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Why Grumbling About GE’s Taxes Misses the Point

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Recent reports of GE’s artful dodge of U.S. income tax liability are the perfect curtain raisers for the annual tax filing ritual. Yet another example of the injustice of our tax code! Time for a flat tax! No more loopholes for fat cats! Put aside GE’s tax lawyers’ interpretation of the tax code. What is more important than the furor over the story is that it represents yet another missed opportunity for a rational debate and another lost chance to design tax policies to spur innovation, global competitiveness, and growth.

When it comes to tax policy, the left usually lumps the rich and corporations together as villains who should pay up. They argue the tax code is not progressive enough and one way to make it so is to go after the plutocratic moneyed interests.

Inadvertently, the left makes a legitimate point lumping wealthy individuals and corporations together. But it is not because corporations and wealthy individuals are two distinct entities with common traits. Rather it is because a corporation is individual people – some rich, some poor. A corporation is a legal construct but it actually an amalgamation of employees and shareholders bonded by a desire to take in more than what is spent producing whatever it provides to the market. When corporations benefit from tax cuts, guess who benefits. It is not a data file sitting in some computer in Delaware but investors, employees, and consumers.

As for progressivity, the left also makes a fair point as we have seen income disparity widen in the last 30 years. But we aren’t going to close income gaps by going after corporations. Rather we need to abolish the tax cuts on individual dividend payments instituted almost a decade and raise the top marginal rates on individual income to mid-1990s levels. But don’t shake down corporations. In today’s globalized, highly-competitive market, we can ill afford to raise money from companies facing competitors whose countries are cutting, not raising, corporate taxes.

The U.S. now has one of the highest effective corporate tax rates of any OECD company. In other words, not only is the rate U.S. corporations pay (on average 39 percent) high, but the actual rate they pay after deductions and credit is also extremely high, notwithstanding some individual companies who may not pay much in any particular year. The high corporate tax rate is not making our companies stronger and inducing domestic investment. Quite the opposite.

Meanwhile, many of those on the right and in the center have an almost messianic devotion to the notion of broadening the tax base and lowering rates by getting rid of a host of deductions, credits, and exemptions. For them, simplicity is the golden rule. They want to tax every company and every activity the same way. But as philosopher Alfred North Whitehead stated, “seek simplicity but distrust it.”

There’s a simple reason not to treat everything companies do the same: the impacts on jobs and growth are not the same. That’s why, for example, virtually every academic study on the issue finds that giving companies a tax credit for research and development they do here in the United States is good effective policy. It’s the same for tax credits for investment in new capital equipment and software. There’s also a good reason not to treat all industries the same.

The simple fact is that industries like grocery stores, electric utilities and car dealers do not compete globally while industries like steel, pharmaceuticals, and electronics do. While the former provide needed services if we raise their taxes they are not going to build fewer grocery stores, electric wires, or car dealerships. But if we raise the taxes of steel companies, drug companies and electronics companies they will do the rational thing that any company would do: move production to the nations that tax them less. Currently, the former industries pay significantly higher effective tax rates than the last three. And that is exactly how it should be. This is why many state’s tax code favors manufacturing and high tech firms. It’s why most countries’ tax code does the same thing. They realize that jobs depend on the health of their companies that are in competition with firms outside their borders.

So, as you get ready to file your taxes, don’t grumble about GE. Turn your anger toward a polarized, irrational, and tired debate in Washington that is aimed at leveraging votes instead of creating the kind of innovative, productive, and globally competitive economic activity that American workers so desperately need.

Wingnut Watch: How Much to Cut the Budget?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

This will be a very important week in determining exactly how much fiscal radicalism the Republican Party is going to be willing to embrace. The odds of a government shutdown over Fiscal Year 2011 appropriations remain relatively high, despite major Democratic concessions over the level of cuts. House Republicans remain under significant conservative activist pressure to refuse compromise either on the level of cuts or the appropriations riders Democrats are most likely to go to the mat to reject (e.g., decimation of EPA enforcement powers, defunding of Planned Parenthood).

Meanwhile, Rep. Paul Ryan is due to release the House GOP’s draft long-term budget resolution tomorrow, which is almost certain to include “entitlement reforms” that Democrats will heatedly oppose. One tactical consideration is whether hard-core conservatives want to “take their stand” and threaten highly irresponsible behavior over the appropriations measures (which would involve a government shutdown) or over the budget (which they have linked to a debt limit increase vote many are promising to oppose unless they get their way on “entitlement reform.”).

A closely related question is how far conservatives (including those considering a 2012 presidential run) go out on a limb with Ryan on specific entitlements. Intel on Ryan’s plan indicates he’s going to give Social Security a fairly wide berth. Medicaid is most likely to get a big, obvious ax, with a trillion dollars in savings over ten years being the figure heard most often, and conversion of the entitlement into a block grant to the states being the most likely mechanism. Medicare will be the most interesting subject, given recent Republican demagoguery on the alleged impact of health reform on Medicare benefits, and Ryan’s past identification with the idea of turning benefits into vouchers that would have to be spent on buying private health insurance and that will not keep up with actual costs. One guess is that Ryan will use terminology that avoids the “v word” and makes it appear he is simply offering Medicare beneficiaries more choices, which will boost competition and thus hold down costs (an interesting proposition in itself, since past private-sector options for Medicare beneficiaries have been far more expensive than the traditional government plan).

On both Medicaid and Medicare, expect conservatives to object emotionally to any description of what they are proposing as “cuts,” since levels of spending will rise, just not remotely as much. Democrats will then be under the burden of explaining the concept of “current services,” whereby changing population levels and rapidly rising health care costs make the same dollars buy fewer actual services over time. During the budget struggles of the 1990s, Democrats largely won that linguistic fight, at least on Medicare. But one factor that might play out differently arises from Ryan’s likely strategy of “grandfathering” everyone 55 years are older into the current system, and limiting major structural changes to younger Americans. That didn’t work for George W. Bush when he attempted the same tactic for selling partial privatization of Social Security in 2005, but could have some effect at a time of perceived austerity when demographic groups tend to look after their own interests.

