Quote of the day

We don't have the best healthcare in the world. We just don't. We have the most expensive healthcare in the world and the best-paid doctors in the world, but that's it. On pretty much every other measure, we suck.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/07/28th-world-baby

President Romney?

Not likely.

The speculators in the Iowa Electronic Markets certainly don't think so.  The IEM 2012 presidential election prediction market indicates that, as of 9:30 CST today, Obama has a 60 percent chance of winning the popular vote; Romney, only a 40 percent chance.

And Nate Silver doesn't think so either. Silver has the lowdown on the Electoral College:  Obama 302, Romney 236.  Most important, Silver gives Obama a 72-percent chance of winning the Electoral College vote as against Romney's 28-percent chance.

We can't relax entirely unless Obama has a 100 percent probability of winning every one of those 538 electoral votes, but things are certainly looking good. 
______________

"The Iowa Electronic Markets"?

The IEM is a real-money, Web-based system on which anonymous traders . . . [bet on future] events. On the IEM’s presidential election market . . . the price of each candidate’s stock reflects the . . . forecast of who will win in November, a forecast that, in the past, has proven quite accurate.  (Salon)

"Nate Silver"?

The accuracy of his November 2008 presidential election predictions—he correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states—won Silver further attention and commendation. The only state he missed was Indiana, which went for Barack Obama by 1%. He also correctly predicted the winner of all 35 Senate races that year. (Wikipedia)

Through a glass darkly

Harold Pollock posted the following on the RBC web site yesterday:

Commenter Mike Kaplan asks the following question below my last post:

Why am I paying taxes to take care of your [intellectually disabled] brother-in-law Vincent? He is your family – why don’t you take care of him? Why do you want to force me to sacrifice my time and labor – in taxes – to do what you are not doing?

All of us need to be responsible for ourselves and our families. The federal government currently borrows over 40% of what it spends. We just don’t have the money to continue this way.

I’ve been thinking about this. It’s reasonable to ask in the direct and sincere way Mr. Kaplan does. After all, I am a full professor at a leading university. I am not an economically disadvantaged person.

I have my own views. I’m more interested in how RBC readers would answer this query. So what do you think? I hope you answer him directly, in a spirit of civility.

For me, in principle anyway, the answer is simple. It's the same as it is to most (all?) other questions of social justice. Put yourself behind Rawls's veil, and ask yourself:

1. Do you want to risk the enormous, albeit very unlikely, burden attendant on being a mentally disabled person (or the next of kin of a mentally disabled person) in a society that does not provide care for such people?
   
2. Or do you want to risk the very small but almost certain tax burden that, as a non-disabled person, you will incur in a society that provides care for the mentally disabled?

As for me, I'll take door 2 every time.

That said, . . .

. . . I don't really think that issues like this get decided by putting ourselves behind that veil and they don't get decided by rational discussion or by cost-benefit analyses. All that stuff is highly over-rated. Although we may think that we make decisions carefully and rationally, we're actually fooling ourselves.

Instead, our decisions are determined by who we are. And who we are is determined by nature or nurture or Grace (or some combination of the three). Apparently, who Mr. Kaplan is is someone who looks at Vincent and says "Whew! I'm glad he's not my problem. What's for supper?" Others look at Vincent and say "How awful! I'm glad he's not my problem, but I'm glad to have a few of my tax dollars make his (and his care giver's) life a little more bearable."

Addendum: At mass on Holy Thursday we were blessed to sit with a group of mentally disabled adults from the local L'Arche community. The wonderful wife, Katka, and I all found it a very moving experience. Maybe someday I'll drum up the courage (or, better, receive the grace) to get involved in L'Arche.

Have you at long last no sense of decency?

12 1/2 minutes of great television: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/welch-mccarthy.html

RFK / MLK

Wow! Just wow!

Future reading

A couple wild-eyed lefties I'd like to check out some day:

• Chris Hedges (whom I'd never heard of until I saw him on Book TV for all of 5 minutes)
• Amy Goodman (who can be so intense as to be almost scary)

Mom and pop stores

When politicians sing the virtues of small business, I think they want us to think about mom and pop grocery stores, Lou's barber shop, Bubba's coon dog kennel, and Maria's maid service. That aint' exactly what the Small Business Administration thinks of, however:

• A "small" manufacturing business can have up to 1500 employees.
• A "small" wholesaler can have up to 500 employees.
• A "small" service business can have revenue of up to $21.5 million.
• A "small" retailer can have revenue of up to $20 million.
• A "small" general contractor can have revenue of up to $17 million.

Not to put too fine a point on it, . . .

Let’s say it clearly: the Republican activist base consists largely of worshipers of evil. The god they believe in accepts human sacrifice. They call him “Jesus,” but the true name of the god they adore, and who accepts their sacrifices, is Moloch.

Mark Kleiman

You really should be reading The Reality-Based Community

Kleiman alerts us to a Politico story:

The headline asks the question: “Is Rick Perry Dumb?” The story implies the answer: “As dumb as a box of rocks.” Or, as one Republican governor is quoted as saying, “Bush without the brains.”

