U.S. officials say they have al Qaeda on the ropes in Pakistan. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for al Qaeda’s homicidal ideology, which is spreading to extremists in other Muslim countries. This poses new risks for Americans, and highlights a big hole in President Obama’s counter-terrorism policies.
According to The Washington Post, the Central Intelligence Agency now rates al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemen-based offshoot, as an even greater threat than Osama bin Laden’s original. Under the “spiritual” guidance of Anwar a-Aulaqi, a cleric and U.S. citizen, AQAP is busy plotting attacks on America, including a failed attempt earlier this year to set off a car bomb in Times Square.
As my colleague Jim Arkedis pointed out yesterday, this doesn’t mean AQAP is capable of staging 9/11-scale attacks on our country. But since Aulaqi also counseled Nidal Malik Hasan, the U.S. Army major accused of gunning down 13 Americans at Fort Hood last year, the AQAP threat seems real enough.
Meanwhile, in the Hobbesian nightmare that is Somalia, another al Qaeda affiliate, Al Shabab, launched a suicide attack this week that killed 32 people at a Mogadishu hotel. Last month, the group claimed responsibility for a massacre of over 70 people watching the World Cup at a bar in neighboring Uganda.
And just last week, al Qaeda’s Iraq franchise launched a suicide attack that killed 57 job seekers at an army recruitment center in Baghdad.
What’s the message in all this carnage? That al Qaeda continues to offer the brand of choice to aspiring jihadists, who are more than willing to use its gruesome tactics to advance their local ambitions.
What can our government do to stop this contagion of suicide and mass casualty terror attacks?
Self-defense requires that we shift some military and intelligence resources to these new hot spots. But unless we want to be drawn into a never-ending game of terrorist whack-a-mole, we also need to do a better job of discrediting the ideology that motivates al Qaeda and its affiliates to kill in Islam’s name.
A trenchant strategy for doing just than is detailed in Fighting the Ideological Battle, an excellent study by the Washington Institute for Near East Studies. It begins with a step that the Obama administration unfortunately has been reluctant to take, for fear of conflating violent extremism and Islam: acknowledging the essentially ideological nature of the terrorist threat. We need to openly contest and challenge the Islamist catalogue of grievances, the better to drive the wedge deeper between them and the decent majority of Muslims who no part of their apocalyptic visions.
Our government also needs an explicit strategy for shoring up failing or fragile states that are particularly vulnerable to extremist violence. It’s no accident that al Qaeda and its offshoots flourish in ungoverned spaces within countries like Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Finally, we need to keep driving home the essential point about al Qaeda’s growing global franchise: its victims are overwhelmingly civilians, and Muslim civilians at that. That’s why, even as al Qaeda franchises have cropped up, support for terror attacks on civilians has fallen among Muslim publics. And al Qaeda’s vicious tactics have sparked a backlash even from some of the organization’s founders and leading theoreticians. Rather than being overly sensitive about lending credence to the Islamists’ “clash of civilizations” rhetoric, our government should miss no chance to stand in solidarity with the victims of Islamist ideology.
Last weekend, Australia held a national election. And for the first time in 70 years, the land down under is now facing a hung parliament.
While Australia struggles to figure out how to govern itself, it’s worth reflecting on a larger trend: there is now a hung parliament in every major nation that is governed by a winner-take-all, “Westminster model” parliament (For those of you keeping score at home, that’s India, U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). And just about every other major industrial democracy relies on some version of proportional representation, resulting in multi-party governing coalitions of varying stability.
India obviously is an astoundingly heterogeneous country, so that makes sense. But it’s not immediately obvious why the four Anglo countries should be having such a difficult achieving political consensus these days. It’s enough to make one wonder: have we entered a new era of global politics in which it’s no longer possible for any party to win an electoral majority anymore?
And then of course, there is the good U.S. of A. (not a Westminster parliament, obviously, but also a winner-take-all system) where even though Democrats control both Congress and the Presidency, filibuster powers in the hands of an obstructionist minority sure makes it feel like a hung parliament.
But the big U.S. story this election is of course how the voters are growing increasingly sour on both parties, and no matter who winds up in control of the House and Senate come 2011, it’s not like any electoral majority is going to have anything close to a meaningful national mandate. In the latest National Journal poll 28 percent of all respondents disapproved of both parties, and the number of Independents has been rising over the last six years to the point where the plurality of voters (36 percent) now choose to identify themselves as independents. And even if most independents tend to vote like partisans, the changing self-identification suggests they are less and less happy about it.
And while there are any number of possible explanations (Is it the hyper-adversarial nature of modern politics, stoked by the 24/7 media cycle, in which every trivial tiff is the new Waterloo? Is it something about the grim global economy, and the difficult reckonings that almost all nations are facing on some level?). One wonders: have we entered a new era in which it is impossible for the majority of any modern nation to come together behind one banner? Is the modern partisan majority dead? And if so, what do we do about it?
David Brooks’ column today tackles what he sees as a pervasive intellectual laziness in modern political discourse, emerging in good part out of confirmation bias run amok and coddled by a culture that errs on the side of affirmation as opposed to challenge.
The ensuing mental flabbiness is most evident in politics. Many conservatives declare that Barack Obama is a Muslim because it feels so good to say so. Many liberals never ask themselves why they were so wrong about the surge in Iraq while George Bush was so right. The question is too uncomfortable.
Brooks figures maybe this has something to do with that simple fact that giving people what they want is always more profitable than the alternative:
In the media competition for eyeballs, everyone is rewarded for producing enjoyable and affirming content. Output is measured by ratings and page views, so much of the media, and even the academy, is more geared toward pleasuring consumers, not putting them on some arduous character-building regime.
Brooks is surely right on this point. But here are two additional ways in which the current media environment probably contributes to intellectual laziness:
1) Given the inexhaustible availability of content at any given moment, it is easier than ever to stay on a selective media diet, only munching on the news you know you like. Gone are the days when if you wanted to know what was going on in the world, you had only your local papers and evening television news to guide you. Today, you can read and read and read and watch and watch and watch to your heart’s content without ever so much as having to encounter an idea with which you disagree, or even a discomfiting fact.