A parallel question is how far Republicans go in stimulating Tea Party resentment of the poor and minorities in promoting destruction of Medicaid as an entitlement. Initially, they will almost certainly focus on the demands of Republican governors for “flexibility” in administering Medicaid, which actually means the power to reduce eligibility and benefits. But Democratic arguments that the most vulnerable Americans will be bearing the burden of budget cuts could well produce a Santelli-like backlash among hard-core conservatives who don’t have much sympathy for “looters” dependent on government benefits. There’s not much evidence such sentiments are broadly shared in the population, but they are visible enough on the Right as to find expression among House Republican freshmen.

Throughout the appropriations and budget “crises,” the reaction of presidential candidates to ongoing events could be an aggravating factor, given the competitive pressure to express base-voter fury against Congress and conventional politicians and show “leadership” by saying outrageous but crowd-pleasing things. And by the same token, events in Washington could affect the lay of the land on the campaign trail quite a bit. It’s worth remembering that with one exception, no one among the likely presidential candidates is currently serving in Congress. And the one exception, Rep. Michele Bachmann, has staked out a permanent position of opposing any conceivable compromise with Democrats on any topic.

Speaking of the fiery Minnesotan, she’s finally beginning to get some attention in the mainstream media as something other than a gaffe machine and a cartoon character. First-quarter fundraising figures for the various proto-candidates’ leadership PACs showed her unexpectedly out in front, just ahead of Mitt Romney, having already raised over $2 million. Since she raised over $13 million for her 2010 House re-election campaign (more than Mike Huckabee raised for his entire 2008 presidential campaign), this was just a small indication of what she might ultimately raise if she does run for president.

Separate War Funding Still Makes No Sense

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

On Friday, I spent an hour or so with Senate staffers selling the merits of ending the war funding supplemental bills. We remain mired in the midst of budget negotiations, and my aim was to get Hill staff to keep in mind the bigger picture while they’re in the midst of scrutinizing every line-item.

As I state in the paper, as well as the op-ed in Politico that accompanied it, the goal of ending war funding bills is simple: as the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan have long been predictable (save the troop surge in Afghanistan, but even that isn’t a huge outlier), we should be paying for our military operations at the same time and with the same Congressional scrutiny as the rest of the Defense budget. Currently, we pass separate budgets to pay for what have become known as “Overseas Contingency Operations”, which essentially writes a blank check to the Pentagon, reduces Congressional oversight, and creates uncomfortable votes for Democrats.

The issue remains both valid and pressing. If policymakers want to demonstrate their fiscal chops in the current environment, I suggest a read. Here’s a excerpt:

Supplemental war funding appropriations are hardly new, beginning in World War II. When used correctly, the process serves as a vital tool that delivers timely funding to America’s fighting men and women. In the initial stages of combat, supplemental appropriations are extraordinarily useful in the face of the lengthy Congressional budget process, which does not allow for unanticipated military spending. Typically, the supplemental funds pay for pre-deployment costs, servicemembers’ transportation to the warzone, combat operations, equipment needs, and military construction. Without this tool, the Pentagon would essentially be forced to sacrifice long-term projects to meet immediate wartime needs.

Here’s the rub: Under the Bush administration, allegedly “emergency” supplemental appropriations for war costs became routine avenues for backdoor spending. Their opaque nature and lack of oversight have created a propensity to fund low-priority programs that has effectively eroded any sense of fiscal discipline at the Pentagon, bloating military spending. We must put an end to the practice.

Going Bananas

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s spring and the sap is rising in Washington – especially among Tea Party militants. They seem determined to shut down the federal government, even if it means making the United States look like a plus-size banana republic.

House Speaker John Boehner has been trying to talk sense to his vast freshman class, but they are in no mood for compromise. Although Democrats have agreed to reduce current spending by $33 billion, the GOP’s fiscal fundamentalists won’t budge from the $61 billion in cuts they have already passed on a party-line vote.

Nor will they back off from a slew of nakedly partisan policy riders calculated to be radioactive to Democrats. These poison pill measures, for example, would cut funding for Planned Parenthood, bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon emissions, and block implementation of parts of President Obama’s health care law.

The government will run out of money if no agreement is reached by midnight Friday. The prospect of government agencies shutting down and hundreds of thousands of federal workers being furloughed doesn’t faze Tea Partiers. Having drunk deep of their own strange infusions, they apparently believe the public shares their contempt for the federal government. More experienced GOP hands know better.

“Let’s all be honest, if you shut the government down, it’ll end up costing more than you save because you interrupt contracts. There are a lot of problems with the idea of shutting the government. It is not the goal. The goal is to cut spending,” Boehner warned at a news conference last week.

The economic costs of a shutdown, of course, aren’t the real issue. Behind closed doors, Boehner no doubt is reminding his caucus of the fierce public backlash against Congressional Republicans who forced two shutdowns in the mid-1990s. These battles energized Democrats and set the stage for Bill Clinton’s political resurgence and reelection in 1996.

All this is ancient history to Tea Partiers, who believe they won a public mandate in 2010 for a drastic and immediate fiscal retrenchment. But a more dispassionate reading of the midterm results suggests that the voters’ foremost concern was the economy’s poor performance. Yes, they also want to reduce federal deficits, but timing is crucial. With unemployment falling at last, GOP demands for austerity now are likely to strike many Americans as premature. Plus, what the public wants is for their elected leaders to pull together and tackle the nation’s economic and fiscal problems, not bring government to a grinding halt.

What’s more, House Republicans are fighting on the wrong battleground, haggling over discretionary spending programs that comprise only 13 percent of the federal budget. Slowing and eventually reversing today’s rapid run-up of public debt will require a combination of tax reform and constraints on the automatic spending growth of “mandatory” programs, chiefly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan will introduce tomorrow a comprehensive debt reduction package along these lines. The Ryan plan is really radical: it would voucherize Medicare and turn Medicaid into a block grant. But at least it will focus the House on the real drivers of our fiscal crisis and realistic fixes.

Meanwhile, over in the Senate, there’s been a striking, bipartisan convergence around the idea that the comprehensive blueprint developed by the President’s Fiscal Commission should be the starting point for fiscal reform. Remarkably, 64 Senators (half from each party) endorsed that approach, as has the bipartisan “Gang of Six” led by Senators Mark Warner and Saxby Chambliss.

This is the main arena for serious action to restore fiscal stability in Washington. The sooner we move beyond the distracting “squirmish’ in the House, the better.

