Matthew Yglesias's Blog, page 2442

Pay Attention to Details in Land Swap Proposals

Mark Landler has a New York Times article about some new maps from the Washington Institute's David Makovsky that aims to propose some land-swap concepts for drawing a border between Israel and Palestine:

The goal, Mr. Makovsky said, is to "demystify" the territorial hurdles that divide Israelis and Palestinians, and to debunk the notion that there is no way to reconcile the Palestinian demand for sovereignty over the West Bank with the Israeli demand for control over a majority of the settlers.

"In my view, it is definitely possible to deal with each other's core demands," he said. "There are land swaps that would offset whatever settlements Israel would retain. The impossible is attainable."

I'm not sure why Makovsky thinks these maps lead to that optimistic outcome. Certainly it's true that if you zoom out it's possible to come up with a solution that's "fair" in the sense that the numbers add up:

But look at the practical consequences this has in the vicinity of Jerusalem:

Only 10-20 miles separate Ramallah north of Jerusalem from Bethlehem south of Jerusalem, but this map creates salients of Israeli territory that would force massive detours and break up what ought to be a contiguous Arab conurbation of Ramallah/East Jerusalem/Bethlehem. It would be as if the only way to get from Silver Spring to Tyson's Corner involves driving through West Virginia. You could make this work, of course, by making the Israeli/Palestinian border very porous but that doesn't seem like something Israel would want to do.

To me, Makovsky's cartographical undertakings simply illustrate the problem here. Israel's core interest is to have a Jewish state in the historic Land of Israel with secure and internationally recognized boundaries. The Palestinians' core interest is to have an economically viable Palestinian State in historic Palestine. These demands are very compatible, but they're not compatible with Israeli efforts to hold on to all these Jerusalem-area settlements. Some measure of land-swapping is a very reasonable alternative to total dismantlement of all Israeli settlements, but raw quantities of land aren't everything.

Public Opinion and the Deficit

David Leonhardt explains the confused public:

The new Times/CBS News poll highlights the problem, by asking more specific questions about taxes and spending than many previous polls have. (See questions 33 through 45 here.) Not surprisingly, when given a straight-up choice between broad spending cuts and tax increases, Americans say they would prefer to reduce the deficit mostly through less spending. It's not even close: 62 percent for spending cuts, 29 percent for tax increases.

A few questions later, though, our pollsters offered a different choice. Would people rather eliminate Medicare's shortfall through reduced Medicare benefits or higher taxes?

The percentages then switch, becoming nearly a mirror image of what they had been. Some 64 percent of respondents preferred tax increases, while 24 percent chose Medicare cuts. The same is true of Social Security: 63 percent for higher taxes, 25 percent for reduced benefits.

What I think we ultimately need to see is Universal Medicare rather than Medicare for old people only. But it would be Medicare operating under a global budget and with a dedicated source of tax revenue. People won't be happy with the rationing that results from the global budget, but they also won't be happy with the idea of raising the tax rate, and the balance between the two will be a very reasonable thing for political parties to argue about. Personally, I'd favor focusing on catastrophic coverage and preventive services, while leaving routine care up to individuals, but reasonable people will disagree about exactly how many social resources should be devoted to health care overall. Currently, though, the public debate is distorted by widespread misunderstanding of what's happening (Jeb Hensarling doesn't help) and by the sharp divergence in how we treat people above and below the age of 65.

Troikas

Ken Auletta on Google:

Was Eric Schmidt pushed or did he jump? Both. According to close advisors, the Google C.E.O. was upset a year ago when co-founder Larry Page sided with his founding partner, Sergey Brin, to withdraw censored searches from China. Schmidt did not hide his belief that Google should stay in the world's largest consumer marketplace. It was an indication of the nature of the relationship Schmidt had with the founders that he—as Brian Cashman of the Yankees did this week—acknowledged that the decision was made above his head. He often joked that he provided "adult supervision," and was never shy about interrupting the founders at meetings to crystallize a point. In the eleven interviews I conducted with him for my book on Google, he freely told anecdotes about the founders, sometimes making gentle fun of them, never seeming to look over his shoulder. Yet he always made clear that they were "geniuses" and he, in effect, was their manager. After a bumpy first couple of years after he joined Google as C.E.O. in 2001, they had developed a remarkable relationship. But also a weird one. How many successful organizations have a troika making decisions?