2) The infinite chaos of the modern media stream might just be too overwhelming for anyone to approach without the crutch of an ideological filter. Imagine, for a moment, that you were truly agnostic as to some policy question, and you earnestly wanted to research it objectively. Where would you start? And more importantly: where would you stop? And when contrary ideas and facts emerged, how would you evaluate them? Picking an ideology to start provides coherence in a chaotic world (as it always has). And with the news environment more chaotic and expansive than ever, having a starting ideology seems even more helpful.
All of this suggests that those of us who agree with Brooks about the dangers of intellectual laziness built on ideology may be facing more obstacles than ever before. In short, we have our work cut out for us.
It’s a familiar argument: we know that putting a price on carbon will impose economic costs, but we can’t be absolutely sure that major climate change will happen. Therefore, we shouldn’t impose a carbon price, or at least we should avoid doing so in a recession, and be very reticent to do so at any point. The argument strikes many as logical and wise.
It is neither. And it won’t help make good policy or make progress towards consensus on what good climate policy should be.
At its core, the argument claims that any uncertainty about climate change means we should either give up, or at least wait indefinitely for better evidence. I call it the “McClellan principle.” Like the Civil War general, proponents of the argument counsel doing nothing until absolutely certain of success. The principle is frequently stated or assumed to be true in climate policy debates, often but not always by professed climate skeptics. To give a few recent examples, Stephen Calabresi states the principle explicitly in a Politico debate last week, while Steve Everley of Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions outfit uses the stealth version of the principle by listing costs of a carbon price while failing to mention climate change at all. But perhaps the most common form of the principle is simply as a concluding statement, thrown in as if its implications were obvious and unworthy of debate. The Wall Street Journal does this when criticizing California’s AB32 cap-and-trade policy in an April editorial:
While almost all of AB32’s benefits are speculative and uncertain, its costs are hitting businesses and residents now. This is one more blow to jobs and growth that California doesn’t need.
The appeal of the McClellan principle may come from the fact that it is cloaked in rational language, but it isn’t a rational approach to policy at all. In fact, it’s the inverse of the familiar “precautionary principle” advanced by many Greens (at least in the precautionary principle’s strong form). The strong precautionary principle would require a policy response even if uncertainty is large. The McClellan principle requires inaction even if uncertainty is small. Both principles are simplistic, and neither leads to good policy decisions.
The reason for this is that there are both costs and uncertainty about those costs associated with climate policy and with doing nothing. Both are real choices with consequences, even if we can’t say with complete precision what those consequences are.
The McClellan principle stresses that the economic costs of climate policy—primarily higher energy prices—are certain, while there is at least some chance that all the climate science models are wrong and that there will be no costs associated with doing nothing. Holding out hope that the Earth will not warm (or that we can do nothing about it) strikes me as absurdly Panglossian, but the basic premise that we can be more confident in estimates of the economic costs of policy—particularly that they will not be zero—is probably right.
The McClellan principle’s conclusion does not follow from this premise, however. Making policy based only on which kind of costs we think are more or less likely to be zero doesn’t make sense. We should instead do the best we can in estimating the two costs, both their magnitude and precision, and make the policy we can based on those estimates. That is of course incredibly difficult in practice. It raises questions about discounting of future costs and benefits, the tensions between national policy and global risks, and distributional impacts, among others. But it has to be the basic framework for making a decision. Both the McClellan and (strong) precautionary principles try to offer shortcuts, but in doing so they obfuscate rather than clarify.
I illustrating this is hard because conversations about climate policy are, unfortunately, so loaded with politics and preconceived ideas. Instead, let’s look at another issue loaded with different politics and preconceived ideas: crime. Imagine you are on a parole board considering release of a prisoner. There is a cost to releasing the felon (he might commit another crime) and a cost to keeping him in prison (prisons are crowded and expensive, and he might contribute to society if released). You know the cost of prison is not zero. The cost of release might be zero, or it might be big. But that doesn’t mean you should release the felon— or even that you should be any more likely to. Setting moral/ethical considerations about the prisoner aside, all we should care about is balancing our best guess about the costs of both options.
Of course, the way that parole boards work in practice—or at least the way most people demand that they work—is that any real chance of repeat offense is regarded as a reason for denying parole. So why is there such a dissonance between the way many people view parole decisions and the way so many view the climate policy debate? Why does the mainstream view on releasing felons appear to be a form of the precautionary principle, while the McClellan principle, if not the mainstream view on climate, is at least a major and usually uncriticized one? Surely a big factor is that the risks of crime are viewed as more personal and visceral, even if the chances of actually being a victim of a re-offender are low. It might be as simple as saying that most of us fear criminals more than we fear the more emotionally and temporally, if not probabilistically distant risks of climate change—and that mainstream positions are defined by what we most fear. That’s unavoidable to some extent, but it’s not a rational approach to making good policy.
Others, most notably Richard Posner, have made a similar analogy between major climate change and asteroid impacts—for which uncertainty is similarly paired with catastrophic downside risk. This analogy is useful because asteroid impacts are completely politically irrelevant—there’s no party line, and little fear—and as a result few people seem to have either a precautionary or McClellan principle-style reaction. A rational approach is the most appealing, though the same lack of fear may cause us to ignore the risk entirely and do nothing.
As these analogies hopefully illustrate, precision is important, but lack of it shouldn’t keep us from acting—on climate or on other problems of risk. Precision is just another factor in estimation of risks and costs. And whether the costs of action or inaction might have a chance of being zero doesn’t provide a shortcut out of the difficult task of balancing the two and making policy. Uncertainty matters, but it does not and cannot do the work alone.
I suspect that many people who advance the McClellan principle as their argument against pricing carbon would still oppose a price even if there were much less uncertainty about climate change risks (or would simply disbelieve claims of certainty). In their case, the McClellan principle may provide cover for less politically-acceptable positions, like an economic or political interest in fossil fuels or a very large discount rate. But many people who state the principle are not being disingenuous just to score rhetorical points. You don’t even have to reject climate science to advance the McClellan principle—you just need to point to the uncertainty within it.