Most Manufacturing Industries Are Still Flat on Their Back

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A new story from the Associated Press argues that there’s been a big productivity surge in the U.S., post-financial crisis. Paul Wiseman writes: (my emphasis added)

The reason is U.S. workers have become so productive that it’s harder for anyone without a job to get one.

Companies are producing and profiting more than when the recession began, despite fewer workers. They’re hiring again, but not fast enough to replace most of the 7.5 million jobs lost since the recession began.

Measured in growth, the American economy has outperformed those of Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan — every Group of 7 developed nation except Canada,

According to the conventional wisdom, as summarized by Wiseman, the U.S. has sailed through the crisis in better shape than our industrialized rivals. The conventional wisdom also says to the degree that we have a jobs problem, it’s because we are so good at boosting output and productivity.

Of course, this directly contradicts my recent post, where I argued that the apparent productivity gain from 2007-2009 was to a large extent the result of mismeasurement.

But now let me make a different point. Wiseman argues that companies are producing more than when the recession began.

I don’t think he’s right for most of manufacturing.

I’m going to show a series of charts for various manufacturing industries. These charts show shipments, adjusted for prices changes–’real’ shipments. Real shipments are a good measure of what actually comes out of the factory.

These charts are scaled to January 2007 =100. They are also not seasonally adjusted. We’re going to look at them and ask ourselves the question–is the industry producing more than when the recession began? (I do my comparison from JanFeb 2007 to JanFeb2011, to reduce the impact of seasonal variation)

Let’s start with chemicals. Is the industry producing more than when the recession began? No, since real shipments are down almost 13% over the past four years.

Next up is the plastic and rubber products industry. Producing more than when the recession began? No. Real shipments are down 21% over the past four years, and it’s not even clear that we are seeing signs of recovery now.

Next: Nonmetallic mineral products, which includes glass, cement, tile etc. Producing more than when the recession began? No. Real shipments are down almost 30%. And from the chart, there’s little sign of recovery, which is not surprising given the importance of construction as a market.

Now we come to primary metals–steel, aluminum and etc. Producing more than when the recession started? Almost! Real shipments are down only 3.5% and there appears to be a sustained improvement underway.

Our next contestant is not quite so lucky. Machinery is one of the key strengths of the U.S. economy, including everything from construction equipment to turbines to mining machinery. Unfortunately, when we ask ourselves the question if the industry is producing more than when the recession started, the answer is: No. Real shipments are down 14% over the past four years. What’s more, the data suggest that the industry is still at early 2009 levels, which is not the right place to be.

Next is the computer and electronics industry. Is this industry producing more than before the recession? This is the one case where the answer is unequivocally yes. According to the methodology I am using, real shipments are up 8% over the past four years, with a steady recovery since the bottom of the recession. A couple of caveats here, both directions. There’s reason to believe that this number might be understated, because it doesn’t take into full account the increased power of communications equipment. On the other hand, this industry depends on foreign components, so it is very susceptible to the mismeasurement problem I described in my post last week. Let’s call it a yes for growth, and move on.

Our next industry is electrical equipment, which includes appliances. Is it producing more than when the recession began? Hell, no. Real shipments are down almost 17% over the past four years, and there’s no sign of a real recovery in the data.

Now we come to the ever-important transportation industry–motor vehicles, airplanes, and all that good stuff. Is the industry producing more than 4 years ago? No. According to my methodology, real shipments are down 24% over the past four years. Now, I don’t intend to go to the wall on this exact number. Everyone has their favorite way of doing this. The Fed’s industrial production number pegs motor vehicle IP as down 18.7% and aerospace and other transportation IP as up 2.7%. Still, no matter which way you slice it, real shipments are down for the industry as a whole.

Just two more to go, furniture and miscellaneous. Not surprising, furniture is still licking its wounds from the housing collapse, with real shipments 24% below the level of four years ago

Finally we come to the miscellaneous category, which is actually kind of interesting because it includes medical equipment, as well as toys, sporting goods, and office supplies. Wiseman’s main example, a maker of pharmaceutical equipment, is probably in this category. Is this industry producing more than it was before the recession? Oh, an ever so barebones 0.6% gain. Really, the graph looks pretty much flat.

A couple of final notes. First, these results are roughly compatible with the Fed’s industrial production indices (the Fed’s number for growth in the computer and electronics industry is larger, for the reason I noted above).

Second, I eagerly await the BEA’s real value-added stats for 2010 to see how it matches up (coming out April 26). And then we can contrast these two very different views of the health of manufacturing and the economy as a whole.

Crossposted at Mandel on Innovation and Growth

Is the Tea Party Finally Boiling Over?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Maybe the Tea Party is finally starting to boil over, after all. According to CNN’s latest polling, 47 percent of the public now views the Tea Party unfavorably, a new high (up four points from December, and up 21 points from January 2010). By contrast only 32 percent now view the movement favorably, down five percent from December. Tea Party favorability had actually been pretty stable for the last year in the high 30s, so the recent downslide is significant.

Meanwhile, in Washington, House Speaker John Boehner appears increasingly willing to leave Tea Party demands for $100-billion-in-cuts-or-bust behind, and instead gamble that he can find enough moderate Democrats to support a shutdown-averting deal.

Tea Partiers are descending on the Capitol today to hold a “continuing revolution rally” to demand no surrender on the budget. Tea Party nation founder Judson Phillips wrote in an email to supporters that: “Boehner must go. The Tea Party must unite and make sure Boehner is replaced in the next election. Boehner is living proof of something I have said for a long time. It is not enough that we vote out bad leaders, we must replace them with good leaders.”

I hope Boehner’s stand will be a decisive moment: a solid break that begins the marginalization of the Tea Party as too-crazy-to-govern.

Presumably, Boehner the strategist understands a few things that the Tea Partiers do not.

First: that, if there is a government shutdown, Republicans are much more likely to get blamed, and nobody really wants a government shutdown.

Second: Many voters are symbolic conservatives in that they like to say they are for things like small government and fiscal discipline. But when it comes to specific government programs, well, they like those. As a recent Pew poll reminds us, there is not a single budgetary area in which a majority of voters would favor a decrease, and only two federal programs in which more respondents favored a decrease in spending than an increase: Global poverty assistance (45 percent for a decrease, 21 percent for an increase) and unemployment assistance (28 percent for a decrease, 27 percent for an increase). The only other program that at least 30 percent of voters support decreasing is military defense. (I’m still mystified with how this squares with the fact that 64 percent of Americans think “federal spending and the budget deficit” is a problem that they worry “a great deal” about, but that’s a rant for another time)

If Boehner can make a break with the Tea Party, it will presumably drive the Tea Party into over-boil (I envision more Boehner-must-go memes). And that’s good.

