Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 205
July 22, 2014
Dodd-Frank Turns Four
Suzy Khimm checks in on the impact of Wall Street reform upon Dodd-Frank’s four-year anniversary yesterday:
We’ve eliminated some of the causes of the last crisis, but that doesn’t mean we’ve prevented the next one. The toxic mortgage products that led to the last financial collapse have been all but eliminated from the marketplace. If anything, policy experts and advocates are concerned that federal officials have gone too far in tamping down mortgage risk. But the next crisis isn’t likely to resemble the last one. Faced with increased regulation and scrutiny in one sector, financial institutions will simply turn to other kinds of financial products. A post-recession boom in subprime auto lending and junk-rated corporate debt, for instance, have recently raised concerns that few had anticipated four years ago. Such risky loans will continue unless regulations are implemented and enforced more effectively, said [finance professor Anat] Admati.
Patrick Caldwell blames regulators and Republicans for failures in implementation:
Congressional Republicans have done everything in their power to stall the process. They’ve introduced bills to hamper rulemaking and, when that has failed, hamstrung regulators by holding back funding for the agencies, blocking their ability to hire the new employees necessary to write and enforce Dodd-Frank rules.
Peter Suderman, meanwhile, argues that the problem is excessive regulation within Dodd-Frank:
By its third anniversary last summer, the 848-page law had generated nearly 14,000 pages of new regulations, with who knows how many more in the lifetimes of rule-writing to come. … Dodd-Frank is not a law that was passed to do any specific thing, or even several specific things. It regulates all manner of minutiae: the particulars of debit card surcharges, mortgage qualification rules, bank capital requirements, energy company finances, and even disclosures on the corporate use of tungsten and other minerals from the Congo. In practice, it looks more like a law designed to do anything, and perhaps everything. Judging by the results, it’s hard not to conclude that the legislators behind the law did not really know what it was supposed to do at all.
The Left’s Elizabeth Warren Fantasy
Warren’s speech last week at Netroots Nation gave it new life. Her fans even created this cringe-inducing hathetic theme song:
But there are few signs that Warren is preparing for a run:
[S]he is not doing behind-the-scenes spadework expected for a White House run. When she headlined the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s Humphrey-Mondale Dinner in March, Warren did not take down names and numbers of the people she met. She traveled with only one aide, hitching a ride from the airport from a local party official, said Corey Day, the party’s executive director.
“There was no advance guy making sure the room was exactly right and her water was cold,” Day said. “You didn’t sense an urgency for her to build a political operation. It was just her and her message, all very low-key.”
Weigel understands the game activists are playing:
The Dean campaign lost every major primary. The lesson activists took away: Try something. The media, at least, is going to cover a primary threat more than it covers a sui generis student loan bill. Thus the Warren “presidential campaign,” a masterful branding and messaging exercise.
In September 2013, the New York Times wrote an attention-getting profile of Warren’s appeal to progressives, proven by the growing crowds for organizers wise enough to book her. “Bumper stickers and T-shirts surfacing in liberal enclaves proclaim, ‘I’m from the Elizabeth Warren Wing of the Democratic Party.’ ” Jonathan Martin reported that those stickers were mass-produced by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which was founded in 2009 by Adam Green (a veteran of MoveOn and Democratic campaigns) and Stephanie Taylor (a veteran of the SEIU, AFL-CIO, and yes, MoveOn).
Enten shows that Warren, if she ran, would be the most liberal candidate in decades:
If Warren were to win the Democratic nomination, she’d rank as the second-most liberal nominee who served in the Senate or House. Her voting record has been to the left of Walter Mondale’s; only the famously liberal George McGovern had a more leftward-leaning legislative record. By contrast, the past three Democrats to represent the party on the presidential ticket were all near the center of the Democratic Senate caucus, while Warren has the fifth-most liberal voting record in the Senate today.
And, as Andrew Prokop explains, merely running to Hillary’s left isn’t likely to succeed:
The assumption among people who talk to a lot of very progressive activists is that the Democratic base is yearning for a much more liberal nominee. But according to a poll from CNN and ORC International, that’s not the case at all. Only 11 percent of Democrats would prefer a nominee who’s more liberal than Clinton — compared to 20 percent who’d like a more conservative nominee. Once again, it’s difficult to see the opening for a progressive challenger here.
Criminally Bad Parenting, Ctd
Douthat takes a deeper look at “the obligations of conservatives, who tend to support measures that encourage single parents to take jobs, to fiercely oppose policies and practices that then punish such parents when they leave their kids unsupervised.” He suggests building on “direct, paycheck-based success rather than trying to build out the existing K-through-12 system,” and warns against looking to Europe for answers:
[T]he more regimented and mandate-thick a society’s child care system, the more likely it is to have unexpected and perverse consequences for parents and families whose lives don’t quite fit the system’s implicit norms — which could mean anyone from high-achieving professional women (who often fare better in the laissez-faire U.S. than under family-friendly socialism) to would-be stay-at-home parents (who get nothing from a government-run child care system, and who can be effectively prodded into the workforce by the taxes required to pay for it).
