J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2090

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Jonathan Weisman Edition

Ezra Klein:

Ezra Klein - A deal based on the Fiscal Commission would include higher taxes: Jonathan Weissman's article that:

the deficit commission's version of tax reform would net $180 billion in additional revenues over 10 years.

[Jonathan] Chait notes that $180 billion would mean there's:

nearly ten times as much spending cuts ($1.7 trillion) as higher revenue ($180 billion.)... It's so nuts I'm tempted to assume this story couldn't possibly be correct."

At least as far as the Fiscal Commission's report goes, Chait is right and the number is incorrect. "Weisman said that the Fiscal Commission got $180 billion in tax revenue relative to the baseline over ten years," one of the commission's staff members told me. "That's wrong. The tax reform piece brought in $180 billion in 2020 alone, and $785 billion over ten years."... [T]he idea is to make the Fiscal Commission's report into legislation, not radically change its mix of revenues and spending cuts, and so I'd assume they're still targeting $785 billion.

David Roberts: The Public Trusts the EPA

DR:

New poll: the public trusts EPA, loves the Clean Air Act, and wants Congress to butt out | Grist: As everyone knows by now, Republicans have launched a massive, coordinated assault on EPA, attempting to block its greenhouse gas regulations, its air and water regulations, and in some cases its very existence.... [T]he Republican attack on EPA is radically unpopular with voters across parties and demographics. The latest evidence comes from a nationwide survey done by the American Lung Association in partnership with polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.... The public overwhelmingly supports EPA in updating Clean Air Act standards and overwhelmingly opposes congressional efforts to block EPA. When it comes to clean air, the public trusts EPA far more than Congress.

Should EPA update Clean Air Act standards to make them stricter? Fully 69 percent of respondents somewhat or strongly agree, compared to 26 percent who somewhat or strongly oppose... independents line up with Democrats. Where 88 percent of Dems want standards updated, so do 68 percent of independents, compared with 49 percent of Republicans. (Note too that even among Republicans, support for strengthening standards outweighs opposition.)

Yet another key fact: The public does not distinguish greenhouse gas standards from other air quality standards. When asked about four specific regulations, CO2 standards were just as popular (77 percent support) as smog limits, even a hair more popular than vehicle fuel efficiency standards....

Republican agitprop doesn't seem to be having much effect. For instance, take the endlessly repeated point that EPA is "overreaching." Does the public agree? No....

This poll is in line with previous polls, and the conclusion is inescapable: The public likes clean air. They like the Clean Air Act. They trust EPA to set appropriate standards for both conventional pollutants and for greenhouse gases. And they don't want Congress interfering...

This Is a Better Version of "Mountains Beyond Mountains" than Duncan Black Has

Arcade Fire:

Mitchell Hoffman on Wealth and Rescue

MH:

Review of Economics and Statistics: "Does Higher Income Make You More Altruistic? Evidence from the Holocaust": This paper considers the decision of Gentiles whether or not to rescue Jews during the Holocaust, a situation of altruistic behavior under life-or-death stakes. I examine the role to which economic factors may have influenced the decision to be a rescuer. Using cross-country data, and detailed individual-level data on rescuers and non-rescuers, I find that (1) Richer countries had many more rescuers than poorer ones, and (2) Within countries, richer people were more likely to be rescuers than poorer people. The individual-level effect of income on being a rescuer remains significant after controlling for ease of rescue variables, such as the number of rooms in one's home, suggesting that the correlation of income and rescue is not solely driven by richer people having more resources for rescue. Given that richer people might be thought to have more to lose by rescuing, the evidence is consistent with the view that altruism increases in income.

The Arctic Melt

dr2chase:

dr2blog: This looks bad: When people say they think the IPCC Climate predictions are too conservative, they’re talking about stuff like this.

From The Copenhagen Diagnosis, via Skeptical Science.

David Swanson: Colin Powell's Own Staff Had Warned Him Against His War Lies

David Swanson:

Colin Powell's Own Staff Had Warned Him Against His War Lies: In the wake of WMD-liar Curveball's videotaped confession, Colin Powell is demanding to know why nobody warned him about Curveball's unreliability. The trouble is, they did....

During his presentation at the United Nations, Powell provided this translation of an intercepted conversation between Iraqi army officers.... Powell was writing fictional dialogue. He put those extra lines in there and pretended somebody had said them. Here's what Bob Woodward said about this in his book "Plan of Attack."

[Powell] had decided to add his personal interpretation of the intercepts to rehearsed script, taking them substantially further and casting them in the most negative light. Concerning the intercept about inspecting for the possibility of 'forbidden ammo,' Powell took the interpretation further: 'Clean out all of the areas. . . . Make sure there is nothing there.' None of this was in the intercept.

For most of his presentation, Powell wasn't inventing dialogue, but he was presenting as facts numerous claims that his own staff had warned him were weak and indefensible....

A Feb. 3, 2003, INR evaluation of a subsequent draft of Powell's remarks noted:

Page 4, last bullet, re key files being driven around in cars to avoid inspectors. This claim is highly questionable and promises to be targeted by critics and possibly UN inspection officials as well.