The more visibly extremist the Tea Party gets, the high the level of disapproval (I hope!). But even better, if they’ve declared war on Republican leadership, it means that Republican leadership now has a vested interest in casting them as unhelpful extremists. And this is the key.

So could this be the moment for some GOP leaders to re-discover a bit of courage in moderation and finally offer some real thought leadership that gives ordinary Republicans an alternative to the exasperating slash-and-burn anger that has dominated the dialogue for too long? I certainly hope so.

The Myth of the Productivity Surge?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over at his blog, PPI chief economic strategist Michael Mandel has a fascinating and mammoth post tackling the question: “How much of the productivity surge of 2007-2009 was real?” The answer: Just about nothing.

“I estimate that the actual productivity gains in 2007-2009 may have been very close to zero,” writes Mandel “In addition, the drop in real GDP in this period was probably significantly larger than the numbers showed.”

He also explores some of the implications for economic policy. Mandel also replies to his critics here.

Beyond Sanction: The Next Iran Strategy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI has launched a new task force on human rights inside Iran. We’re proud to team up with Freedom House in this endeavor, and the project will be chaired by PPI Senior Fellow and frequent P-Fix contributor Josh Block and Andrew Apostolou, Senior Program Manager for Iran at FH. Yours truly will be a member of the group.

We’re calling the task force Beyond Sanction: The Next Iran Strategy, a nod to the necessity of bringing fresh ideas and new life into the debate on how to handle Tehran. As Iran defiantly continues efforts to construct a nuclear device, it has become glaringly clear in the wake of the 2009 Tehran protests in response to the country’s sham presidential elections that the regime lacks popular legitimacy. In the context of recent upheavals across North Africa and the Middle East, it’s important to remember that the pro-democracy movement began not in Tunisia, but in Iran.

We did an official launch of the new project yesterday, and have received a fair amount of positive press. Ben Smith of Politico had the scoop, and we’ve also received attention in the Jerusalem Post, Commentary, and The Atlantic.

From The Atlantic’s write up:

Nuclear weapons and human rights are “separate issues, but they’re separate issues with regard to the same regime, so one of the things the task force is going to listen and come up with is … how do you raise those separate issues and when do you raise them that has a direct impact,” said Freedom House co-chair Andrew Apostolou on a conference call with reporters this morning. …

The point of the group is not to criticize the Obama administration, but to supply it with strategic options.”I think they’ve taken some actions that have been important,” Block said, referencing President Obama’s initial openness to engage Iran and his messages to the Iranian people on the Nowruz holiday.

The administration’s initial policy was an attempt “to test Iran and give Iran a chance to say we are serious about talking about our nuclear regime, and I think the Iranian response was loud and clear that [Iran was] not serous,” Apostolou said. “What are you supposed to do, after 30 years … the same thing?

“They gave it a try, and it didn’t work. It didn’t work, and now they’re casting around for ideas.”

Exactly.

Wingnut Watch: Iowa’s Cattle Calls and Conferences Continue, But is it Too Much Camp Christian?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Aside from rather predictable carping about the president’s handling of the military intervention in Libya, the wingnut world has been preoccupied the last week with an anticipatory sense of betrayal on federal spending and with sorting through its 2012 presidential options.

Conservative activists continue to pant for a government shutdown over FY 2012 appropriations, and are alarmed at any and all Republican efforts to avoid a shutdown via negotiations with the White House or congressional Democrats. News that Speaker John Boehner has begun talks with “moderate Democrats” in the House as a hedge against conservative defections on a compromise plan has spurred shrieks throughout the wingnut-o-sphere.

RedState’s Erick Erickson left no cliché undeployed in announcing that the GOP leadership had “no spine” and was so “scared of its own shadow” that it would “sell its soul, betray its base, and out-negotiate itself.” Conservative activists vary somewhat in their bottom lines; some are demanding no compromise on the policy riders aimed at Planned Parenthood, EPA and NPR; some want language crippling “ObamaCare;” some just want much deeper cuts, even though Democrats seem willing to reach the targets originally announced by House Republicans. Some want a separate deal on “entitlement reform” as part of the initial discussions on a long-term budget. And some will scream about any deal blessed by the America-hating socialist in the White House.

From a tactical point of view, of course, this conservative agitation will give Republican negotiators a bit of extra leverage, so long as the rank-and-file in the House doesn’t take it too seriously and sabotage any ultimate agreement.

Even as they keep a suspicious watch on their current representatives in government, conservatives are already avidly engaged in the 2012 presidential nomination contest, particularly in Iowa, where the whole game begins. There were two major Iowa events last weekend: a home-schoolers conference addressed by Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, and Herman Cain; and a cattle-call organized by Iowa’s own favorite wingnut, Rep. Steve King, which drew Bachmann, Cain, Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour, and John Bolton. At the former event Bachmann touted her own history of homeschooling her kids (before setting up a “Christian school” with her husband) while Paul proposed a large tax credit for homeschoolers. It was not lost on anyone that homeschoolers were a significant part of the coalition that won the 2008 Iowa Caucuses for Mike Huckabee.

Steve King’s event produced an array of proto-candidate speeches. Bachmann and Cain gave all-red-meat addresses split between liberal-baiting and challenges to the audience to get ready for 2012 and ultimately for leadership of the country. Bolton stuck to foreign policy in his speech, while Barbour stuck mainly to economic and fiscal policy. Gingrich gave his standard stock speech. In what is likely to become a pattern for such events, Cain and Bachmann got far and away the strongest audience response. And King’s influence was validated by the appearance of not only the presidential candidates, but of national conservative titan Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). King is widely expected to endorse Bachmann, his closest colleague in Congress, if she ultimately makes the race.

The cavalcade of culturally conservative events in First-in-the-Nation Iowa is spurring some debate, there and nationally, about the extent to which other Republican voices are being marginalized. Doug Gross, who was the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Iowa in 2006 and ran Mitt Romney’s 2008 Caucus operation, complained to The New York Times:

We look like Camp Christian out here. If Iowa becomes some extraneous right-wing outpost, you have to question whether it is going to be a good place to vet your presidential candidates.

