Matthew Yglesias's Blog, page 2465

The "Repeal Amendment"

Kate Zernicke reports on a quixotic movement that's apparently gaining support inside the conservative establishment, including Eric Cantor:

Under the proposed "repeal amendment," any federal law or regulation could be repealed if the legislatures of two-thirds of the states voted to do so.

The idea has been propelled by the wave of Republican victories in the midterm elections. First promoted by Virginia lawmakers and Tea Party groups, it has the support of legislative leaders in 12 states. It also won the backing of the incoming House majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor, when it was introduced this month in Congress.

For whatever reason, the conservative movement isn't really given to self-criticism. But it's worth pointing out that before the right goes all-in on an ad hoc constitutional change driven by dislike of the Affordable Care Act, that different conservative behavior could have avoided this outcome. For example, Tom Davis would have been a formidable contender for a Senate seat in 2008, but the right decided he wasn't conservative enough so they'd let Mark Warner win in a landslide. Then they decided Arlen Specter wasn't conservative enough, so they drove him from the party and gave Democrats 60 votes in the United States Senate. Then they steadfastly refused to offer any compromise proposals that might have peeled the Ben Nelsons and Mark Pryors and Evan Bayhs of the world away from the pro-ACA coalition. I recall that after Scott Brown's election there was mass panic in Democratic circles and lots of people wanted to abandon the ACA. For a while, I thought that those of us urging continued action might lose the argument to those who favored passing a "scaled-down" health care bill. But in the end we got a bailout from the GOP, which refused to offer any indication that it would actually accept such a bill.

At any rate, the ACA will almost certainly not be fully repealed. And the "repeal amendment" will certainly not join the constitution. If conservatives really think these facts are disasters of historical proportion, they should think harder about the chain of events that led to its passage in the first place.

A Chilling Possibility

It occurred to me today that it's perfectly plausible to imagine a Republican winning the 2012 Presidential election and then being defeated in 2016 by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. This, in turn, could very plausibly lead to Sandra Lee becoming de facto or de jure First Lady of the United States. And then what? Semi-homemade state dinners? The Chinese won't even need aircraft carriers to emerge as global hegemon.

It's kind of a cliché to observe that in the contemporary world, the concept of the "first lady" is badly outdated. But contemplating this goes to show how true that cliché is. The country does, in fact, need someone to play the hostess-in-chief role but that's simply not compatible with the range of career options open to today's women.

Orlando's Trade Fiasco

Wow. The big moves made by the Orlando Magic over the weekend strike me as really, really bad.

First, start with the Wizards deal. From DC's point of view, basically we're swapping Gilbert Arenas' bad contract for Rashard Lewis' bad contract. The upside for us is that there's one less year on Lewis' bad contract. That's not huge upside, but it's something. If the Magic are willing to help us out like this, good for them, but they should get something in return. Not a lot necessarily, but something. A second round draft pick. The right to swap first-rounders. A free cap. Something. Instead they got nothing. This deal hardly turns the Wizards around, but any time Ted Leonsis can get something for nothing I get a little more hopeful.

The Phoenix trade, meanwhile, is a mess. Vince Carter and Jason Richardson have essentially the same production. But Carter's on a more favorable contract. So mildly bad deal. This then leaves us with Gortat and Pietrus for Hedo Turkoglu. Trading Gortat makes sense on many levels since he deserves more minutes than he can realistically get as Dwight Howard's backup. He's a valuable player, but not super valuable to the Orlando Magic so trading him to a team that needs a starting center makes sense. But they traded him for . . . Hedo Turkoglu, who's not good. As best I can tell, this is superstition. The Magic played really well when Turkoglu was on the team. And he played very well during a high-profile playoff series against the Boston Celtics. But he wasn't a particularly great player during that season, and he's gotten worse since leaving.

What a President Thinks

I'm a strong believer in structural explanations for things, but I think Jonathan Bernstein goes a bit too far with this:

Now, the second part of what Yglesias said — how can anyone know what Romney will actually do it elected? I think the answer is, basically, the same way you can know that about anyone. He'll follow party incentives, and institutional incentives, and other such things that have little or nothing to do with what he "really" thinks. And that's mostly a good thing!

There's a lot of truth to that. But still, I do think beliefs matter. One reason is that people engage in "motivated reasoning" all the time. A politician with a visceral loathing of gay people is more likely to interpret the objective incentives facing him as having anti-gay implications than is a politician who has warm personal relationships with gays and lesbians. I don't think there's any guarantee that President Tom Ridge would have pursued the 2003 Medicare bill with as much alacrity as George W Bush did, or that President John Corzine would have been as committed to the "cadillac tax" on high-value health insurance plans as Barack Obama was.

