Jonathan Chait's Blog, page 150

Climate Science Skeptic Report Plagiarized

I expected better than this from the climate science skeptic community:

An influential 2006 congressional report that raised questions about the validity of global warming research was partly based on material copied from textbooks, Wikipedia and the writings of one of the scientists criticized in the report, plagiarism experts say.

Review of the 91-page report by three experts contacted by USA TODAY found repeated instances of passages lifted word for word and what appear to be thinly disguised paraphrases.

The charges of plagiarism don't negate one of the basic premises of the report — that climate scientists used poor statistics in two widely noted papers.

But the allegations come as some in Congress call for more investigations of climate scientists like the one that produced the Wegman report.

"It kind of undermines the credibility of your work criticizing others' integrity when you don't conform to the basic rules of scholarship," Virginia Tech plagiarism expert Skip Garner says.

If You Die In A Terrorist Attack, Remember This Moment

Probably the most serious long-term threat to American security is the possibility that terrorists will acquire an unsecured nuclear weapon. It's therefore terrifying that Republicans are holding up the START Treaty that secures that material:

Let's start with START, the proposed nuclear pact with Russia that Senate Republicans such as Jon Kyl (Ariz.) are attempting to derail, at least until the next Congress. Since the expiration of the previous START treaty last December, there have been no U.S. inspectors in Russia to keep an eye on the country's thousands of nuclear warheads. If the Senate doesn't come up with the 67 votes needed for ratification, says Travis Sharp of the Center for a New American Security, there's a risk Russia will retaliate by removing its logistical support for the U.S. war in Afghanistan, abandoning its cooperation in preventing nuclear proliferation, and thwarting U.S. efforts to keep Iran from gaining nuclear weapons.

But don't take his word for it. Listen to Richard Lugar, top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations committee and one man who still puts the national interest above political considerations. "We're talking today about the national security of the United States of America," he pleaded on Wednesday. "[T]his treaty must be ratified and be ratified in this session of the Congress.... We're talking about thousands of warheads that are still there, an existential problem for our country. To temporize at this point I think is inexcusable."

Or listen to Bob Gates, the Bush/Obama defense secretary. "The new START treaty has the unanimous support of America's military leadership," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, calling for a strong bipartisan majority to support the treaty because of "the security it provides to the American people."

What's so hair-pulling about it is that our security apparatus is filled with wildly expensive and/or intrusive measures that bring minimal benefit, but the one security intervention with an enormous cost-benefit ratio may get held up because you need the consent of an intransigent and largely insane party.

Unlearning The New York Accent

It turns out to be a cottage industry:

Miss LoGiudice’s accent didn’t matter when she was growing up in Howard Beach, a heavily Italian neighborhood in Queens where dropping r’s in words like doctor (doctuh) and water (wawtuh) just happens to be the way many people talk.

“I grew up with people who could be the cast of ‘Jersey Shore,’ ” Miss LoGiudice, 27, said. It was not until she got to Wesleyan University that she realized how much her speech pigeonholed her. And as a young actress who is “tall and Anglican-looking,” she worried her accent would be a roadblock. “If I had looked like Meadow Soprano,” Miss LoGiudice said, “I wouldn’t have had to worry about my accent.”...

The online Yellow Pages includes more than a dozen listings for “New York accent reduction” specialists, and searching “New York accent” and reduction or elimination on Google generates about 4,000 hits. The process typically takes at least several months, with as many as three sessions a week, and can cost from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.

The story does not mention it, but one of the great bits in Woody Allen's "Radio Days," which ranks among my favorite movies, centers around an actress who takes diction lessons to remove her New York accent:

Torture Chamber

President Obama is offering an olive branch to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the right-wing business lobby that spent millions of dollars opposing his agenda and helping elect Republicans. Meanwhile, the Chamber has said it won't be working to unseat Obama in 2012, though this promise actually means it won't be working quite so openly to unseat Obama in 2012:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spent more than $32 million to boost GOP candidates in 2010, announced Wednesday that it won't campaign against Obama in the upcoming presidential campaign.