But even for the intellectually honest, the wellspring of the principle’s appeal is, again, fear. Especially in a recession, the downside of pricing carbon sparks greater concern than climate change does, at least for many people. To them, the economic costs of a carbon price are very real, immediate, and personal, while the costs of climate change are distant and abstract. This is to some extent true for everyone, though if you are unemployed and live in a coal state, economic costs are certainly more apparent: a recent study suggests that unemployment and some measures of concern about climate change are negatively correlated. In a democracy, these perspectives cannot and should not be dismissed. They are valuable and should be listened to when considering climate policy, and in particular its distributional impacts.
But the fact that costs are tangible—that they are feared—doesn’t mean the McClellan principle is any more logically sound. Lack of certainty about climate change risks doesn’t justify inaction any more in Ohio than it does in California—or places at great risk from warming, like Bangladesh. The McClellan principle is ultimately based on fear, not reason. Stripping the principle of its thin cloak of rationality might therefore make a difference, however small, in the politics of climate policy. As I mentioned above, I’m certainly not the first person to try to do this, but the principle remains a resilient meme. It’s worth having the counterargument in your pocket. Next time you hear it, ask its proponent what they would do on a parole board.
I pity journalists on the terrorism beat. Take Greg Miller and Peter Finn’s piece in the Washington Post this morning, entitled “CIA sees increased threat in Yemen,” referring to the al Qaeda splinter group called Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (or AQAP). The journalists’ challenge is to quantify the scale and immediacy of the “threat”, an amorphous term that implies danger, yet remains extraordinarily difficult to quantify.
The story, based on analysis from the CIA, describes AQAP as the “most urgent threat to U.S. Security.” It’s critical to properly categorize the threat because left undefined, the average American’s basis of comparison for a terrorism is the devastation of September 11th. Hell, I spent five years trying to brief relatively high-ranking Pentagon officials on this stuff, and 9/11 was their point of departure too. Nuance is important in defining terrorist threat – without it, government officials tend to over-react, going into CYA-mode (that’d be “cover your ass”) that guards against today’s headline rather than the overall, long-term picture.
Of course, part of the problem is that the CIA source in the article is only willing to go so far with the information he/she provides – sufficing at such vague quotes as “increased threat” and “on the upswing” while pointing to evidence of the group’s prowess that we already have: the Christmas Day plot and radical cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi’s increasing activity. Give away more, and the source could end up busted.
So what are we talking about here? Does the “increased threat” mean AQAP can pull off a massive terrorist attack on American soil? How far from its base in Yemen can the network reach? Is it a threat to American only interests in the Middle East region? Is the network confined to smaller attacks? Civilian or military targets? What?
As the article asserts, AQAP may now be more dangerous that Osama Bin Laden’s war-ravaged and hiding clique, but that’s a dangerous comparison to make. The United States has dedicated nearly ten years to degrading al Qaeda’s core group, and AQAP’s relative strength – and the resources dedicated to combatting them – should be understood within that context.
And that’s why in absolute terms, I wouldn’t lose sleep over AQAP launching a massive, 9/11-style attack against the United States just yet. That’s because the terrorist threat is measured by marriage of a group’s intentions plus its capabilities: AQAP may really, really want to strike New York (intent), but hasn’t yet developed the operational expertise of training, financing, internal security, and logistics (capabilities) to succeed.
Currently, I’d assess that AQAP has the intentions and capabilities to threaten American security in two ways: First, we’re likely to see a continuation of small attempts against public targets in the U.S., in the mold of the Christmas Day attempt. These attacks will be launched by single operatives that have plausible cover and legit paperwork to slip over the American border. However, coordinating a massive terrorist attack with many operatives against thousands of Americans continues to remain several years off.
Second, the group likely does pose a threat to American interests in Yemen or the broader region. The 10th anniversary of the USS COLE bombing is upon us, which serves as a fitting reminder that Bin Laden’s al Qaeda has successfully executed complex terrorist attacks against hardened American targets in Yemen before. But until AQAP pulls off an attack of this nature – like an embassy bombing akin to the 1998 attacks in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam – I can only assess that the group’s ability to project power will remain confined to the region.
In sum, AQAP remains one to watch. The intelligence community is right to be concerned about the group’s apparently amassing capabilities, but keep in mind that terrorist attacks are often a building-block process: a group must crawl before it can walk, and walk before it can run.
Right now, AQAP seems to be taking its first few steps. The IC seems to recognize that, and will be working hard to knock it back on all fours.
Last week’s The Economistleader and cover story, “Picking winners, saving losers”, painted an insidious picture of governments’ increasing intervention in market economies, arguing that the hideous Leviathan of the state was gobbling up one sector after another and warning that “picking industrial winners nearly always fails.” Now, put aside the fact that the government was forced into some sectors—such as automobiles and financial services—only after mammoth market failures and pleas for rescues from capitalism’s chieftains. The more important fact is that the article feeds a Socialism-is-coming hysteria and ignores how picking winners—within limits—has worked in the past for the United States (and Japan, South Korea, etc.) and is needed more than ever to bolster our long-term competitiveness.
Of course, the debate about the appropriate role between the state and the private sector in market economies has raged for centuries. The debate is marred in part by vague terminology, and The Economist perpetuates this problem by throwing around a slew of terms—“picking winners”, “industrial policy”, “innovation policy”—without adequately distinguishing between them but while uniformly indicting them as inappropriate manifestations of government economic intervention.
It would be more constructive to envision a continuum of government-market engagement, increasing from left to right in four steps from a “laissez faire, leave it to the market” approach to “supporting factor conditions for innovation (such as education)” (which The Economist endorses, as, certainly, does ITIF) to going further by “supporting key technologies/industries” to at the most extreme “picking specific national champion companies”, that is, “picking winners.” And while it is generally inadvisable for governments to intervene in markets to support specific national champion companies, ITIF believes there is an appropriate role for government in placing strategic bets to support potentially breakthrough nascent technologies and industries.
Ironically, The Economist asserts that, “Industrial policy may be designed to support or restructure old struggling sectors, such as steel or textiles, or to try to construct new industries, such as robotics or nanotechnology. Neither track has met with much success. Governments rarely evaluate the costs and benefits properly.” Yet, seconds later, the authors admit, “America can claim the most important industrial-policy successes, in the early development of the internet and Silicon Valley.” In one sentence, the article glosses over the point that the government, in this case the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), “supported creation of ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet, despite a lack of interest from the private sector.” (Italics mine.) But this point, as economists are wont to say, is “non-trivial.” In fact, it is the precisely the point.