The observation earned Gross some seriously angry responses (the Iowa Republican’s Craig Robinson referred to him as “Mr. Irrelevant”). But it did get some non-Iowa analysts looking at the numbers to see if the “Camp Christian” rep of Iowa Caucus-goers was overblown. RealClearPolitics’ Erin McPike ran some numbers:

The strength of religious conservatives in Iowa, while formidable, may be somewhat overstated.

To be specific, add Romney’s 2008 results in Iowa (about 30,000 votes, or 25.2 percent) to Arizona Sen. John McCain’s (about 15,500 votes, or 13 percent) to former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson’s (16,000 votes or 13.4 percent) to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s (4000 votes or 3.4 percent), and the total is about 55 percent of the votes. Texas Rep. Ron Paul garnered a tenth of the votes. Compare that to winning Mike Huckabee’s winning share of some 41,000 votes, 34.4 percent of the vote.

The problem with this analysis is that in 2008 Mitt Romney was running as the “true conservative” candidate (he was ultimately endorsed by Jim DeMint, Paul Weyrich, Sean Hannity, Robert Bork, and many other hard-right figures) while Fred Thompson was the candidate of both Steve King and the National Right to Life Committee. Limiting “Camp Christian” to Huckabee caucus-goers misses a big part of the picture.

In any event, 2012 proto-candidates seem to be taking seriously the state’s reputation as a stomping ground for the Christian Right specifically and “movement conservatives” generally. King’s being treated like a senior statesman rather than a much-mocked crank. Romney’s giving the state a wide berth for the time being and trying to tamp down expectations. And if Mitch “Truce” Daniels is ultimately going to run, he certainly hasn’t shown his face in Iowa. Newt Gingrich probably did a very smart thing politically by getting one of his PACs to pour money into the successful 2010 effort to recall some of the judges responsible for the Iowa Supreme Court’s 2009 decision legalizing same-sex marriage. In a Caucus environment where evangelical fervor has a lot to do with the willingness to spend hours on an icy night standing up for a candidate, investing in the foot soldiers of the Christian Right makes a lot of sense.

Clean Elections Are Constitutional

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

When the U.S. Supreme Court last year ruled in Citizens United that incorporated entities have the same First Amendment rights as individuals to spend money in political campaigns, it upended a century of settled law aimed at limited special interest influence in American politics. The predictable result was a torrent of new spending in the 2010 midterm election, with nearly $300 million in electioneering ads by outside interest groups, half of which was undisclosed.

On Monday, the Supreme Court waded back in to the campaign finance issue when it heard oral arguments in McComish v. Bennett, concerning one of the most sweeping and successful forms of campaign finance regulation to emerge in recent years, publicly funded “Clean” or “Fair Elections”.

The case in question involves a challenge to the constitutionality of a specific “trigger funds” provision of Arizona’s Citizen’s Clean Elections Act of 1998, the law which established voluntary public funding for qualifying candidates for any state office in Arizona. Under the challenged provision, candidates who opt in to the Clean Elections system receive matching funds beyond their initial allocation if they are outspent by a privately funded opponent. The aim of the provision, as of the law in general, is to provide serious and hardworking candidates who attract broad-based constituent support in the form of small donations and who agree to forego private special interest contributions with enough money to mount a credible campaign.

The law is being challenged by a group of Arizona candidates and political committees who claim that triggered funds to participating candidates have a “chilling” effect on the First Amendment free speech of privately funded candidates and independent spenders. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the challenge last May, which concluded that no candidate or group had been prevented from spending money by the law.

Contrary to petitioners’ characterization of the Arizona law as curtailing First Amendment speech, Arizona’s Clean Elections program places no limits on the ability of privately funded candidates or independent spenders to enter the political debate, including by spending far in excess of the triggered funds provided to participating candidates. Instead, as argued by former Reagan Solicitor General Charles Fried in an amicus brief to the Court:

Arizona extends public financing to any candidate who meets certain qualifications and agrees to forego fundraising from private sources. Thus, if the government violates no one’s First Amendment rights, does not silence, suppress or deter anyone’s speech by speaking a contrary message in its own voice, so most assuredly it burdens no speech when it makes funds available to all comers on a viewpoint neutral basis. More speech may answer speech but it does not silence it. What effect speech has on its audience the First Amendment leaves up to the audience.

The brief, which was signed by a bipartisan committee of former Senators, Representatives, and Governors on behalf of Americans for Campaign Reform, established in no uncertain terms the constitutional imperative of voluntary public funding as an effective means of expanding and enhancing First Amendment free speech: “The law at issue in this case is not, in the words of the First Amendment, a law ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Rather, it adds voices to the political forum and thereby expands speech… If there is one fixed star in the constitutional firmament, it is that arguments seeking to compel a reduction in speech face an extraordinary hurdle.”

That message, at least, the Court heard loud and clear in the oral arguments on Monday: public funding writ large, regardless of the specific provisions of Arizona’s law, does not violate the Constitution. In the the post-Citizens United world of big spending by corporate and union interests, public funding may be the only means left to effectively combat the power of special interest money in politics.

A decision is expected before the end of the Supreme Court Term in June.

Whither Progressive History?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Elbert Ventura has an excellent piece about progressives’ inability to develop a “coherent vision” – a guiding sense of history that can provide both context and narrative for progressive accomplishments and ongoing political struggles. Contrast this to the political right, which has, with relentless impetuousness, pushed a once-fringe view of American history that casts the 20th century as one big nightmare betrayal of founding principles, thus setting for itself the task of restoring the world’s largest economy to a golden age of agrarian farming.

“History is being taught – On TV and talk radio, in blogs and grassroots seminars, in high-school textbooks and on Barnes & Noble bookshelves,” writes Ventura. “In all of those forums conservatives have been conspicuous by their activity – and progressives by their absence.” (Full disclosure: Ventura is a friend and my predecessor as managing editor of ProressiveFix.com)

Perhaps, as Ventura goes on to suggest, “Part of it may be the progressive orientation – our eyes are always cast toward the next horizon, not the one behind.”