But in his speech to the group's membership, Chamber President Tom Donahue appeared to leave his high-powered lobbying group a little wiggle room. While he said the group won't campaign against Obama, Donahue also said it won't back down from its opposition to Obama's policies, likening them to a "regulatory tsunami."

Translated from D.C. campaign code, that probably means the group won't run ads specifically calling for Obama's defeat or talking up potential rivals -- but will leave the door open to running spots critical of the president's policies, as it did in scores of House and Senate races in 2010.

Why is the Chamber taking a lower profile? Possibly because the White House is encouraging some competition to the Chamber's pro-Republican line:

The White House has been working behind the scenes to boost an outside group of corporate executives, known as Business Forward, to help set it up as a kind of rival organization to the Chamber of Commerce. The idea is, according to senior Democratic strategists, that the executives who make up Business Forward can stand up and support the president's agenda -- serving as a counterweight to Chamber opposition in order to show that the business community is not unilaterally anti-Obama.

In fact, Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff at the White House, briefed leaders of Business Forward on Obama's agenda at a meeting in Washington on Monday. The group is made up of executives from several major corporations, including AT&T, Ford, Facebook, Microsoft, Fidelity, Hilton Worldwide, Visa, Wal-Mart, McDonald's and Time Warner (the parent company of CNN).

Documents from the event obtained by CNN noted that "17 of America's most respected companies are working with Business Forward to encourage thousands of business executives, small business owners, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to get engaged in the policymaking process."

The documents added that over the next three months, the group plans to "host panels in Washington and around the country on consumer financial protection, trade and exports, cybersecurity and IP, health care and childhood obesity," all of which could be an opportunity to drum up support for some of Obama's signature issues.

If you recall, several companies pulled out of the Chamber in 2009 over its hard-line opposition to cap and trade. The Chamber is run mainly by Republicans who are committed to a classic class-solidarity brand of pro-business advocacy, in which business executives emphasize their shared interests in opposing regulation and protecting low tax rates for wealthy individuals. But there are a lot of executives who want to do something about carbon emissions and other national problems that can't be solved simply by concentrating more wealth and power in the hands of business owners and managers, and the Chamber doesn't want competition. So the apparent detente between the Chamber and Obama may be less friendly than it appears.

The Voodoo That They Do So Well

Deficit hawks have a common trope of drawing parallels between right-wing critics who don't want to raise taxes and left-wing critics who don't want to cut entitlement spending. It's not a very good parallel. Liberals have an ideological preference for a larger welfare state, with tax rates closer to the range found in Western Europe. But they do accept the factual premise that reducing spending on entitlement programs would, in fact, decrease the budget deficit. They simply find that outcome undesirable.

Meanwhile conservatives not only prefer much smaller government, they constantly deny that increasing the revenue base will actually reduce the budget deficit. One such theory is that increasing tax rates reduces tax revenue. Another theory is that increasing tax rates increases revenue but then, through political voodoo, causes spending to increase by an equal or greater amount.

Most conservative movement apparatchiks advocate one or the other of these theories, and some, like Wall Street Journal editorial page economics writer Stephen Moore, advocate both, even though the two theories are mutually exclusive. Here is classic Moore in Laffer mode defending his arguments that Bill Clinton's 1993 deficit reduction plan would increase the deficit. And here he is today arguing for starve the beast:

We're constantly told by politicos that tax increases must be put "on the table" to get congressional Democrats—who've already approved close to $1 trillion of new spending in violation of their own budget rules over the last two years—to agree to make cuts in the unsustainable entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.

Our research indicates this is a sucker play. After the 1990 and 1993 tax increases, federal spending continued to rise. The 1990 tax increase deal was enacted specifically to avoid automatic spending sequestrations that would have been required under the then-prevailing Gramm-Rudman budget rules.

I haven't read the paper they claim shows that tax hikes lead to spending hikes. But I have seen research conclusively showing the very opposite. Research aside, it's plainly obvious that the 1990 and 1993 tax increases did not cause spending to rise:

Following the 1990 budget agreement, outlays collapsed as revenue rose sharply. Outlays only increased after the 2001 Bush tax cut.