Early on, companies were reticent to invest in the nascent field of computer networking because the sums required were enormous and the technology was so far from potential commercialization that companies were unable to foresee how to monetize potential investments. Moreover, such basic research often results in knowledge spillovers, meaning the company cannot capture all the benefits of its R&D investment (in economist’s terms, the social rate of return from R&D is higher than the private rate of return), and thus companies tend to underinvest in R&D to societally optimal levels. Of course, this dynamic pertained not just to the Internet, but applies today to a range of emerging infrastructure technologies such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, etc. As Greg Tassey, Senior Economist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), explains it, “the complex multidisciplinary basis for new technologies demands the availability of technology “platforms” before efficient applied R&D leading to commercial innovation can occur.” In other words, the levels of investment required to research and develop emerging technologies is so great that the private sector cannot support it alone, and thus, “government must increasingly assume the role of partner with industry in managing technology research projects.”
Such was the case with the initial development of the Internet, as government stepped in and provided initial R&D funding, helped coordinate research between the military, universities, and industry, and thus seeded development of a breakthrough digital infrastructure platform, making the Internet a reality decades before the free market ever would have (if ever) if left to its own devices. And this admittedly-successful industrial policy has indeed been a spectacular success. As ITIF documented in a recent report, The Internet Economy 25 Years After.com, the commercial Internet now adds $1.5 trillion to the global economy each year—that’s the equivalent of adding South Korea’s entire economy annually.
Moreover, the list of technologies in which government funding or performance of research and development (R&D) has played a fundamental role in bringing the technology to realization is long and compelling. It includes: the cotton gin, the manufacturing assembly line, the microwave, the calculator, the transistor and semiconductor, the relational database, the laser beam, the graphical user interface, and the global positioning system (GPS), amongst many others. The National Institute of Health (NIH) practically created the biotechnology industry in this country. And yes, even Google, the Web search darling, isn’t a pure-bred creature of the free market; the search algorithm it uses was developed as part of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Digital Library Initiative. (But Google hasn’t done much to spur economic growth!) The point is that companies like IBM, Google, Oracle, Akamai, Hewlett-Packard, and many others may not have even come into existence─and certainly would not have prospered to the extent they have─if the U.S. government was not either an early funder of R&D for the technologies they were developing or a leading procurer of the products they were producing. And if you don’t get Intel developing the semiconductors, or Cisco building out the Internet, or Akamai securing it, or Google making it accessible, then you don’t get the downstream companies like the Amazons or eBays, the latter of which 724,000 Americans rely on as their primary or secondary source of income.
Thus, while governments shouldn’t be creating and running such companies itself—that is for the free market to do—the government has a role to play in thoughtfully, strategically, and intentionally placing strategic bets on nascent and emerging technologies—as the United States did with information and communications technologies in the 1960s and 1970s—that have the potential to turn into the industries, companies, and jobs that drive an economy two to three decades hence. We call this innovation policy, as opposed to industrial policy. Today, this augurs the need for smart policies and investments in industries such as robotics, nanotechnology, clean energy, biotechnology, synthetic biology, high-performance computing, and digital platforms such as the smart grid, intelligent transportation systems, broadband, and Health IT. Explicit in this approach is a recognition that some technologies and industries are in fact more important than others in driving economic growth—that “$100 of potato chips does not equal $100 of computer chips.” Indeed, they are not because some industries, such as semiconductor microprocessors (computer chips) experience very rapid growth and reductions in cost, spark the development of subsequent industries, and increase the productivity of other sectors of the economy—not to mention support higher wage jobs.
Yet The Economist frets that governments aren’t very good at identifying and investing in strategic emerging technologies. In impugning governments’ ability to pick winning technologies, the article cites failures such as France’s Minitel (a case of a country picking a national champion company) and argues that “Even supposed masters of industrial policy {like Japan’s MITI, or Ministry of International Trade and Industry} have made embarrassing mistakes.” But this would be tantamount to pointing to the spectacular failure of Apple’s Newton and arguing that Apple’s no good at innovation. The Economist seems to suggest that if governments failed 80-90% of the time in picking technology winners (and ITIF actually thinks their success rates are much higher), then they must be pretty incompetent at the effort and should stop trying altogether.
But if private corporations followed that advice, then we would have no innovation whatsoever. Indeed, research by Larry Keeley of Doblin, Inc. finds that, in the corporate world, only 4 percent of innovation initiatives meet their internally defined success criteria. More than ninety percent of products fail in the first two years. Other research has found that only 8 percent of innovation projects exceed their expected return on investment, and only 12 percent their cost of capital. Yet companies have to continue to try to innovate, even in the face of these long odds, because research finds that firms that don’t replace at least 10 percent of their revenue stream annually are likely to be out of business within five years. The point is that just because innovation is difficult and success rates are low, this does not mean that corporations, or governments, should quit trying—or that their successes, like the Internet, can’t be spectacularly successful and have a profound impact on driving economic growth.
But The Economist laments that industrial or innovation policies are subject to capture by industries. What this neglects is that all countries, including the United States, already have de facto industrial policies that favor some industries over others. In the United States, for example, our regulatory and tax system favors agribusiness through farm subsidies, the oil industry through oil subsidies, airlines and highways at the expense of rail, and mortgage and financial industries. In fact, it is precisely because the United States has historically lacked an ability, or willingness, to have a clearly defined innovation strategy and an open dialogue about “making strategic decisions about strategic industries” that we’ve ended up with a de facto industrial policy ill-suited to supporting industries that will drive economic growth in the future. The Economist notes that “there is no accepted framework for “vertical” policy, favoring specific sectors or companies.” True. So let’s make one.
Finally, while The Economist criticizes President Obama’s new Strategy for American Innovation (released in 2009), it fails to come up with compelling evidence that breakthroughs such as mapping the human genome, unlocking nanotechnology’s potential, or achieving the technology-enabled transformations that need to occur in sectors from energy to transportation will occur solely because of the market’s ability to allocate capital efficiently. In this, it discounts the need for effective, intentional public-private partnerships to invest in and collaborate in the development and diffusion of these industries and technologies.
