now want to return to doing it. At this point I’m beginning to wonder if calling them an international crime syndicate is actually unfair to international crime syndicates. These guys are so totally evil it actually goes beyond the bounds of rational behavior; they’re turning into cartoon supervillains. I would honestly not be that surprised if there were a video of one of these CEOs caught on camera cackling maniacally, “Muahahahaha! The world shall burn!” (Then again, I was pleasantly surprised to see the CEO of Goldman Sachs talking about the harms of income inequality, though it’s not clear he appreciated his own contribution to that inequality.)

And that is why Democrats must not give in. The Senate should vote it down. Failing that, Obama should veto. I wish he still had the line-item veto so he could just remove the egregious riders without allowing a government shutdown, but no, the Senate blocked it. And honestly their reasoning makes sense; there is supposed to be a balance of power between Congress and the President. I just wish we had a Congress that would use its power responsibly, instead of holding the American people hostage to the villainous whims of Wall Street banks.

Why immigration is good

pnrj public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2456977 PST 12:31.

The big topic in policy news today is immigration. After years of getting nothing done on the issue, Obama has finally decided to bypass Congress and reform our immigration system by executive order. Republicans are threatening to impeach him if he does. His decision to go forward without Congressional approval may have something to do with the fact that Republicans just took control of both houses of Congress. Naturally, Fox News is predicting economic disaster due to the expansion of the welfare state. (When is that not true?) A more legitimate critique comes from the New York Times, who point out how this sudden shift demonstrates a number of serious problems in our political system and how it is financed.

So let’s talk about immigration, and why it is almost always a good thing for a society and its economy. There are a couple of downsides, but they are far outweighed by the upsides.

I’ll start with the obvious: Immigration is good for the immigrants. That’s why they’re doing it. Uprooting yourself from your home and moving thousands of miles isn’t easy under the best circumstances (like I when I moved from Michigan to California for grad school); now imagine doing it when you are in crushing poverty and you have to learn a whole new language and culture once you arrive. People are only willing to do this when the stakes are high. The most extreme example is of course the children refugees from Latin America, who are finally getting some of the asylum they so greatly deserve, but even the “ordinary” immigrants coming from Mexico are leaving a society racked with poverty, endemic with corruption, and bathed in violence—most recently erupting in riots that have set fire to government buildings. These people are desperate; they are crossing our border despite the fences and guns because they feel they have no other choice. As a fundamental question of human rights, it is not clear to me that we even have the right to turn these people away. Forget the effect on our economy; forget the rate of assimilation; what right do we have to say to these people that their suffering should go on because they were born on the wrong side of an arbitrary line?

There are wealthier immigrants—many of them here, in fact, for grad school—whose circumstances are not so desperate; but hardly anyone even considers turning them away, because we want their money and their skills in our society. Americans who fear brain drain have it all backwards; the United States is where the brains drain to. This trend may be reversing more recently as our right-wing economic policy pulls funding away from education and science, but it would likely only reach the point where we export as many intelligent people as we import; we’re not talking about creating a deficit here, only reducing our world-dominating surplus. And anyway I’m not so concerned about those people; yes, the world needs them, but they don’t need much help from the world.

My concern is for our tired, our poor, our huddled masses yearning to breathe free. These are the people we are thinking about turning away—and these are the people who most desperately need us to take them in. That alone should be enough reason to open our borders, but apparently it isn’t for most people, so let’s talk about some of the ways that America stands to gain from such a decision.

First of all, immigration increases economic growth. Immigrants don’t just take in money; they also spend it back out, which further increases output and creates jobs. Immigrants are more likely than native citizens to be entrepreneurs, perhaps because taking the chance to start a business isn’t so scary after you’ve already taken the chance to travel thousands of miles to a new country. Our farming system is highly dependent upon cheap immigrant labor (that’s a little disturbing, but if as far as the US economy, we get cheap food by hiring immigrants on farms). On average, immigrants are younger than our current population, so they are more likely to work and less likely to retire, which has helped save the US from the economic malaise that afflicts nations like Japan where the aging population is straining the retirement system. More open immigration wouldn’t just increase the number of immigrants coming here to do these things; it would also make the immigrants who are already here more productive by opening up opportunities for education and entrepreneurship. Immigration could speed the recovery from the Second Depression and maybe even revitalize our dying Rust Belt cities.

Now, what about the downsides? By increasing the supply of labor faster than they increase the demand for labor, immigrants could reduce wages. There is some evidence that immigrants reduce wages, particularly for low-skill workers. This effect is rather small, however; in many studies it’s not even statistically significant (PDF link). A 10% increase in low-skill immigrants leads to about a 3% decrease in low-skill wages (PDF link). The total economy grows, but wages decrease at the bottom, so there is a net redistribution of wealth upward.

Immigration is one of the ways that globalization increases within-nation inequality even as it decreases between-nation inequality; you move the poor people to rich countries, and they become less poor than they were, but still poorer than most of the people in those rich countries, which increases the inequality there. On average the world becomes better off, but it can seem bad for the rich countries, especially the people in rich countries who were already relatively poor. Because they distribute wealth by birthright, national borders actually create something analogous to the privilege of feudal lords, albeit to a much larger segment of the population. (Much larger: Here’s a right-wing site trying to argue that the median American is in the top 1% of income by world standards; neat trick, because Americans comprise 4% of the world population—so our top half makes up 2% of the world’s population by themselves. Yet somehow apparently that 2% of the population is the top 1%? Also, the US isn’t the only rich country; have you heard of, say, Europe?)

There’s also a lot of variation in the literature as to the size—or even direction—of the effect of immigration on low-skill wages. But since the theory makes sense and the preponderance of the evidence is toward a moderate reduction in wages for low-skill native workers, let’s assume that this is indeed the case.

First of all I have to go back to my original point: These immigrants are getting higher wages than they would have in the countries they left. (That part is usually even true of the high-skill immigrants.) So if you’re worried about low wages for low-skill workers, why are you only worried about that for workers who were born on this side of the fence? There’s something deeply nationalistic—if not outright racist—inherent in the complaint that Americans will have lower pay or lose their jobs when Mexicans come here. Don’t Mexicans also deserve jobs and higher pay?

Aside from that, do we really want to preserve higher wages at the cost of economic efficiency? Are high wages an end in themselves? It seems to me that what we’re really concerned about is welfare—we want the people of our society to live better lives. High wages are one way to do that, but not the only way; a basic income could reverse that upward redistribution of wealth, taking the economic benefits of the immigration that normally accrue toward the top and giving them to the bottom. As I already talked about in an earlier post, a basic income is a lot more efficient than trying to mess around with wages. Markets are very powerful; we shouldn’t always accept what they do, but we should also be careful when we interfere with them. If the market is trying to drive certain wages down, that means that there is more desire to do that kind of work then there is work of that kind that needs done. The wage change creates a market incentive for people to switch to more productive kinds of work. We should also be working to create opportunities to make that switch—funding free education, for instance—because an incentive without an opportunity is a bit like pointing a gun at someone’s head and ordering them to give birth to a unicorn.

So on the one hand we have the increase in local inequality and the potential reduction in low-skill wages; those are basically the only downsides. On the other hand, we have increases in short-term and long-term economic growth, lower global inequality, more spending, more jobs, a younger population with less strain on the retirement system, more entrepreneurship, and above all, the enormous lifelong benefits to the immigrants themselves that motivated them to move in the first place. It seems pretty obvious to me: we can enact policies to reduce the downsides, but above all we must open our borders.