Matthew Yglesias's Blog, page 2323

What Stephen Harper Learned From George W Bush

Reihan Salam has a piece about what Republicans could learn from Stephen Harper's political success in Canada, but the most provocative part of it could easily be reframed as what Harper learned from George W Bush:

Led by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, the Conservatives mounted an unprecedented effort to win the votes of Asian voters, many of whom had long been loyal to the Liberals. The gestures ranged from large to small, from reforming Canada's immigration policies to welcome more high-skilled immigrants to creating official committees celebrating the virtues of traditional Chinese medicine. The Conservatives realized that the key to winning immigrant voters is to demonstrate that you understand and value their concerns. One result of this outreach effort has been the election of a large number of Asian Canadians as Conservative MPs, a number of whom have made it into Harper's cabinet. Given that the American electorate is growing steadily less white, it is widely understood that Republicans need to make inroads in large and growing Latino and Asian communities. Harper's Conservatives offer a road map as to how they might do that.

This is sort of lost to the sands of time, but once upon a time the administration of George W Bush paired a hard-right agenda on taxes, business regulation, environmental policy, and foreign policy with a centrist approach to K-12 education reform and a sincere effort to break with xenophobic elements in his party's base and achieve a bipartisan agreement on immigration reform. It was, in its way, a Harper-esque agenda. And it was driven in large part by precisely these same demographic concerns. A political party can't just be friendly to tax-averse businessmen, and under Bush the GOP wanted to try to broaden its appeal to minorities. Ultimately, the failure of Bush's foreign policy and his inability to regulate the banking system brought down his political coalition. Then the lingering recession and the fact that twentysomethings don't like to vote in midterms allowed it to come roaring back. But the basic demographic issue hasn't gone away.

FLASHBACK: In 2007, Jim DeMint Praised RomneyCare, Called An Individual Mandate "Making Freedom Work For Everyone"

Here is an excellent catch from Brian Beutler who digs up South Carolina Republican Senator Jim DeMint's video endorsement of Mitt Romney from October of 2007. At the time DeMint was not only willing to overlook Romney's endorsement of a tyrannical individual mandate to purchase health insurance, he specifically touted health care as an example of Romney's ability to "look at a problem and come up with a solution" with methods that involve "making freedom work for everyone."

Watch it:

Hello, I'm Senator Jim DeMint. A lot of my friends and my supporters across the country have asked me who I support for President. And I've told them: Mitt Romney. They ask, "why do you support Mitt Romney?" First of all, he's not in Washington, DC and he spent most of his life as a businessman and not a politician. We need a president who's not a politician, but who is a real problem solver and who's proven over the years that he can look at a problem and come up with a solution and actually get the job done. There's no one in the race like Mitt Romney who's proved in business and in his volunteer work and as governor of Massachusetts that he can solve a problem. Not by creating more government but by making freedom work for everyone. He's done it with health care, he's done it by cutting budget deficits and not increasing taxes. We need a CEO for president who knows how to get things done.

Now DeMint says he'll only endorse Romney if Romney disavows his health plan.

This all serves to highlight the absurd doubletalk that the right has tied itself into over this health care business. The key features of the Affordable Care Act that seem to genuinely bother conservatives are that it's financed through progressive taxation and it was proposed by Barack Obama. When an extremely similar proposal was on the table lacking those two features, it was regarded as a reasonable compromise. And were the right willing to approach the ACA in that spirit, it would in fact be possible to alter the revenue sources and tweak other specifics.

Waiting For Perfection From The Public Sector Is A Recipe For Inefficiency

I've been waiting a while for a good pretext to present my case that we ought to care less about fraud and abuse in public services, and conservative education policy expert Rick Hess making the case for being meaner to teachers actually illustrates the point perfectly:

I trust that few RHSU readers will mistake my concerns for squeamishness or kind-heartedness. Any evaluation system will entail some misidentification. Some individuals will be unfairly terminated. That's the way of the world, and I can live with that. I'm not worried about imperfections and I'm not holding out hope for a perfectly "fair" system.

That's exactly right. If you have a system that tells you who to fire and who to give a raise to that's easy to implement and gives the right answer 15 percent of the time, that's a very useful system. On balance, it'll improve the performance of your organization. And it'll also lead to some unfair terminations and undeserved promotions. And that's fine. A myopic focus on never making a mistake is going to be counterproductive.