This critique is not meant to pick on The Economist, which is usually chock full of solid reporting and informed commentary. Rather it is take on the myth of America’s purely free market capitalist system and make the case for an informed innovation policy. It is also to note that countries (like the United States) find themselves desperately turning to industrial policy in a last ditch effort to save stumbling sectors such as automobiles because they have failed to make adequate investments in innovation policies that would support science and technology, R&D, and the development and diffusion of innovative processes and technologies that could have helped keep old sectors like automobiles at the technology frontier while supporting the development of new sectors to drive the economy forward.
Finally, it seeks to rebut the ideological and highly politicized assault on the idea the governments cannot make prudent, targeted bets on the industries of tomorrow. As Greg Tassey has noted, competition among governments has become a critical factor in determining global market share among nations. Indeed, the role of government is now a critical factor in determining which economies win and which lose in the increasingly intense process of creative destruction.
There are appropriate and inappropriate roles for governments to play in this competition. Supporting education, removing barriers to competition, supporting free and fair global trade, opening countries to high-skill immigration, and targeting strategic R&D investments towards the technologies and industries of the future are appropriate roles for governments to play in this competition. Other government policies, such as mercantilist ones which deny foreign countries’ corporations access to domestic markets, pilfer intellectual property by stealing it outright or making it a condition of market access, creating indigenous or proprietary IT standards, failing to adhere to trade agreements, or directly subsidizing domestic companies or their exports, are illegitimate forms of global economic competition. The United States—and The Economist—must abandon its fanciful, stylized neoclassical notion of a purely free global economic marketplace unfettered by any form of government intervention whatsoever, and recognize that governments play a legitimate and crucial role in shaping the innovation capabilities of national economies. As between corporations, it’s a competition; and, as with companies, the ones that develop the best strategies and skills at fostering, developing, and delivering innovation are the ones most likely to win.
Today’s primaries range from dogs that didn’t bark—AZ GOP Senate and gubernatorial primaries that turned into snoozers—to noisy kennels of nastiness in Florida.
Florida
Florida’s Democratic Senate and Republican gubernatorial primaries were originally supposed to be snoozers, with Rep. Kendrick Meek (D) expected to win the former and Attorney General (and former congressman) Bill McCollum (R) expected to win the latter without a whole lot of trouble. Then, near the end of the qualifying period, billionaire investor Jeff Greene jumped into the Democratic Senate primary while multi-millionaire (his net worth is estimated at $218 million) former hospital exec and anti-health-reform lobbyist Rick Scott (R) jumped into the gubernatorial primary. Nothing’s been the same since then.
In a remarkably short period of time, Scott has shattered every Florida political spending record, pouring $39 million of personal money and another $11 million of his wife’s money (channeled through an “independent” 527 group that’s been attacking McCollum) into the race. From the get-go, he identified himself as a Tea Party-friendly “outsider” taking on the corrupt status quo in Tallahassee, as symbolized by McCollum, who spent twenty years in Congress and lost two Senate races before becoming AG.
For a while, it looked like McCollum was toast, but he fought back with his own nasty-grams calling attention to the $1.7 billion fines for Medicare fraud paid out by the HCA-Columbia hospital chain for billings during Scott’s tenure as CEO. The party stalwart has been helped by endorsements from Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, not to mention a 527 group of his own that collected about $9 million from every conservative interest group in the state.
Several late polls have shown McCollum pulling ahead of Scott, even as both candidates’ rising negatives have enabled Democrat Alex Sink to pull ahead of both of them in a hypothetical three-way November race with independent Bud Chiles.
Meanwhile, a similar but even more dramatic dynamic has occurred in the Democratic Senate race. Greene (whose original strategist was none other than Joe Trippi, who left the campaign just a few weeks ago, to be replaced by another famous name, Tad Devine) sprinted into a quick lead over Meek after heavy advertising identifying himself as a can-do businessman “outsider.” But then details about how Greene got rich betting on a housing market collapse, and more luridly, about Greene’s alleged playboy antics, sometimes in the company of BFF Mike Tyson, started to come out, and Meek has retaken the lead rather decisively.
Greene fought back with attacks on Meek and his mother, former congresswoman Carrie Meek, for alleged corruption, and on Meek for supposedly not being sufficiently supportive of Israel, but other than contributing to the already low tone of the primary season, they haven’t had a major impact. Buttressed by endorsements from both President Obama and former president Bill Clinton, Meek has opened up sizable leads in all the late polls, and if this holds, he can move on to worrying about how to keep Democrats from supporting independent candidate Charlie Crist.
Vermont
There’s a different political atmosphere up in Vermont, where Democrats are holding a highly competitive but very civil five-way primary to choose a candidate for governor. The two early favorites were Secretary of State Deb Markowitz (a long-time self-identified New Democrat) and former Lt. Gov. Doug Racine (a favorite of unions and liberal activists), but once incumbent Republican governor Jim Douglas announced his retirement, other strong candidacies appeared, including state senator Peter Shulman, credited with a key role in passage of Vermont’s gay marriage statute; former state senator Matt Dunne, who’s run the national VISTA program and also served as a Google exec; and state senator Susan Bartlett, who’s challenging Markowitz for the votes of centrists.
Though there’s been no public polling in the race, it looks like a dead heat among Markowitz, Shulman, Racine and Dunne, with turnout (expected to be quite low thanks to the vacation season timing) a crucial factor. The winner will face Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie (R), who has no primary opposition, and who has positioned himself somewhat to the right of the incumbent Douglas. Vermont represents a prime “takeback” state for Democrats, though Dubie led all the Democrats in a June Rasmussen poll.
Arizona
Over in Arizona, John McCain’s pulled far in front of once-feared challenger J.D. Hayworth, thanks to a combination of heavy spending, shifts to the right on policy issues, and Hayworth gaffes. Meanwhile, Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, once considered a caretaker sure to lose a primary, has been turned into a national conservative celebrity by her signature on the state’s new immigration law, and will win easily.
Alaska
Up in Alaska, Sarah Palin’s risked her home-state reputation with a late effort on behalf of former judge Joe Miller, who is challenging Sen. Lisa Murkowski. There’s no love lost between Palin and Murkowski, whose father Palin defeated in a primary to become governor in 2006. But Murkowski has a huge financial advantage, and despite occasional ideological heresies, should win.