But let me toss out another possibility. Arguably, the political left lost its abiding faith in ideas by putting too much faith in ideas.

Let me explain: A previous era of liberal thought put great faith in the capacity of human rationality. But ideas led to hubris, and hubris led to overreach, and ultimately to policy failures. Lacking humility, liberals over-estimated their ability to achieve social justice ends in through top-down technocratic means. Constituencies who had been helped by the New Deal did not benefit from the Great Society, and instead grew anxious and angry.

In response, the idea of planning became socialism, which became communism. Critics repeatedly traced the facile road-to-serfdom syllogism that any attempt to improve the workings of society winds up with Stalin and Hitler.

For progressives, the lesson from the failure of 1960s idealism should have been to approach big ideas and grand narratives with a requisite caution. Instead, the lesson seemed to be abandoning big ideas altogether.

But what didn’t change for progressives was the political program. Instead, it became increasingly unmoored from a larger narrative. Lacking a grand story, progressivism increasingly decayed into a kind of interest group liberalism. A coalition once formed for a grander purpose became a tangle of single-interest groups fighting myopically to defend yesterday’s victory. Rather than being a means to the social justice ends it was designed to achieve, familiar liberal policies became ends in and of themselves.

The conservative story was different. Four decades ago, a kind of principled Burkean conservatism was a legitimate response to a genuine assessment that the Great Society had not turned out so great after all; Contra the great liberal narrative of progress through collective action, conservatism warned of the folly of grand gestures and the humility of human endeavors.

But then, in the grandest of all grand gestures, conservatism went ahead and embraced radical theories of its own — about economics, about tax cuts, about the role of government — and effectively went from simply yelling “stop!” to aggressively yelling “rewind!” Far from principled caution, conservatism took on a utopianism that put even the most liberal of 1960s liberals to shame.

That modern conservatism has not been effectively dismissed as antithetical to the traditional conservatism is truly remarkable. To quote Sam Tanenhaus, the New York Times book review editor who has proclaimed conservatism dead: “What passes for conservatism today would have been incomprehensible to its originator, Edmund Burke, who, in the late eighteenth century, set forth the principles by which governments might nurture the “organic” unity that bound a people together even in times of revolutionary upheaval.” Burke would be horrified at a Tea Party rally.

The question then becomes, why have we given conservatives a free pass on this? The answer is that it’s hard to challenge one narrative if you don’t have an alternative.

We can argue over what that progressive narrative ought to be, but let me offer up my preferred candidate: an embrace of progressivism’s relentless experimentation as a kind of philosophy in and of itself, the kind of pragmatism that FDR expressed when he famously said, “Do something. If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t, do something else.”

Or put another way: a hopeful but humble faith that there is some rough-and-tumble thing called human progress, some long arch that does bend towards justice eventually, even if that eventually is far into the horizon. A telling of history that recognizes that there are no easy answers, only a series of hard problems that we must confront with humility. We must always strive, but never promise.

As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in the conclusion of The Vital Center: “Problems will always torment us, because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution.” (The same sentiment can be found in the writings of the progressive theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: “Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.”)

To me, this is a fighting faith, and a story. That the history of America has mostly been a history of, in FDR’s words, trying things and if they work, doing more of them, and if they don’t trying something else. It’s only in recent years that politics has become more about trying things, and if they don’t work, trying them again and again and blaming circumstances or your opposition if they still don’t work. This is not a fighting faith. It’s surrendering to faith.

We need something better. Conservatives have gone overtime in re-telling American history as a mistake that must be undone. We need to tell history in a way that moves forward.

Men’s Earnings Have NOT Declined by 28 Percent Since 1969!

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Tyler Cowen, of whom I’m generally a big fan, summarizes an interesting post by Michael Mandel on recent productivity growth (the lack thereof). But he ends by trumpeting Hamilton Project analyses claiming to show that men’s earnings declined by 28 percent between 1969 and 2009. This claim, like the Mandel analyses, reinforces Cowen’s argument that we are in a Great Stagnation, but it’s not true! Stop this meme!

I’ve not had much time to blog recently, so I submitted a brief critique in the comments to the Leonhardt post that introduced the world to this unfortunate study (co-authored, unfortunately, by a fellow classmate of mine from Harvard’s inequality program) and in the comments to the Hamilton post. Here’s the basic problem: the analyses assign all nonworking men annual earnings of $0, and since labor force participation among men has declined, the result is a big drop in median earnings over time. But a lot of that decline in labor force participation is attributable to earlier retirement (they include men as old as 64), later and longer school enrollment (they include men as young as 25), rising “disability” rates (which do not correspond in any obvious way with changes in health or job demands but which do correspond with increasing generosity in disability benefits), and other factors having nothing to do with the strength of labor markets.

I re-crunched the numbers as follows. I included all men age 20 to 59 except for those who said they worked only part of the year or not at all because they were retired, going to school, in the Armed Forces, sick or disabled, or taking care of home and family. Using the inflation adjustment that the Hamilton guys likely used, I find a decline in median earnings of 9 percent, not 28.

Note, however, that comparing 1969 and 2009 holds up a likely peak year (when the business cycle was at a high) to a trough year (when it was at a low). Comparing 1969 to 2007 is apples-to-apples, and when I did that, the median was EXACTLY the same in both years (to the dollar, which is a pretty crazy coincidence). Finally, if I use the Bureau of Economic Analysis “personal consumption expenditures” deflator, which I think overstates inflation somewhat less than other commonly-used deflators, median earnings among men rose 7 percent from 1969 to 2007.

Seven percent is no great shakes, but this figure is also too small for assessing how men’s economic fortunes have changed over time. None of these analyses account for the fact that as a group, husbands reduced their hours over time in response to rising work and wages among wives. Nor do they account for the rising share of non-wage benefits in total compensation (health and retirement benefits have eaten into wages, presumably following the preferences of the median worker). Nor do they include the impact of taxes (which have declined) and tax credits (which have increased). In addition, even my figures may overstate inflation, thereby understating the earnings increase over time–inflation measurement is much more tricky when choices within categories of goods and services and retail outlets explodes and when so much of what we consume is (thanks to the inter-web . Finally, the analyses do not account for changes in the composition of the population. For instance, the fact that more men today are nonwhite and foreign-born pushes the 2009 median down, but it is likely that the typical white, nonwhite, native-born, and foreign-born men are all doing better than the trend in the overall median implies. Someday I’ll get to a full analysis.