The good news is that the utter, abject failure of George Bush's economic theories -- failure even by the ideological standards of the conservative movement -- has created some openness to questioning the voodoo dogma of the right. But the dogma remains very powerful, and there's simply no parallel to it on the left.

Republicans' School For Scandal

Suspicious doings at the Harvard Republican Club:

Michael W. McLean ’12 won an uncontested race for the Harvard Republican Club presidency last night after Luis A. Martinez ’12 pulled out of the contest while denying accusations that he forged an e-mail from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company to Harvard students.

Martinez said that McLean confronted him in Winthrop Dining Hall on Monday night, alleging that he was responsible for sending the e-mail (see here for text). The message, which The Crimson obtained yesterday, invited recipients—including several members of the HRC—to a selective McKinsey recruiting event at MIT, which was to take place at the same time as the HRC elections last night.

If you read the whole story, it appears very, very likely that Martinez tried to steal the election.

Frank Foer wrote a memorable article in 2005 about the culture of the College Republicans, which basically is a training ground to teach future party operatives to cheat and smear each other:

Back in 1981, Abramoff and his campaign manager, Norquist, promised their leading competitor, Amy Moritz, the job of CRNC executive director if she dropped out of the race. Moritz took the bait, but it turned out that Abramoff had made the promise with his fingers crossed. Norquist took the executive director job and named Moritz his deputy. That demotion didn't last long, either. After discovering the talented Ralph Reed, Norquist handed the Christian Coalition godfather Moritz's responsibilities and her office space. They placed all of Moritz's belongings in a box labeled amy's desk. Even 25 years later, she hasn't shed her role as College Republican doormat. Abramoff used her think tank, the National Center for Public Policy Research, to funnel nearly $1 million into a phony direct-mail firm with an address identical to his own. 

While College Republicans have a vague understanding of Abramoff's ascent, they all can recite the ballad of Rove and Atwater--the ultimate object lesson in how the Establishment strikes back. In 1973, Rove was the Establishment candidate, and Atwater, the original Sun Tsu-quoting College Republican, was his prime campaign operative. They spent the spring of 1973 crisscrossing the country in a Ford Pinto, lining up the support of state chairs--basically the right-wing version of Thelma and Louise. But, in point of fact, Rove was hardly the right-winger in the race. His two opponents, Terry Dolan and Robert Edgeworth, were. And, when Dolan threw his support to Edgeworth, Rove had no other alternative. He had to cheat. 

When the College Republicans gathered for their convention at the Lake of the Ozarks resort in Missouri, Rove and Atwater relentlessly challenged the legitimacy of Edgeworth's delegates, even if the evidence did not justify their attacks. Because of Rove's allegations, the convention ended in deadlock. In revenge, Dolan went to The Washington Post with recordings that captured training seminars where Rove boasted of his campaign techniques, including rooting through opponents' garbage cans and other forms of campaign espionage. The Post broke the story under the headline "gop probes official as teacher of tricks." The Republican National Committee chairman, one George H.W. Bush, however, didn't punish Rove for his less-than-high-minded behavior. Instead, he gave Rove the chairmanship and sent Edgeworth a scathing letter accusing him of disloyalty.

A Tale Of Two White Boards

For better or for worse, one of the most important communications media of the last couple years has been Glenn Beck and his chalkboard:

I wonder if it's a coincidence that the Obama administration has countered with Austan Goolsbee and his white board:

Now, Goolsbee's presentations are short, popular, and well below the level of an economic seminar. That said, they're smart, cool, fact-based, and fairly persuasive. The contrast between the two men at their white boards is a synecdoche of the clash between technocratic liberalism and right-wing ideology that has dominated the national agenda since 2009.

Return Of the Donald Trump Emergency Theory

National Review's Daniel Foster, reacting to the possibility that Democrats will allow the tax cuts to lapse, asks, "does anybody think allowing all the cuts to expire wouldn’t prolong our economic doldrums?"