But this is a much more generally applicable point about the public sector. Private sector employers take it for granted that some waste, fraud, and abuse is going to happen. I use CAP envelops for my personal mailing needs. If you go to Nado's Peri-Peri in my neighborhood and ask for a glass of water with your meal, they'll give you the same empty glass that they'd give you if you ordered a soda and nothing's stopping you from filling up at the soda fountain. In both cases, the view is that perfectly safeguarding against abuse by employees or customers would be counterproductive. The costs in terms of monitoring, compliance, and lost morale would be worse than accepting a small amount of waste. But in the public sector, any quantity of "waste" becomes a big scandal even though seeking perfect compliance is often much more time consuming and costly than just accepting that you may have some small quantity of fraud in your food stamp rolls.

Hours Worked Not Rising

David Leonhardt delivers some bad news from the jobs report:

Businesses may be getting more confident, but they are far from wildly optimistic. The average work week in the private sector remained 34.3 hours in April, unchanged over the past three months. If businesses were on the verge of a hiring boom, an increase in the work week would be a leading indicator (given that companies often give their existing employees more work before adding new ones).

Employers know more about their existing workers than about hypothetical future workers, it's easier to scale back hours than to fire someone, and you can extend someone's hours without incurring various overhead costs (health care, training, whatever) so this is generally a more attractive response to a small upswing in business activity. If you've got increased demand, your first response to offer your current employees more shifts. If the increase is sustained, or if your workers don't want more shifts, then you hire new people. But we have plenty of "part time for economic reasons" folks in the workforce at the moment, so there shouldn't be a problem extending hours as a prelude to new hiring.

Tim Pawlenty's Partial Privatization Of Medicare Will Lead To Eventual Destruction Of Medicare

Tim Pawlenty has thus far declined to endorse the Medicare privatization plan backed by House Republicans earlier this year. But today he offered the first hints of his alternative strategy, one that attempts to put a softer face on the same basic concepts. One important thing to note is that even though he won't come out and say so, his new ideas are fully consistent with the conservative movement's longstanding desire for Medicare to "wither on the vine" and die. Here's the key point as reported by Ben Smith:

Pawlenty also suggested he'd offer "premium support" — Paul Ryan-style vouchers — to people who aren't yet enrolled in the program [i.e., Medicare]. He suggested, though, that he'd make the Ryan-style plan an option for individuals, not an immediate replacement for the entire program.

This is supposed to make privatization sound non-threatening. If you like Medicare, you can stay in Medicare. But here's the problem. Medicare takes advantage of its large scale to save money by paying doctors and hospitals less than they would charge on the private market. Consequently, if Pawlenty structures a partial privatization scheme such that it's a good deal for 20 percent of seniors and a bad deal for 80 percent of seniors, then about 20 percent of seniors will drop out of Medicare. That reduces the size of the Medicare purchasing pool, and creates incentives for doctors to drop out of treating Medicare patients in order to focus on higher-paying private ones. But when doctors drop out of Medicare, that makes the program less attractive to the remaining 80 percent. So more patients will drop out leading to more doctors dropping out leading to more patients dropping out. Lather, rinse, and repeat. In the end, seniors will face all the same problems as they'd face under the House GOP privatization plan—much higher per unit treatment costs and less available care.

Video Games As Art, No Matter What Roger Ebert Says

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Roger Ebert conceded last year that he'd been wrong to say that video games can never be art. As much as Ebert's a Wise Old Man of popular culture, his admission of defeat, or at least neutrality, isn't as important for the artistic recognition of video games as two things that happened this week. First, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that it is turning its Arts on Radio and Television grants program into an Arts in Media program that will include digital games. If you're a game designer, you're eligible for $10,000-$200,000 to develop, produce, and distribute your project if you can convince a grants committee by September 1 that the game you're working on can be considered a work of art. It'll be interesting to see where that standard ends up being set in this process.