Source

And Keith Humphreys takes on liberals who are upset with the president (if you'll excuse the lengthy quotation):

Harold Pollack tells me that the Affordable Care Act is the best domestic AIDS health policy in the history of the United States. I know myself what Jeffrey Buck has just documented: It’s also the best domestic drug and alcohol health policy in the history of the United States. In these and countless other ways it will literally prove life-saving to hundreds of thousands of people who live in poverty and near-poverty.

Ted Kennedy couldn’t do it; it was the greatest regret of his political career. Jimmy Carter couldn’t do it. Bill Clinton came into office with both Houses of Congress in his party’s hands yet almost ruined his presidency trying to do it. President Barack Hussein Obama did it.

Yet a persistent minority of putative progressives speak of holding their nose and voting for Obama against Rick Perry, or call the President a failure, a traitor to liberalism, an icy technocrat, a heartless plutocrat, more conservative than Barry Goldwater, I could go on but I won’t.

[. . .] I have lost patience and very evidently my temper with those sanctimonious ingrates of the Left who denigrate as a turncoat the President who took an extraordinary political risk to deliver for progressives and for the most vulnerable citizens in this country.

It may sound like what I am saying is that the Affordable Care Act is such a historic triumph for American progressives that a liberal would have to be deluded to direct any of the aforementioned slanders at President Obama.

Yes, that is exactly what I am saying.

Source

Is this a great country or what?

Here's Harold Pollack, a lefty:

This has become a conflict with a nihilist minority among Republicans. This minority exudes contempt for the craft of public policy. It eagerly seeks whatever violation of our nation’s implicit legislative norms would provide some momentary advantage. This minority now holds hostage the full faith and credit of the United States . . .

OK, Now I'm Mad
(emphasis added)

Here's Andrew Sullivan, a self-described conservative who I would probably classify a moderate:

The Republican refusal to countenance any way to raise revenues to tackle the massive debt incurred largely on their watch and from a recession which started under Obama's predecessor makes one thing clear. They are not a political party in government; they are a radical faction that refuses to participate meaningfully in the give and take the Founders firmly believed should be at the center of American government. They are not conservatives in this sense. They are anarchists.

America's Cold Civil War
(emphasis added)

And don't forget certfied conservative-with-a-capital-C, David Brooks:

. . . the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

[snip]

The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.

The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor.

The Mother of All No-Brainers
(emphasis added)

So according to these guys, the Repubs are controlled by nihilist, anarchist, anti-intellectual, moral degenerates. Sounds just about right to me.

"Is this really too complicated to understand?"

Kevin Drum rails against "[t]he insane idea that the federal deficit needs to be addressed now now now!" I don't do economics any more, thank goodness, but to my way of thinking he's right, right, right!

Republicans didn't care about the deficit when Reagan was president, they didn't care when Bush Sr. was president, and they didn't care when Bush Jr. was president. They only get religion when a Democrat is president and they need an all-purpose reason to oppose everything Democrats want to do. Is this really too complicated to understand? It's a political tactic — and a good one! — not a genuine reaction to anything in the real world. In the real world, stimulus spending is winding down, Medicare was reformed a mere 14 months ago and is solvent for at least another decade, Social Security is solvent for two or three decades, and the deficit is very plainly not a domestic spending problem. It wasn't a problem at all until 2001, and it was caused by two gigantic tax cuts, two unfunded wars, and a finance-industry driven recession. If we just let the tax cuts expire, get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and get the economy moving, the medium-term deficit will disappear. In the meantime, grinding unemployment in the United States is really a wee bit more important than continuing to humor Republican political posturing.

Kevin Drum

What touched off the revolt in Tunisia?

SIDI BOUZID, Tunisia — Mohamed Bouazizi spent his whole life on a dusty, narrow street here, in a tiny, three-room house with a concrete patio where his mother hung the laundry and the red chilis to dry. By the time Mr. Bouazizi was 26, his work as a fruit vendor had earned him just enough money to feed his mother, uncle and five brothers and sisters at home. He dreamed about owning a van.

Faida Hamdy, a 45-year-old municipal inspector in Sidi Bouzid, a police officer’s daughter, was single, had a “strong personality” and an unblemished record, her supervisor said. She inspected buildings, investigated noise complaints and fined vendors like Mr. Bouazizi, whose itinerant trade may or may not have been legal; no one seems to know.

On the morning of Dec. 17, when other vendors say Ms. Hamdy tried to confiscate Mr. Bouazizi’s fruit, and then slapped him in the face for trying to yank back his apples, he became the hero — now the martyred hero — and she became the villain in a remarkable swirl of events in which Tunisians have risen up to topple a 23-year dictatorship and march on, demanding radical change in their government.

The revolution has rippled beyond Tunisia, shaking other authoritarian Arab states, whose frustrated young people are often written off as complacent when faced with stifling bureaucracy and an impenetrable and intimidating security apparatus. That assumption was badly shaken with Mr. Bouazizi’s reaction to his slap, and now a picture of him, in a black jacket with a wry smile, has become the revolution’s icon.