Subject for discussion (and a future post): how are we as a nation supposed to clearly understand the state of the economy and our living standards when even moderate think tanks and researchers are so eager to hype negativity? As I’ve said before, policymakers aren’t the only people who–individually or collectively–can talk down the economy.

Crossposted at The Empiricist Strikes Back

On Libya, Obama Doesn’t Swing Hard Enough

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

He kept tee-ing it up for himself, but seemed to stroke a few long drives that were barely the wrong side of the foul pole last night.

I wanted the president to come out with a thunderous defense of why humanitarian intervention is in our national interest. I sense he knew he had too, which is why he circled round to the issue no less than four times by my count. He spoke of the importance of protecting human life, of why a massive refugee crisis would be disastrous, and why non-intervention could ultimately lead to a higher cost in the future.

Here’s what I wanted him to say: “The United States’ strategic interest is in protecting human lives that would otherwise face murder at the hands of their tyrannical dictator. This serves America in two ways: First, we are protecting those who yearn for individual liberty that has been denied them for 42 years; and second, by standing up for those seeking their individual freedoms, we are creating a more stable world. Democratic countries are stable countries, and they make for a more secure America.”

On that note, I’ve just published a piece in Foreign Policy addressing American intervention, and Barack Obama’s foreign policy philosophy. I take on Stephen Walt, a self-proclaimed “realist”, and define the differences between neoconservatism and progressive internationalism. He mixes them up, and it’s important to explain why Libya is not Iraq. Read it here.

Discussing The Future of Nuclear Power After Fukushima

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Nuclear power should remain an important part of our energy mix. Despite a worst-case scenario, the older generation Fukushima reactor has held up remarkably well. And yet, serious obstacles remain, not the least of which is the public’s irrational fear of nuclear disaster.

Such were some of the conclusions from a PPI Policy Briefing on the future of nuclear power, held today in the Rayburn House Office Building. The panel featured: Dr. James Conca, Director of the Waste Sampling and Characterization Facility (WSCF), U.S. Department of Energy’s Hanford Site; Margaret Harding, President, 4 Factor Consulting; and Micheal A. Levi, Director of Energy Security and Climate Change Program, Council on Foreign Relations.

PPI’s Scott Thomasson moderated, and Mitchell Baer, of the Office of Policy and International Affairs, U.S. Department of Energy, introduced the panelists.

Conca kicked off the discussion making the case for a 2040 energy mix that is the one-third fossil fuels, one-third renewables, and one-third nuclear, as laid out in his recent PPI Memo, “Getting Real About Energy: A Balanced Portfolio for America’s Future.”

“This mix decreases carbon dioxide emissions by half, costs 20 percent less than the baseline, and it’s achievable, though it takes strong political will,” Conca said.

As the discussion moved to the future of nuclear, the first issue was the legitimacy of the old fears raised again by the Fukushima collapse.

“One of the things about radiation is that it’s very scary,” explained Conca. “That was the whole point of the Cold War – to scare everybody about nuclear weapons. But we forget to distinguish between weapons and energy. Weapons are bad. Energy is good.”

But, Conca noted, just because we can detect radiation in the air it doesn’t mean that it is harmful.

Harding noted that there has not yet been a single radiation death from the Fukushima plant, and all 128 people with reported contamination are now fine.

But while safety is obviously an important issue, Levi added that the real barrier to nuclear gaining ground in the U.S. is not safety, but cost. In short, nuclear requires an increasingly insurmountable upfront investment that takes decades to recoup.

“The price of building a plant has steadily risen,” Levi said. “The bottom line is that without a significant incentive on carbon emissions, and with natural gas prices where they currently are, you will not expect to see a large number of nuclear power plants built.” (Levi’s guess was five by 2035).

“It’s not clear that Three Mile Island killed nuclear,” he added. “Costs were already going up when it occurred.”

But, on a more optimistic note, Conca said that “The longer you run the plants, the more cost-effective they’ll become. You’re going against the short-term investment of certain groups. We need to decide where we want to be in 2040.”

“Humans are very good at engineering things,” he added. “But we don’t do the social and political stuff as well.”

The panelists also discussed improvements in technology that have made nuclear plants much safer and more effective. New Generation 3 reactors probably could withstand a similar stress with even less damage.

“The next generation of reactors have significant passive safety systems, and the reactor could not have any other support for three days and be okay,” said Harding. “The whole event would have played out differently if one of these had been installed.”

But Levi cautioned that innovations in safety could actually slow the regulatory approval process because it will take a long time for regulators to become familiar with the new technologies.

“With new technologies we have to redo our regulatory assessment and the first few times we don’t know what will happen,” he said. “It introduces regulatory uncertainty and increases financing costs. We need managed innovation.”

Harding reminded the audience that, “In the 1970s, each plant was unique, and that adds to complexity in the regulatory space. The goal should be to make the next generation plants more like cars.”

Despite notes of caution, the panelists overall were optimistic about the future of nuclear power. Conca re-emphasized the need to get started now, because things take a while to get moving.

“If we start now with something ambitious, we will make a significant change,” he said. “But if you wait, you move that 30-year window out and out. You have to come up with a plan that gets you where you want to go.”

Getting Clarity on Libya

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Bowing to criticism across the political spectrum, President Obama will try to clarify U.S. goals in Libya tonight in a speech to the nation. Expect him to argue that, however confusing our policy may seem, it’s working.

Aided by NATO airstrikes, Libya’s rebels have resumed the offensive and are driving westwards toward Tripoli. Meanwhile, an economic embargo is making it difficult for the regime to provide people under its control food, water, gas and other necessities.

Whether the rebels can defeat Moammar Qaddafi’s better-trained security forces remains to be seen. But there’s no question that international intervention has prevented Qaddafi from quashing the rebellion, indiscriminately slaughtering civilians, and carrying out his vows to exact merciless vengeance on regime opponents.

Obama’s critics, nonetheless, have a point. He has not spelled out with precision what our ultimate goal there is, or how we will achieve it.

The reason for this seeming incoherence, however, is not as mysterious as Obama’s critics make it out to be. Put simply, U.S. aims in Libya and those of the international community are not aligned. What America wants – and no doubt France and Britain as well – is Qaddafi’s ouster. But the United Nations doesn’t do regime change. Russia and China, with long histories of autocratic and repressive rule, are adamantly opposed to political interference in the sovereign affairs of other countries.