That didn't stop Colin from stating it as fact and apparently hoping that, even if UN inspectors thought he was a brazen liar, US media outlets wouldn't tell anyone.

On the issue of biological weapons and dispersal equipment, Powell said: "we know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was disbursing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents to various locations, distributing them to various locations in western Iraq." The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as "WEAK"....

Powell's own staff had told him the thing was a water truck, but he told the U.N. it was "a signature item... a decontamination vehicle." The UN was going to need a decontamination vehicle itself by the time Powell finished spewing his lies and disgracing his country...

Ed Balls Draws a Line in the Sand

EB:

FT.com / UK / Economy & Trade - Balls warns King on Bank credibility: Ed Balls, shadow chancellor, has criticised Mervyn King, Bank of England governor, saying he should step out of the political arena and stop tying his credibility to the coalition’s “extreme” deficit-reduction plans.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Balls drew comparisons between Mr King’s stance and the backing lent by the Bank of England to the Treasury’s fiscal hawks during the Great Depression. “The last thing you ever want is for the Bank of England to be drawn into the political arena,” said Mr Balls, one of the architects of Labour’s plan in the 1990s to give the Bank its independence. “Central bank governors have to be very careful about tying themselves too closely to fiscal strategies, especially when they are extreme and are making their job on monetary policy more complicated.”

Mr Balls believes that the governor is risking the Bank’s reputation by endorsing policies that could tip Britain into a double-dip recession and a period of mass unemployment....

Mr Balls said a double-dip recession was a possibility – although “not the most likely outcome” – and argued that Mr King and the monetary policy committee have been right so far to maintain interest rates at 0.5 per cent.

The criticism of Mr King’s allegedly political role echoes that of a number of MPC members who aired their concerns about the “excessively political” stance taken by the governor towards the coalition’s austerity programme...

Government Should Be the Right Size

Michael O'Hare:

Right-sizing government « The Reality-Based Community: Can the assertion “Government is too big [or too small]” ever mean enough to support a serious conversation, much less a policy decision?  How about “California [or the US; plug in your own jurisdiction larger than a small town] can’t afford [plug in a program]“? What could such  statements mean, or be shorthand for?...

Let’s, then, immediately distinguish a society as a whole, and especially its economy, from the special agency – government – it might decide to task with a larger or smaller set of its productive activities.... If you have loosened the stone libertarian mind-vise enough to admit that there is such a thing as a market failure, and enough intelligence or education to understand that market failure is a technical property of a good or service and implies no rap on markets, you will be OK with the idea that government is exactly the right agency with which to get stuff we want that the market won’t supply (enough of) by itself, and to avoid stuff we don’t want, like pollution, that the market will overproduce. If you have a heart, you will also be OK with ideas like “death by starvation is cruel and excessive punishment for ‘not having been able to save enough to retire on’, even for ‘having been too careless to save enough’, certainly for ‘having been unlucky enough to be smitten by illness or accident’” and you will find government is also well suited to correct some important unfairness and injustice, even when the best it can do along these lines entails some moral hazard and bad incentives. It’s worth noting that absent slavery, every productive activity, whether managed (or obligated) by government or by private enterprise, is in the end carried out in the private sector: public schools are built by private contractors, and government workers are economically just small private businesses with no employees.

As is true at every moment of every year, we have governments doing the tasks they have been given so far, and consuming economic resources to do so. Among those are some tasks a reasonable person might ask not be done at all, like making a second, redundant engine for the joint strike fighter, and tasks others might think better done entirely in the private sector, like building and operating a bridge or a piece of highway.  We also see tasks not being done at all that some claim should be, and would if government were assigned the work, like stabilizing the climate, and tasks (some claim) would be better done by government than however they are being accomplished in the market. We could ask similar questions about everything in and out of the public sector, but for some of them, like whether the army should be shut down and left to the market, it’s hard to get grownups to waste time on the conversation, so the political debate tends to focus on programs at the deliberative margin of the public-private boundary.

The only way a sane person can want to move tasks like these in or out of the government part of society’s productive ensemble is to ask whether doing so will give us more of the stuff we want(physical and other)  than we would have to give up to get it. The fancy name for this test is cost-benefit analysis....

Taxes are too high when there are programs in government that create less value than they use up, and too low when there are programs that would create net value if we assigned them to government.  Government is too big or too small by precisely the same rules.  Trying to make the conversation simple enough for Fox News analysts to rant about by reversing these rules of inference (which actually seem pretty simple to me) is monomaniac lunacy, or cynical mendacity in the service of selling advertising time or getting votes, or both; it’s not politics and certainly not governance.

The Decline Of The Music Industry

Jay Yarrow:

CHART OF THE DAY: The Death Of The Music Industry: Here is a stunning visualization of the collapse of the music industry from Bain. As you can see, the growth of digital sales is not doing enough to offset the death of the CD. (Chart via Peter Kafka, who spotted it on Flickr.)

Econ 210a: Memo Question for February 23

The temperate economies settled from northwestern Europe--the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand--were all resource rich. So why did they industrialize early? Why didn't they simply become gigantic Denmarks, shipping agricultural and other resource-based products to the European industrial powers in return for manufactures?