Analogy of the Weekend

Is courtesy of Niklas Blanchard, who says: "Here's an interesting comparison, but I defy you to counter it: Google (Labs) is the modern-day Bell Labs."

Bell Labs was the R&D unit of the old AT&T monopoly. It's not clear that it was a particularly productive investment for AT&T's shareholders, but they came up with a lot of important stuff, including C & C++, UNIX, and the laser. Google, similarly, is plowing a very large share of its very considerable revenue into financing new ideas rather than just rebating it as dividends. The jury's still out on the merits of this as a business strategy (and it's really a boring "only time will tell" kind of scenario) but it's already given the world a lot of neat products.

China Building an Aircraft Carrier

News that China may be in the midst of building its first aircraft carrier is a reminder both of China's rising geopolitical clout and also the reminder that they remain quite a bit behind us. On top of that, it's of course a reminder that the political aspects of international relations often lack the cooperative rationalism of the economic aspects. America badly wants to boost exports, China wants an aircraft carrier, and it would be much simpler and cheaper for China to buy an aircraft carrier or two from the United States than to build one at home. We have a lot of expertise in the production of advanced military equipment, and our ability to produce more of it is primarily constrained by the fact that our producers are only allowed to sell to certain select clients.

Robert Farley's recent article on the promise and peril of a US-India-Japan anti-Chinese entente is also worth reading. Long story short, this is not the best option for the USA though events may transpire to make it the only one.

Possible But Unlikely Bargains

If we agree that Paul Ryan's proposals for Medicare more-or-less amount to turning it into ObamaCare, then the stage is set for a potential bargain. That would be—Republicans stop trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and in turn Democrats agree to phase Medicare out on Ryan's schedule. You can further sweeten the deal by throwing in a public option and the replacement of ACA's Medicare tax hikes with something more regressive.

This is basically "everyone takes a shot of poison" and I don't expect it to happen, but it would better-align policy with the things people claim to care about. The underlying principle would be to shift to a system where the US government subsidizes your consumption of health care services according to how poor and sick you are, rather than primarily according to how old you are.

(PS: This is not optimal policy in my view, but it would be better than the status quo and much better than endless rounds of fights over ACA repeal).

Ask, Tell, Dream

Obviously a huge win for equality today in terms of military service. It's good for national security, it's a question of principle, and it's the right thing to do. In broader terms, it also means that in the near future we'll have openly gay war heros which will be important in terms of the larger quest for full social and political equality.

At the same time a frustrating, though not-unexpected, result for the DREAM Act.

The important thing to recall here is that DREAM Act supporters did what you normally ask political activists to do. They got the majority of the American people on their side. They get the majority of the House of Representatives on their side. They got the President on their side. And they got a majority of Senators on their side. For the vast majority of American history, that would have been good enough. And with luck, in the near future it will be good enough again.

Life in 2008

Dave Roberts interviews Doug Holtz-Eakin on April 21, 2008:

David Roberts: How urgent a problem is climate change in John McCain's mind?

Douglas Holtz-Eakin: Senator McCain has a very serious sense of urgency about moving on [climate] legislation, directly from his hearings and his travel to Antarctica to the Arctic. It is augmented by the national security component. Given his strong beliefs on the need to make America safe, the idea that we're sending $400 billion to nations where it is actively turned into financing for terrorists — and other nations who are simply not supportive of democracy — he finds that incredibly troubling.

The good news is that John McCain and Douglas Holtz-Eakin are still influential figures in Republican Party politics. The bad news, of course, is that they've both completely abandoned these views and never so much as attempted to justify the change.

Life in 1960

One way to think about why a little utopianism in one's thinking is okay is to think back to the state of public policy in 1960. Back then there was no Medicare no Medicaid no Environmental Protection Agency no SCHIP and no looming Affordable Care Act. There was also no schools were segregated, abortion was illegal, "miscegenation" was illegal, and gays and lesbians were in the closet. Private ownership of telephones was also illegal, a regulatory agency set airfares, the Pentagon was 9.3 percent of GDP, and a bank couldn't have branches in more than one state.

Since that time, we've had a huge increase in personal freedom, a dramatic expansion of the welfare state, and yet a huge increase economic freedom. And policy improvements in the United States have been modest compared to those in China or Poland. I'm hoping to still be alive to see where we end up in 2060.