U.N. Resolution 1973 therefore authorized only a humanitarian intervention aimed at protecting civilians from attack. The problem, of course, is that humanitarian crises invariably have political roots, and the Libyan opposition will never be safe from retaliation until Qaddafi and his henchmen and mercenaries are gone.

With NATO airstrikes clearing the way for rebel advances, it’s clear that the humanitarian mission is something of a fiction, a fig-leaf for the coalition’s real aim, which is to hasten Qaddafi’s fall. Our European allies fear that their publics have little stomach for a long engagement in Libya. So the international coalition has taken sides in the Libyan revolt, and must now confront the reality that rebel offensives in Tripoli and other regime strongholds will put civilians at risk.

This is a strategically and morally sustainable position. In the long run, it’s the best way to minimize civilian deaths and free Libya from a loathsome tyrant. Yet the Obama administration has been less than forthcoming about its true aims, for fear that absolute candor will unravel the international consensus behind the Libyan intervention.

At the same time, the White House has been eager to toss the hot potato of leading the Libyan intervention to NATO. Yet its attempts to downgrade America’s role from lead actor to stagehand have failed to answer doubts about the operation shared by liberals and conservatives. On the contrary, they’ve made the administration look both weak and furtive.

Obama needs to do a better job tonight of acknowledging the tensions between U.S. and international policy towards Libya, and reaffirm his resolve to see Qaddafi go. But his critics also need to understand that Obama can’t simply issue unilateral ukases if America is to share the burden of intervening with others.

Armchair strategists demand that Obama spell out America’s policy with Euclidean precision. Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose, in The Washington Post, offers out an eminently logical set of criteria for intervention, in which Presidents clearly define mission and goals, select means to match the ends, develop plans for what happens when the fighting ends, and have backup contingencies in place when things don’t go as expected.

But military interventions, especially multilateral ones, unfold in the context of international politics. And international politics is just as illogical, imprecise, and unscientific as domestic politics. Sometimes, candor and coherence have to be sacrificed to achieve enough consensus to get traction against big problems. That’s why humanitarian or other kinds of interventions launched in the name of collective security today are likely to be messy affairs, to have limited and even muddled aims, and be prosecuted in a spirit of continuous improvisation rather than rigid adherence to war plans.

Rigorous rules of intervention are useful intellectual and strategic exercises. But ultimately what matters to Americans are results, not theory. They support wars – yes, even wars of choice like Panama, the 1991 Gulf War, and Bosnia and Kosovo – that entail manageable costs and are over quickly. Over time, they come to oppose those that drag on, cost too many lives and too much money, and begin failing a cost-benefit test of national interest.

Whatever President Obama says tonight to rally support for his policies, he should act in ways that ensure the endgame in Libya – Qaddafi’s fall – comes sooner rather than later.

The Case For Supporting Syrian Democracy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

UPDATE: We are re-posting this piece from Friday as events over the weekend continue to highlight the need for American attention on pro-democracy protests in Syria. Over the weekend, 12 people have reportedly died during demonstrations in the northern port city of Latakia–where the military has reportedly been deployed–and some 4,000 people gathered again in Daraa.

You may not have noticed between the new war in Libya and the nuclear crisis in Japan, but the latest Arab country to see popular protests is Syria. Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, Syria has been an opponent of the peace process and allied with Iran.

Yet, like President Mubarak and President Ben-Ali, President Assad is following what seems to be the traditional playbook in response to a week of intensifying and pitched protests, again making noises about reexamining the country’s decades-old emergency law barring free political expression. Unlike these gauzy allusions to “reform,” however there has been nothing vague about the soldiers and anti-terrorism units attacking Syrian citizens in the streets.

The Obama administration must do more to help Syrian democracy and human rights activists to expose this regime for what it is. The Administration should start by dispatching Ambassador Robert Ford to Daraa, where dozens were slaughtered in the streets this week by government security forces firing on crowds and attacking those rallying for freedom from Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny. From Daraa, Ambassador Ford should call for a full UN Security Council investigation into what happened during the recent protests. His mere presence can bring hope to those brave enough to stand up to Assad’s thugs. America owes them that much.

Not many more died in Egypt, where the armed forces never fired on crowds. Yet we’ve heard far stronger words from the White House about Egypt than we have about Syria thus far. A statement by the White House Spokesman was a start, but the President should speak out himself and up the ante.

The Assad regime should also be put on notice that interfering with the Ambassador in this context would vitiate the purpose of our renewed high-level presence in Syria. The entire point of sending Ambassador Ford to Damascus – a move welcomed by Syria – was to establish an American presence on the ground. It’s time to put it to use.

We can do more. Congress should enhance the Syria Accountability Act to account for Assad’s renewed crackdowns on dissidents, and the Treasury Department should sanction those responsible for attacks on the Syrian people. IAEA pressure on Syria’s illicit nuclear program, which bears increasing scrutiny in any event, should be ratcheted up. The censure of the United Nations should be brought to bear on the murder of Syrian citizens by their government. Syrian opposition and institution-building groups should be funded and supported by the U.S. and our Western Allies – all the better to create an alternative to Assad’s rancid regime. The benefits of weakening the Assad regime cannot be underestimated.

This regime plays a pivotal role in the arming of Hezbollah, a non-state military that has killed more Americans than any terrorist group except Al Qaeda. It is the host to eleven terrorist groups based in Damascus and for years its border was like a turnstile at an amusement park for terrorists heading to Iraq to kill American soldiers. And none of that takes into account violence and repression that Assad visits on his own people.

For decades the United States has been denigrated across the Middle East for our policies, not chiefly regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict, but more fundamentally for our hypocrisy. President Obama has a historic opportunity to align our interests with our values in helping dissidents and democracy activists repressed by an unfriendly regime find their voice. We need to seize the opportunity, and stop looking this gift horse in the mouth.

This administration has gambled that communication with hostile regimes is preferable to stubborn silence, and that being on the ground is preferable to self-righteous absenteeism. Fair enough. Now is the time to talk advantage of the diplomatic presence we have in Syria. Ambassador Ford should head to Darra, and he should demand explanations.