Which is why it’s a little unfortunate that American liberalism is pressing so hard right now on ideas (universal daycare, mandated family leave) that could just import some of the European system’s problems to our shores.
Ross returns to the practical childcare issues for struggling families within the US:
Whatever policy outcomes we’re seeking for working families, I still want to resist one possible implication here, because by allowing that it’s reasonable to debate whether policy can do more for parents in Debra Harrell’s position I’m in no way conceding that she actually did anything wrong or problematic, or for that matter that letting one’s children roam or play unsupervised is ever necessarily a sign that government assistance is needed, stat.
My Sunday column began with a childhood anecdote, but I think the far better anecdata comes from today’s piece by Michael Brendan Dougherty, who unlike myself actually grew up with a single mother, somewhat outside the upper middle class cocoon. Part of his argument, and it’s an important one, is that whatever we do to help working parents cope, we should also want to live in a society where parents — regardless of their material situation — feel entirely comfortable leaving their kids to play in park while they work, or letting them wander the woods and streets near their house, or leaving them home alone for a few hours under an older sibling’s supervision.
Michael Kress at Parents, responding to Ross’ column, is more sympathetic to Europe’s approach:
Affordable, reliable, and safe childcare is a necessary component of a functioning society, especially one that expects—requires, even—parents to work. And so we need to figure out a way to guarantee it to all working parents. In Europe, “all European countries offer government subsidies and regulation support to early childhood care,” according to the European Union’s website. “These measures include tax breaks, vouchers, subsidies paid to parents or to the care provider; and in several European countries, capping of childcare costs relative to household income, or by obliging employers to support childcare costs (for instance in the Netherlands).”
I don’t know what form this sort of policy should take here in the United States, but whether it’s tax breaks or subsidies or publicly funded day-care centers or something else entirely, without addressing this problem, we will see many more Debra Harrells. …
Our public policy must recognize the realities of today’s families, especially the huge number of single parents (and the correlation between single parenthood and poverty). In addition, many families today lack the extensive familial and social networks that may have, in the past, provided (free) childcare so mom and/or dad could work. This is not just a problem for the very poor. There is nothing optional about working for most people trying to support their kids, and childcare could easily be beyond a single parent’s means.
As parents, most of us have said things to our kids like, “I don’t have eyes in the back of my head,” or, “I can’t be in two places at once.” For the single moms who must be at work in order to feed their families but have no one else to supervise their children, these are not flippant throw-away lines; they are realities that we as a society must help fix.
More blogging on bad parenting here and here, and some reader responses here.
Lonely Planet
Ethan Chiel recounts the strange story behind the decade-old Internet phenomenon I am lonely will anyone speak to me:
[Ten years ago] an unregistered guest poster using the name “lonely” started a thread on the forums at moviecodec.com, a site usually dedicated to discussing digital video files. The thread was titled “i am lonely will anyone speak to me,” and the first post read:
please will anyone speak to about anything to me …
Ten days after the thread was created, another guest, wetfeet2000, made the first of what of what would be many similar posts:
dude, i typed in “I am lonely” in google, and your post was the very first reposnse. does that make you the most popular lonliest person on the planet ?
Noting that the thread is now nearly 2,200 pages long, Chiel considers its significance:
I’ve never posted in the thread, but I think about some of the posts in it often. Having spent time as the top search result for lonely people seeking help through Google means that it doubles as a public archive of mostly anonymous human loneliness. … There are definitely bad elements in “i am lonely will anyone speak to me,” but I think of it fondly anyway because for a long time it’s struck me as an enduring example of something the Internet is well suited for: an impromptu place where people can say something out loud, and where doing so might help them a little.
Which makes us all a little less lonely.
July 21, 2014
The Best Of The Dish Today
If you believe, as most Republicans still seem to do, that the most important boon for the economy and the deficit would be further tax cuts, then surely Kansas’ recent, radical experiment in slashing tax rates should merit a view. The result, it now appears, is that tax revenues in Kansas have collapsed:
From June, 2013 to June, 2014, all Kansas tax revenue plunged by 11 percent. Individual income taxes fell from $2.9 billion to $2.2 billion and all income tax collections plummeted from $3.3 billion to $2.6 billion, a drop of more than 20 percent.
Did growth rebound? Nah: “Since the first round of tax cuts, job growth in Kansas has lagged the U.S. economy. So have personal incomes.” Now take a look at California, that big tax-and-spend liberal state. In 2013, they went in the opposite direction and raised taxes considerably on sales and high incomes. Many predicted disaster. The result?