In a series of interviews, the other fruit vendors, officials and family members described the seemingly routine confrontation that had set off a revolution. They said that Mr. Bouazizi, embarrassed and angry, had wrestled with Ms. Hamdy and was beaten by two of her colleagues, who also took his electronic scale. He walked a few blocks to the municipal building, demanded his property, and was beaten again, they said. Then he walked to the governor’s office, demanded an audience and was refused.

“She humiliated him,” said his sister, Samia Bouazizi. “Everyone was watching.”

Sometime around noon, in the two-lane street in front of the governor’s high gate, the vendor drenched himself in paint thinner then lit himself on fire. A doctor at the hospital where he was treated said the burns covered 90 percent of his body. By the time he died on Jan. 4, protests that started over Mr. Bouazizi’s treatment in Sidi Bouzid had spread to cities throughout the country.

On Jan. 14, the president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, fled the country.

New York Times, 1/22/11

I don't know whether I want to say "amazing" or "heartbreaking." Both, I suppose.

My favorite blogger is glum

Back at the beginning of the month we spent a week going into a frenzy over recommendations from a deficit reduction commission that everyone knew were DOA. Then it was a week of TSA frenzy. And now it's WikiLeaks frenzy. All while our economy slips into a Japan-style stagnation and nobody seems to care. It staggers the imagination. The strongest country in the world — my country — is allowing its economy to decay before our collective eyes even though we know how to stop it. But we're not going to. We're just going to let it happen. As Friedman says, it's willful self destruction.

We need: a big stimulus now aimed at infrastructure development. A credible plan to close the long-term deficit that acknowledges the need for tax increases to be part of the solution. A serious and sustained effort at reining in healthcare costs and broadening access. A collective decision to cut out the culture war nonsense and figure out how to improve our educational system with no more than modest spending increases. Real financial reform, not the weak tea of Dodd-Frank. Less spending on empire building and much, much more spending on real sustainable energy development and engineering.

But we're not going to do this stuff. As near as I can tell, we're not even going to do one single thing on this list. We're not even going to try. In fact, they're all so far from being realistically achievable that it's sort of foolish to even waste breath writing about them. So instead we spend our time reacting to Sarah Palin's latest tweet and demanding that the CIA assassinate Julian Assange. Gotta talk about something, after all, whether the ship is going down or not. Glug, glug.

Kevin Drum

Give the devil his due

This, from "The Reality-Based Community," a blog with undeniable progressive credentials:

I give primary credit to President George W. Bush for helping end the culture war about HIV/AIDS. After a decade of hand painted “Thank God for AIDS” signs, President Bush showed how true Christians react to human suffering by creating PEPFAR [the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief]. This remains the largest effort by any country in history to fight a single disease, and two of my Stanford colleagues recently calculated that it has already saved over a million lives. In one stroke, President Bush created humane policy and shattered the meme that there was something Christian about attacking people with AIDS.

Keith Humphreys

Bravo, W!

Two excellent posts . . .

. . . on the oil leak (why is everybody calling it a spill?) in the Gulf. Or, more accurately, on criticism of the president's handling of the leak:

• in words
• in pictures

"And so they join the Revolution . . . "

A Newsweek reporter writes:

the violence [in Thailand] stems from multiple cleavages in Thai society: old elites against new elites; Thais hailing from the north and northeast against Thais from Bangkok and the south; and people close to the traditional levers of political power, such as the monarchy, against those who no longer trust these institutions.

Source

For some reason this put me in mind of that great speech in Marat/Sade about why people join revolutions. Maybe it shouldn't have: The speech was far more cynical than I remembered. (I know, I know: Sade? Cynical?)

That's how it is, Marat
That's how she sees your revolution
They have toothache
and their teeth should be pulled
Their soup's burnt
They shout for better soup
A woman finds her husband too short
she wants a taller one
A man finds his wife too skinny
he wants a plumper one
A man's shoes pinch
but his neighbour's shoes fit comfortably
A poet runs out of poetry
and desperately gropes for new images
For hours an angler casts his line
why aren't the fish biting
And so they join the Revolution
thinking the Revolution will give them everything
A fish
A poem
A new pair of shoes
A new wife
A new husband
and the best soup in the world
So they storm all the citadels
and there they are
and everything is just the same
No fish biting
Verses botched
Shoes pinching
A worn and stinking partner in bed
and the soup burnt
and all that heroism
which drove us down to the sewers
Well we can talk about it to our grandchildren.
If we have grandchildren"

Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade,
scene 25, Corday's second visit
quoted HERE.

Chart of the day

You know that health care reform is the most expensive government program in the history of the world, right? That we can't possibly afford it, right?

Source: Ezra Klein.

Exactly

"the ever-contemptible Chuck Grassley" [Mark Kleiman]

Politics

I don't do politics, but . . .

. . . if the Republicans were serious, this would end the discussion.

Fair warning

Liberals have been arguing that the Guantanamo prisoners won't cause any problems if they're moved to the U.S., in part because we've got super-max prisons where the prisoners are isolated from one another. Once the Gitmo prisoners arrive, however, we're ready to start a new protest: "Isolation is torture." The estimable Atul Gawande makes the case powerfully in a March 30, 2009 New Yorker article.