Oklahoma
And down in Oklahoma, a low-turnout runoff will decide two Republican congressional nominations, including the challenge to Blue Dog Democrat Dan Boren, who has tons of money but is theoretically vulnerable in a conservative district.
When Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari played the terrorism card Monday appealing for flood relief funds, I had to stop my eyeballs from reflexively rolling back in my head. Zardari called the flood the “ideal hope of the radical” and cast relief efforts as a struggle between his government and Islamic extremists. On the surface, it sounds cheap, it sounds disingenuous. Worse yet, it sounds like something George W. Bush would say. But desperate to spur the international community and its sluggish financial response to the crisis, Zardari made a calculated pitch framed in stark terms: help us or the terrorists win.
The thing is, he might just have a point. The flood might not be the radical’s ideal hope, but there is certainly an opportunity to further divide Pakistani’s allegiances.
Disaster relief is the ultimate test of a government’s competence. Its citizens are dying, homeless, and starving, and they know where the buck stops. If the government fails to address basic survival needs, a vacuum in public trust can open almost instantaneously.
On the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it’s fitting to examine the dispassionate political parallels. After winning the 2004 election with 51 percent of the vote, Bush’s approval hovered just shy of 50 percent through mid-2005. When Katrina hit in mid-2005, his ratings nose-dived from 48 percent in June to 39 percent by November. After a brief recovery in late 2005, Bush was toast for the rest of his presidency, leaving office with an awesomely bad 23 percent on Election Day 2008.
Zardari has Bush-like unpopularity: the Pew Research Center’s July poll gave him just a 20 percent favorability rating amongst Pakistanis, and a full 77 percent say his influence is downright negative. Just 25 percent rate the national government as having a “good influence”.
It is safe to say that if Zardari’s government continues to fail delivering swift relief aid, that Pakistanis are ready to support whoever will. One of those possibilities is Zardari’s chief rival, Nawaz Sharif, who has garnered a tidy 70 percent approval rating and maintains a deep desire to return to the top of Pakistani politics. While the U.S. should have no great preference for individuals over democratic institutions, a messy political fight in the midst of relief efforts would only cause more suffering.
A more serious concern is the Pakistani Taliban, which could draw on the example of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. That group has won hearts and minds in the public services business in southern Lebanon, too.
Zardari may never be America’s best bud, but he understands that it is in Pakistan’s interest to have a working strategic relationship with the United States. While humanitarian grounds should be enough to motivate the world’s rich countries to give generously to Pakistan, that hasn’t proven the case. Short-term political instability and Taliban opportunism should be.
It’s one of the great ironies of this political era of discontent that some of the most exceptional indicia of economic inequality in recent American history are being accompanied by a populist backlash against income redistribution, even in its most time-honored forms.
I’ve done a full review of this book for the Washington Monthly, and you can check that out at your leisure. But the book is useful in two major respects: (1) It focuses not just on the ever-growing divide in wealth and income between the top and everyone else, but between the top-of-the-top and everyone else, a process that has been largely immune to the economic vicissitudes of the last decade. (2) It makes a very strong case against the assumption that this sort of inequality is the “natural” product of market forces, rather than the artificial results of government policies deliberately promoted for that purpose.
I tend to think that Hacker and Pierson underestimate the deep-seated, non-contrived extent of anti-government sentiments among Americans, and the contributions of poor public-sector performance in abetting them, but all in all, their book is a very valuable contribution to our understanding of the politics of the economy today and yesterday. It’s a book that will probably make you mad–but in a constructive way. It’s certainly an appropriate read for the upcoming Labor Day weekend.
Opposition to nuclear energy seems to be melting fast, especially in the South. The Tennessee Valley Authority voted last week to complete a nuclear reactor in Alabama it stopped working on in 1988.
Earlier this year, the Obama administration awarded loan guarantees to Southern Company and two partners to build two new nuclear reactors in Georgia – the first new generating plants to be approved since the 1970s. Others are in the works for South Carolina, southern Maryland, and Texas.
TVA’s decision to revive its long-shelved reactor at the Bellefonte site was the latest sign that a “nuclear renaissance” in America isn’t just hype. Work began on the plant in 1974 but was stopped in 1988 because of falling energy demand, as well rising anti-nuclear sentiment following the 1979 Three Mile Island incident.
The $4.3 billion project is part of the venerable public power company’s strategic plan for meeting future energy demand in the seven states it serves: Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, George, North Carolina, and Virginia. It envisions reducing carbon and sulfur dioxide emissions, by switching from coal-burning units to natural gas and nuclear energy. “We want to be one of the nation’s leading providers of low-cost and clean energy by 2020,” TVA CEO Tom Kilgore told the Associated Press.
Will other regions emulate the South and learn to love nuclear power again? It’s hard to say. The South is not as well endowed in wind, hydro and even solar energy as other regions, though it could become a major biofuels producer. But other regions, notably the Midwest and Mountain West, are even more dependent on coal than the South. They may also turn to nuclear energy, along with natural gas and, if it pans out, clean coal technology as attractive alternatives for meeting rising energy demand with low-carbon fuels.
And since President Obama isn’t getting much love these days, it’s worth pointing out that his administration has given the nuclear revival a big boost by dramatically increasing nuclear loan guarantees. He’s absolutely right: at a time when America’s ability to generate good jobs is in question, we cannot afford to cede global leadership in the fast-growing market for nuclear energy to France and China.
Mandel starts by noting that the one sector of the economy where there has been real growth of late is the digital communications sector. And given how hard new jobs are to come by in this current economy, Mandel figures we ought to keep growth going where we can by limiting the temptation to write too many new rules in the telecom sector:
What’s needed from regulators now is some creativity and humility – in the form of “countercyclical regulatory policy.” This gives innovators a bit of breathing space at the start of an economic recovery, but sets the stage to tighten regulations later on if excesses develop.
For example, Mandel argues that now is not the time for any new net neutrality rules:
For that reason, I suggest a two-year pause in new broadband regulation, keeping the current balance among the different players, which seems to be generating growth. At the same time, the knowledge that the regulator remains on duty, ready to intervene, would provide an essential check.