And second, the Smithsonian American Art Museum finished the voting to see which games will be included in its Art of Video Games exhibit that opens next year. As a Star Wars extended universe nerd, I'm glad to see one of Michael Stackpole's projects make it in there. But I'm more glad the exhibit is happening at all. Much like with fashion, which has occupied a sort of bastard position in the art world, a museum show on video games codifies what the rest of us know, that they can be art as much as Michaelangelo's ceilings, Kara Walker's cutouts, or the amazing and eccentric folk art altar SAAM also has on display. Now that they're getting a show, what will be important is not that game are displayed but how they're displayed. As Jenna Sauers points out in a review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Alexander McQueen exhibit, with fashion "Elaborate styling, stupid wigs, and busy show design in these kinds of exhibitions is not only unnecessary, it's disrespectful to both the clothing and its audience — because it sends the message that a dress, unlike a painting, can only be understood with significant curatorial intervention."

It's not that without government support, people won't make games, or people won't acknowledge that they're art. But institutional support for that consensus matters. Broadening the definition of art makes it easier for people to see that even if they're not going to the opera or museums, art is a major part of their lives, that support for the arts is important.

What Happens If NAEP Civic Scores Go Up Slightly?

Charles N. Quigley executive director of the Center for Civic Education says they "confirm an alarming and continuing trend that civics in America is in decline" because "[d]uring the past decade or so, educational policy and practice appear to have focused more and more upon developing the worker at the expense of developing the citizen."

Osama bin Laden Culture Watch: The First Single Drops

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Sometimes, first out of the gate on a cultural phenomenon is not actually where you want to be. But perhaps a bin Laden party tune complete with Charlie Sheen references, bad production, and so few lyrics it's really just the fragment of a song is the kind of buzz-grabbing move you make if 50 Cent is your mentor:

The only thing that's sort of astute about this is the repeated line "The great news made me lose my mind," which I think encapsulates the conflicted feelings a lot of people have about the celebrations on Sunday night. And I'm sure it's unintentional. As a side note, I'd love to know what Kanye thinks about the reference to the George Condo painting in the art for the single.

(H/T the AV Club)

The Conservative Recovery Continues

Private sector job growth continued apace last month, adding 268,000 jobs in April and with the revised numbers we also added 231,000 private sector jobs in March. That's not a super-strong recovery, but it's a volume of job growth that's faster than labor force growth and thus consistent with a falling unemployment rate. Consistent, that is, if you imagine a scenario in which the size of the public sector keeps pace with the growth in the population. But that's not happening. America's population grew in March, but instead of adding public sector workers we shed 15,000. And in April, we shed 14,000 more. All told, we've had 1.7 million net new private sector jobs over the past year but they've been partially offset by 404,000 net job losses in the public sector.

One question here is the wisdom of this. I think it's been unwise. In the current low interest rate environment, had the federal government engaged in additional borrowing and then engaged in revenue sharing with state and local government, we could have turned those 404,000 public sector losses into zero net losses without any private sector crowding out. What's more, had we had fewer public employee layoffs those workers would have spent more money on private purchases in their communities and we'd probably have somewhat more retail employment. Most of all, we're actually now facing something of an objective shortage of houses in America and absent those missing 404,000 public workers we'd be closer to a revival of the construction industry and thus on the path to long-term recovery.

But another issue is simply that this is the recovery conservatives say they want. The balance of economic activity is shifting away from the public sector and toward the private sector. So why is it that we have people running around the country—not just ignorant grassroots folks or talk show entrepreneurs, but billionaire political organizers like David Koch—screaming about incipient socialism?

The World Can Feed 10 Billion People; The Question Is Whether It Will

Raj Patel writing in Foreign Policy magazine asks "Can The World Feed 10 Billion People." I think it's pretty obvious that we can, and the reason comes from this handy-dandy high school biology lesson about the food energy pyramid:

The same primary crop yield can either support a lot of vegetarians or else it can support a lot of cows and the cows can feed a small number of meat-eaters. And by the same token, meat-eaters feeding themselves off pork or chicken consume much less grain than meat-eaters feeding themselves off cows. The point is that even if we have no increase in crop yields whatsoever, global agriculture is still producing plenty of calories to keep 10 billion people alive and well-nourished. The reason people starve and are malnourished is the distribution of those calories, not their existence, and that will continue to be the case in the future.

That's not to deny that Patel's main subject—increasing crop yields—is important. Fundamentally, better crop yields mean better average living standards. But starvation on the part of the poor isn't cause by some kind of global shortage of food.