Last year California added 410,418 jobs, an increase of 2.8 percent over 2012, significantly better than the 1.8 percent national increase in jobs. California is home to 12 percent of Americans, but last year it accounted for 17.5 percent of new jobs, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/07/20/6564879/states-job-growth-defies-predictions.html#storylink=cpy
Obviously, there are other factors involved in both cases, and you should read the links to see the qualifications. But they are qualifications. We’ve know for a long time that cutting taxes does not help the government’s bottom line and has very limited potential for job growth given the historically low rates of tax in the US right now. But we didn’t know that tax increases could coexist with quite robust job growth and fiscal health. Count this as one more piece of evidence that re-thinking Republican economics on reformocon lines is a necessary but not sufficient initiative to alter GOP dogma.
Today, we covered the ever-more-sobering news out of Ukraine and Gaza – in particular Putin’s dead end and Netanyahu’s Gaza strategy (if you can call it that). And if you weren’t depressed enough, here’s a look at the fate of Iraq’s beleaguered Christians. To balance this a bit, check out pheromone dating rituals and an ode to the pit-bull as the archetypal American dog.
The most popular post of the day was “The Oldest Depiction Of Sex On Record” on the Ron Jeremys of ancient Egypt, followed by Holding Corpses Hostage. Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails, including this back and forth sparked by a reader upset with his situation under Obamacare.
39 more readers became subscribers today (a much bigger Monday total than usual, probably due to our Gaza coverage and Ukraine coverage). You can join those new subscribers here - and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish - for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here.
See you in the morning.
(Photo: Family members of Major Tsafrir Bar-Or mourn and cry during his funeral on July 21, 2014 in Holon, Israel. By Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images)
The View From Your Window
Rockport, Massachusetts, 7 pm
In Case You Need Another Reason To Hate Mosquitos …
Last week, Maggie Koerth-Baker warned that chikungunya, a mosquito-borne disease that’s not typically fatal but currently has no cure, is inevitably making its way to the US:
The virus has been known since the 1950s, but because it was largely non-lethal and largely confined to developing countries in Africa and Asia, the Western medical establishment didn’t much care about it until 10 years ago. That’s when chikungunya showed up on the French-controlled island of La Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, where it infected 40 percent of the population. Since then, it’s exploded in parts of Asia where it hadn’t been seen in decades (and other parts where it hadn’t been seen at all), reached Australia and Taiwan, and made landfall in Italy and France. And all of that was before the outbreak in the Caribbean.
So what changed? The sudden spread of chikungunya seems to be related to two things. First, the virus itself mutated. The strain that’s spreading around the world is different from the one that hung around sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, it’s much more efficient at replicating itself in the guts of mosquitoes. That seems to have increased both its ability to move into new places and its ability to be carried by different species of mosquito.
That same day, the CDC announced the first locally acquired case of the virus in Florida. Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart explains why medical entomologists (like her wife Cassandra) are freaking out:
To understand why it’s chikungunya, not dengue, that makes entomologists so nervous, you’ll need to know a bit about another mosquito; Aedes albopictus (more pronouncably known as the Asian tiger mosquito). The Asian tiger mosquito is an invasive species that has spread over much of the eastern half of the United States since its introduction in 1985. These back-and-white-striped jerks are capable of spreading all sorts of diseases, including West Nile, dengue, and yellow fever. However, they often do so pretty inefficiently, with viruses found in only the tiniest minority of the mosquitoes tested. In the case of chikungunya, however, at least one strain has been shown to spread as easily in tiger mosquitoes as in Aedes aegypti. …
Adding to the reasons for alarm is the fact that chikungunya doesn’t need a reservoir—it can be spread directly from one human host to another. This is in contrast with several other mosquito-borne pathogens, including West Nile virus, which needs to replicate inside a bird before it can pass from a mosquito to a human. The special characteristics of tiger mosquitoes once again exacerbate the problem—these particular mosquitoes prefer feeding off of, and living close to, humans. (Many mosquitoes, in contrast, feed opportunistically on humans, while primarily targeting other animals.) Tiger mosquitoes are also daytime feeders, which means that while other species are taking a break, preferring to feed at dawn or twilight, the tigers keep chomping during the times of day when humans are most active.
Face Of The Day
A security serviceman wearing military fatigues stands during a press conference held by self-proclaimed Prime Minister of the pro-Russian separatist “Donetsk People’s Republic” in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, on July 19, 2014. By Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty.
Poseur Alert
‘”The Mockingbird Next Door’ conjured mostly sad images in my mind. Ms. Lee has a regular booth at McDonald’s, where she goes for coffee. She eats takeout salads from Burger King on movie night. When she fishes, she uses wieners for bait. She feeds the town ducks daily, with seed corn from a plastic Cool Whip Free container, calling “Woo-hoo-HOO! Woo-hoo-HOO!” Somehow learning all this is worse than it would be to learn that she steals money from a local orphanage,” – Dwight Garner, NYT.
(Hat tip: the wonderful Michelle Dean)
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