However, Mandel is clear that counter-cyclical regulation is not the equivalent of no regulation:
This approach does not mean regulators can go to sleep nor does it mean they can raise the flag of laissez-faire. What’s needed is the nuanced judgment of sentries posted at a tense border spot. With watchful eyes, regulators must practice thoughtful restraint that allows space for job leaders to innovate and hire, while remaining ready to aggressively confront violations of law or abuses of consumer rights if they take place.
It took a lot of arm-twisting, but Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced last week that Israel and the Palestinians have agreed to return to the bargaining table. The Obama administration’s faith in the power of diplomacy, which some consider misplaced, is about to face its sternest test.
It’s not hard to find grounds for pessimism. For one thing, Palestinian President President Mahmoud Abbas agreed to participate only under heavy U.S. pressure. He had to give up his demand that Israel continue the freeze on settlements as a precondition for talks, though the “Quartet” (the U.S., Europe, Russia and the United Nations) cooked up a face-saving declaration last Friday.
The agenda for negotiations has been left intentionally vague, so as to give neither side a pretext for refusing to participate. Somehow, the dynamic of face-to-face talks itself is supposed to lead to a peace deal over the next 12 months. Yet there’s been little change in the internal political realities – the West Bank/Gaza split and Netanyahu’s dependence on right-wing coalition partners to govern – that have made this such an unpropitious time for a comprehensive peace settlement.
The operative theory here seems to be that U.S. can more effectively pressure both sides to make concessions – through “bridging proposals” – in the context of direct negotiations. For example, Netanyahu will more likely extend the moratorium on new settlements, lest he be accused of scuttling the talks. U.S. officials also believe that Netanyahu’s hard-liner credentials will make it easier for him to sell a skeptical Israeli public on any deal reached with the Palestinians.
It’s also widely assumed that Abbas needs to demonstrate that his relative moderation and support for a two-state solution can deliver concrete benefits to Palestinians. But if Yassir Arafat, who presided over a more unified Palestinian authority couldn’t bring himself to embrace a two-state deal, its hard to see how a far weaker Abbas can, especially with Hamas looking over his shoulder.
Nonetheless, it’s axiomatic in U.S. diplomatic circles that it’s always better to have the two sides talking than not. The absence of hope for a political solution leaves the field to the radical rejectionists: Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.
Maybe so, but two large doubts hang over the coming talks. First, it’s not clear, for either Netanyahu or Abbas, that perpetuating the status quo, for all its frustrations, is a riskier course than making difficult concessions on territory, refugees, the status of Jerusalem and other traditional sticking points. Second, it’s not evident that either leader, even if he thought such risks worth taking, could forge a domestic consensus for a peace deal. So why shove them together now?
The answer may have more to do with America’s efforts to combat radicalism and violent extremism in the region than any profound yearning for peace among Israelis and Palestinians. If so, it’s going to be a long year.
Tuesday’s primaries in Washington and Wyoming didn’t produce a lot of drama, other than a close three-way race for the GOP gubernatorial nomination in the Cowboy State. But political junkies have been staring at the results of Washington’s “Top 2 blanket primary” (in which all candidates appear on the same primary ballot, with the top two finishers, regardless of percentage, advancing to the general election) for auguries of what will happen in congressional races in November.
That’s particularly true of the U.S. Senate race, where a victory by Republican Dino Rossi over incumbent Patty Murray (D) is generally considered essential to the GOP’s chances of winning control of the upper chamber.
Washington
Thanks to Washington’s practice of accepting mail ballots postmarked by Election Day, the results still aren’t final. As of the moment, with about 86 percent of ballots counted, Murray has 46.41 percent of the vote, with another 2.3 percent being cast for an assortment of minor Democratic candidates. Rossi has 33.4 percent, while former Washington Redskins tight end and Tea Party zealot Clint Didier drew an underwhelming 12.5 percent. Another 3.8 percent went to minor Republicans, so the bottom line is very close to a tie between the two parties (and may get even closer as the final vote, which includes a lot of ballots from staunchly Democratic King County, come in). Since most of the campaign activity was on the GOP side, Murray may be in better shape than the numbers suggest, but this will definitely be one of the races to watch in November.
In House races in Washington, most of the national attention was focused on the open 3rd district seat of retiring Democrat Brian Baird. As generally expected, Democrat Denny Heck and Republican Jaime Herrera won the general election spots, but the combined Republican vote of 53 percent is a bit troubling for Democrats. The same is true in the competitive 8th district, where Republican incumbent Dave Riechert won 47 percent and the total GOP vote rose to 58 percent (Susan DelBene won a general election spot with 27 percent). On the other hand, in the 2nd district, Democrat Rick Larson won 43 percent and the combined Democratic vote reached 54 percent. In the 9th district, New Democrat Coalition co-chair Adam Smith pulled 52 percent, and with a Green Party candidate in the field, the combined Republican vote was only 45 percent.
Wyoming
In Wyoming, where Democrats are waging an uphill battle to hang onto the governorship (currently held by the very popular but term-limited Dave Freudenthal), state party chair Leslie Peterson eased past former Wyoming Cowboys football star Pete Gosar in a genial Democratic primary. But Wyoming voters were denied an all-female general election when former U.S. Attorney Matt Mead edged State Auditor Rita Meyer by 714 votes. Mead, whose grandfather was former Wyoming Sen. Cliff Hansen, heavily self-financed his campaign, and survived constant RINO accusations by “true conservative” candidate Ron Micheli, who finished a very strong third. Meyer was endorsed by Sarah Palin and boasted an extensive military record. Meanwhile, another Wyoming political scion, Colin Simpson (son of Alan), finished a relatively poor fourth.
Speaking of Sarah Palin, St. Joan of the Tundra had another not-so-great night, endorsing not only Meyer but Washington Senate candidate Clint Didier. She did get a win in WA-2 with Republican leader John Koster, but he was the prohibitive GOP favorite all along.