Foster is expressing a view that's become common on the right, which you could call tax cut Keynesianism. The idea is that it's especially harmful to raise taxes during a recession. I wrote a column about this view a couple months ago. Basically, if you believe that recessions are bad times to raise taxes, then you should also believe they're a bad time to cut spending. Alternatively, if you reject the Keynesian model, then you might think raising taxes is bad, but there's no particular reason to think raising taxes during a recession is especially problematic.

The conservative rhetoric about raising taxing during a recession amounts to an ideologically incoherent pastiche of mutually exclusive theories. It literally makes no sense at all.

Extend the Bush Tax Cuts Below $1 Million? I'm Intrigued...

[Guest post by Noam Scheiber:]

The idea's been bouncing around for a while, but Politico suggests some Senate Dems are now seriously considering it, even if many of their colleagues aren't wild about it:

Senate Democrats struggled Thursday to figure out what that next step would be. At a three-hour caucus meeting, members stood up one-by-one to speak their mind, engaging in what one senator described as an animated debate over raising the income threshold to $1 million or keep it at $250,000.

“A lot of people want to really make a good run at continuing the middle class tax cuts and raising taxes on the wealthy and see where we are,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), adding that he was open to the idea. ...

The political argument in favor is that it makes the messaging squeaky clean, and life even less comfortable for GOP opponents--Republicans want to block middle-class tax cuts to take care of millionaires! Obviously you have to weigh that against the fact that the political calculus already heavily favors Democrats (as Jon keeps pointing out, public opinion strongly supports middle-class tax cuts and strongly opposes tax cuts for the top 2 percent). And the fact that the revenue loss from raising the threshold from $250,000 to $1 million would be significant--a major substantive disadvantage.

Having said that, I think there's another big advantage to pursuing this, which lies at the nexus of politics and substance: You create a healthy precedent for separating the tax treatment of millionaires from the tax treatment of everyone else, effectively creating a millionaires tax bracket, which is something that really should happen. James Surowiecki elaborated on the argument in this excellent New Yorker column back in August: 

Even within the top one per cent, income is getting more concentrated: the top 0.1 per cent of earners have seen their share of national income triple over the same period. All by themselves, they now earn as much as the bottom hundred and twenty million people. So at the same time that the rich have been pulling away from the middle class, the very rich have been pulling away from the pretty rich, and the very, very rich have been pulling away from the very rich.

The current debate over taxes takes none of this into account. At the moment, we have a system of tax brackets well suited to nineteenth-century New Zealand. Our system sets the top bracket at three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, with a tax rate of thirty-five per cent. (People in the second-highest bracket, starting at a hundred and seventy-two thousand dollars for individuals, pay thirty-three per cent.) This means that someone making two hundred thousand dollars a year and someone making two hundred million dollars a year pay at similar tax rates. LeBron James and LeBron James’s dentist: same difference. 

This makes no sense—there’s a yawning chasm between the professional and the plutocratic classes, and the tax system should reflect that. A better tax system would have more brackets, so that the super-rich pay higher rates. (The most obvious bracket to add would be a higher rate at a million dollars a year, but there’s no reason to stop there.) This would make the system fairer, since it would reflect the real stratification among high-income earners. A few extra brackets at the top could also bring in tens of billions of dollars in additional revenue.

And, of course, once you have a separate millionaires tax bracket, it's politically easier to raise taxes on millionaires if necessary. And probably easier to create additional brackets beyond that--$10 million, $100 million--which are probably also a good idea. As Suriowiecki puts it: 

The explosion in wealth at the very top of the pyramid has given rise to what the commentator Matt Miller has called a “lower upper class”—doctors, lawyers, accountants, even some journalists, who make very good livings but enjoy nothing like the rewards that come to their peers in finance or in the executive suite. The lower upper class exerts a cultural influence out of proportion to its size, and so its anger toward the upper upper class—toward outrageous executive salaries and Wall Street shenanigans—could be a powerful force for reforming the way we deal with inequality.

Hear, hear.

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