I guess not that many, but maybe more should. After all, are there are lot of organizations out there that are more successful than Google? Is the one CEO supervised by a large and diffuse Board of Directors model really such a stunning success? There doesn't seem to be anything obviously wrong with the troika idea other than that it's unusual. Admittedly in ancient Rome this form of government mostly led to civil wars, but under Roman conditions just about everything seemed to lead to civil wars, right?

The Era of Big Government

I agree with Jon Chait that Jim Kessler from Third Way has hit upon some good advice here about the State of the Union* address:

The President ought to make long term economic growth the theme of his State of the Union. He should declare that with the passage of health care reform, America's 85-year quest to weave a strong safety net is now complete. From there he would describe a clear, tangible, and compelling destination for the nation – that of American excellence. It is a destination where America has the strongest, most vibrant, and most advanced economy on earth.

This isn't precisely how I would put it, but Kessler is write about this. When Bill Clinton pronounced that "the era of big government is over" in 1995, he was clearly wrong. And since that time we've gotten SCHIP, Medicare started covering prescription drugs, and now we have the Affordable Care Act. So the era of big government wasn't over in 1995 and it's not over in 2010, but what is over is the era of big government liberalism. That's not to say there will be no new changes to health care policy or to education policy or any of the rest of it. But there aren't any major new fundamental commitments to be undertaken and there isn't any more money to undertake it with.

Future public policy has to be about ways to maximize sustainable economic growth, and ways to maximize the efficiency with which services are delivered. Right now Medicare is projected to cost more money than Democrats are willing to tax, and yet Republicans are positioning themselves as defenders of the program against the ACA's insidious cuts. The future of American politics is really about how to square this circle. How to find the revenue in viable ways, and how to streamline these services to maximize value to citizens and minimize rent-seeking. Big government isn't over, or going away. It's utterly victorious and yet at its limits.

* Take this all with the basic proviso that I doubt it matters very much what the president says. The fact is he's going to give the speech so he might as well try to give it a good one.

Pushing Sprawl Through Flawed Congestion Analysis

One crucial distinction in regional planning is between approaches to commuting that simply look at moving people as far as possible as fast as possible and approaches that look instead at moving people from where they are to where they're going as fast as possible. For example, consider the Texas Transportation Institute's new report on congestion in America which lists DC as tied for first for hours wasted in traffic, in the context of how their methodology actually works:

The TTI report narrowly looks at only one factor: how fast traffic moves. Consider two hypothetical cities. In Denseopolis, people live within 2 miles of work on average, but the roads are fairly clogged and drivers can only go about 20 miles per hour. However, it only takes an average of 6 minutes to get to work, which isn't bad.

On the other hand, in Sprawlville, people live about 30 miles from work on average, but there are lots and lots of fast-moving freeways, so people can drive 60 mph. That means it takes 30 minutes to get to work.

Which city is more congested? By TTI's methods, it's Denseopolis. But it's the people of Sprawlville who spend more time commuting, and thus have less time to be with their families and for recreation.

The point is that if you simply want people to be inside fast-moving vehicles, that will always bias policy toward sprawl. If you make each house sit on a large enough lot and build reasonable wide roads, then traffic will always move very quickly. But it will move quickly in part because everything's so far away. Living in downtown DC where things are very close together, it's most practical for me to commute to work via the incredibly slow method of walking. But I love only 0.8 miles from my office, so the trip only takes 10-15 minutes and by any sensible estimation it's a very pleasant and convenient commute.

Olbermann

Like everyone, I'm a bit puzzled/shocked/distressed by this Keith Olbermann news. It's not every day a TV network sacks its highest rated host. It had seemed to be the case that Olbermann's success was leading MSNBC to walk further and further down the road of recognizing that there's a market niche for progressive cable television programming. Are they now walking away from that?

America's Housing Shortfall

"Everyone knows" that massive overbuilding of housing during the boom years is a crucial contributing "structural" factor to current unemployment, but Scott Sumner looks at the actual data and finds little evidence of housing oversupply:

Year
Single-Family
Multifamily
Total


2010
470,900
116,700
587,600


2009
445,100
108,900
554,000


2008
622,000
283,500
905,500


2007
1,046,000
309,000
1,355,000


2006
1,465,400
335,500
1,800,900


2005
1,715,800
352,500
2,068,300


2004
1,610,500
345,300
1,955,800


2003
1,499,000
348,700
1,847,700


2002
1,358,600
346,400
1,704,900


2001
1,273,300
329,400
1,602,700


2000
1,230,900
337,800
1,568,700


1999
1,302,400
338,500
1,640,900


1998
1,271,400
345,500
1,616,900


1997
1,133,700
340,300
1,474,000


1996
1,160,900
315,900
1,476,800


1995
1,076,200
277,900
1,354,100


1994
1,198,400
258,600
1,457,000


1993
1,125,700
162,000
1,287,600


1992
1,029,900
169,900
1,199,700


1991
840,400
173,500
1,013,900


1990
894,800
298,000
1,192,700


1989
1,003,300
372,900
1,376,100


1988
1,081,300
406,700
1,488,100


1987
1,146,400
473,800
1,620,500


1986
1,179,400
626,000
1,805,400


1985
1,072,400
669,500
1,741,800


1984
1,084,200
665,300
1,749,500


1983
1,067,600
635,500
1,703,000


1982
662,600
399,700
1,062,200


1981
705,400
378,900
1,084,200


1980
852,200
440,000
1,292,200


1979
1,194,100
551,100
1,745,100


1978
1,433,300
587,100
2,020,300

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Here's my assumption. Housing construction normally seems to fluctuate between one and two million units. Let's take 1.5 million as roughly the trend rate which keeps up with population. Yes, it's true that we exceeded that number every single year from 2002 to 2006, and the total excess production was about 1.87 million units. That's a lot. But over the next four years there was a shortfall of about 2.6 million units. So why do we seem to have a hugely excessive number of homes, if we are actually 730,000 short?

Now of course some of these units are mislocated relative to demand. And severe regulatory restrictions on density mean that lots of this investment is non-optimal. But there are plenty of people in this country who, given decent aggregate demand conditions, would be forming new households and occupying this housing stock.

Endgame

There's not much for me there:

— TED talks throughout history.

— Robyn converts Katy Perry to feminism.

— I don't endorse this full analysis, but it's definitely true that the cash/benefits mix for federal workers is out of whack.

— Everyone is unpopular.

— Stephen Breyer and Ted Kennedy are neoliberal sellouts.

— Excellent profile of Phillip Weiss.

— What Beijing learned from the neocons.

Yeasayer, "Madder Red".

Why Do People Agree to Give SOTU Responses?

My first reaction to the news that Paul Ryan has been designated to give the Republican response to the State of the Union address was to fulminate a bit about the unseriousness of it all. After all, Paul Ryan's written a famous "budget roadmap" that does an excellent job of showing what it takes to balance the budget without raising taxes—massive, massive, massive cuts in Medicare. But since massive Medicare cuts are unpopular, the GOP leadership doesn't want to get behind Ryan's plan for massive Medicare cuts. Indeed, they don't even want to bring it up for a vote. But instead of facing the fact that the GOP is not, in fact, willing to endorse the kind of massive Medicare cuts that are the only way to make their tax policies work, they're going to . . . put Ryan up as their speaker so everyone can pretend there's a plan here.

It's enough to drive a person crazy.

But I'm enjoying a Percocet mellow today, so let's think about a different issue. Is the SOTU response gig anything other than a quick way to trip up a rising star in one's party? The Bobby Jindal experience is the most vivid cautionary tale, but he's hardly alone. The vast majority of people given this task do a bad job of it. And even those who do well, like Jim Webb, don't accrue much in the way of anything in the way of real benefit.

Could Vermont Do Single-Payer?

An interesting AP story earlier this week explained a report produced by Harvard economist William Hsiao for the Vermont state legislature about ways the state could save money by shifting to a single-payer health care system.

My colleague Igor Volsky runs down some of the hurdles and possibilities offered by federal law:

Hsiao said that Vermont faced "no fewer than 15 hurdles before it would be able to implement the plan," not the least of which are some of the new requirements and regulations in the Affordable Care Act. The Vermont Congressional delegation has introduced an amendment that would expand a provision in the law that allows states to propose their own pilot health care programs and seek a waiver from the federal health care law so that they can pursue their own approaches to health care reform. The current law allows states to pursue these waivers in 2017; the amendment would move this waiver date up to 2014. A companion measure has also been introduced by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Scott Brown (R-MA) in the Senate, but it remains to be seen how cooperative HHS will be in granting waiver and allowing the state to pursue these reforms.

In political terms, it seems to me that being generous about the state customization possibilities is probably the best way to start shifting the Affordable Care Act out of the toxic partisanship box and regularize its place in the firmament. Among other things, this provides something of an exit pathway for politicians like Scott Brown who don't want to embrace ACA but also don't want to repeal it.