Next up
Next up on the primary calendar are Alaska, Arizona and Florida (and a runoff in Oklahoma) on August 24, and then Louisiana on August 28. With John McCain blowing away J.D. Hayworth in Arizona, most of the national attention next week will be on Florida, where the Democratic Senate primary and the Republican gubernatorial primary are hanging fire. Most polls indicate that the gazillionaires in those races, Democrat Jeff Greene and Republican Rick Scott, have been losing steam of late. The latest poll, by Quinnipiac, shows Kendrick Meek leading Greene in the Democratic Senate race 35 percent to 28 percent, but with a very large 32 percent of voters still undecided. Publicity surrounding Greene’s relationship with Mike Tyson and his drug habit have not helped the now-underdog. Meanwhile, the Q-poll shows McCollum leading Scott 44-35 in the exceptionally nasty GOP gubernatorial primary. It also confirms a variety of recent surveys giving Democrat Alex Sink a narrow lead in a three-way contest involving independent Bud Chiles and either Republican candidate.
The real outcome of most Washington lobbying is … nothing. Until the right party or person comes to power. So finds a 10-year study.
Actually… according to Lobbying and Policy Change (the landmark book by five political scientists that the post references), 40 percent of the time, lobbyists succeeded. So yes, technically, 60 percent of the time is most of the time and so it is correct to say that most of the time lobbying yields nothing.
But, to me, 40 percent is actually an astonishing success rate.
Sure, this may not look like much if your starting assumption is that special interests own Washington, and that all a clever lobbyist needs to do is approach a Congressman with the promise of a campaign check and that poor helpless Congressman will practically be begging to fete that lobbyist with most indefensible corporate giveaway.
But, on the other hand, if you’ve spent any time in Washington, and you know how hard it is to get just about anything done, 40 percent is definite batting champion territory.
And the big point of the study is actually about the difficulty of change: the status quo is really, really sticky in Washington, in good part because on most important issues there are forces mobilized on both sides, and every action on one side provokes an equal but opposite reaction on the other side. Forces fight each other to stalemate for years. But then then, suddenly, there is movement – and whoever has won the war of positioning is likely to win the war of motion.
But the problem is that nobody – not even the cleverest of lobbyists – really knows which ideas and issues are likely to break and when. Which means the keys to success in the Washington wars of influence are a long-term strategy and the patience and resources to carry it out. One must build a compelling case, nurture allies, and be in position to take advantage of the rare windows of opportunity when they do arise.
Still, the more one works at it, the more likely the success. As the authors of this study note: “The passage of time increases the odds of policy change among our cases. We observer policy changes on significantly more issues after four years than after just two years” (237) (This study only covered a four-year period (1999-2002). Had it looked at a longer period of time, perhaps the success rate would have topped 50 percent. Would the headline then have been “Lobbying Often Yields Something”?)
Interestingly, the study finds that having more resources is no guarantee of success, partly because there are often large resources on both sides of an issue. But that doesn’t mean that money doesn’t matter – it just suggests the price of entry to even get in the fight is quite high. Overall, lobbying is now a $3.5 billion industry, with corporations and business associations accounting for about two-thirds of the expenditures.
Ultimately, any attempt to simplify lobbying as either fundamentally influential or not influential misses a very basic point: lobbying is a process, a conversation, a multi-dimensional chess game that sometimes never ends. Nobody in Washington carries a magic wand that can make policy happen with a mere wave. Not even lobbyists. Influence happens in more subtle and patient ways, something that anybody who might be concerned about the role of lobbyists needs to understand.
4,419. That’s the number of Americans who have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, according to the Pentagon. Tens of thousands more have been wounded, maimed, or traumatized in various ways. And although it’s hard to get an accurate count, it’s likely that more than 100,000 Iraqis have perished.
As U.S. troops head home ahead of President Obama’s Sept. 1 deadline for ending major combat operations in Iraq, it’s worth asking: What did all this sacrifice achieve?
No dispassionate observer can doubt that Iraq, the United States, and the rest of the world are well to be rid of Saddam Hussein, one of history’s worst tyrants. He continually menaced his neighbors, invading two of them (Iran and Kuwait) and launching missiles at a third (Israel). At home, the paranoid dictator presided over a nightmarish police state in which anyone suspected of disloyalty – including school children – were abducted, tortured and murdered by the regime’s vast security apparatus. All told, the Iraqi dictator was responsible for the death of nearly two million people. He was Iraq’s weapon of mass destruction.
It took U.S. troops to free Iraqis from Saddam’s sadistic grip. Despite the many blunders the Bush administration committed following the invasion, that act of liberation is to America’s everlasting credit.
Now it remains to be seen what Iraqis will make of it. It’s easy to be pessimistic. Terrorist acts, though down, are still almost a daily occurrence. Sectarian rivalries have abated somewhat, but still seethe under the surface and could yet fracture the country. Five months after its last elections, Iraqi politicians seem paralyzed, unable to agree on a new government.
But if Iraqi democracy is a mess, even a messy politics is preferable to no democracy at all, as James Traub has argued Slowly, fitfully, a brutalized people have begun to take control of their own destiny. The United States, which will keep an “overwatch” force of 50,000 in the country for another year, still has considerable influence. There’s a reasonable chance that Iraq could continue to evolve into the Arab world’s first functioning democracy.
But even if you grant that the United States has accomplished much in Iraq, many Americans, and not just critics of the war, still wonder whether it was worth the cost. That’s a very different question, and one we’re likely to be debating long after the last U.S. soldier has left Iraq.
Mike Konczal returned from vacation and promptly put up a post criticizing my take-down of Edward Luce’s horrible Financial Times piece on “the crisis of the middle class”. It’s become apparent to me over the past few years that I’ve been in D.C. that you can’t refute a specific empirical question about the situation of the poor or middle class (e.g., is it in crisis? as in much worse off than in the past?) without being attacked on much broader grounds than you staked out and being called an opponent of these groups or an insensitive jerk. I actually don’t disagree with much that Mike writes “against” my “views”.
What I do disagree with is the contention that the middle class is in crisis. And I think that it’s bad to believe (and assert for mass audiences) that that’s true because it hurts consumer sentiment, prolonging high unemployment, and diverts attention from the truly disadvantaged who really are in crisis. Mike can say that that pits me against the middle class (his post was titled, “Scott Winship versus the Middle Class”), but then let me ask Mike and others who would disagree with me a simple question: Why do you think Americans are deluded about their economic conditions, since in June, 7 in 10 American adults said their “current household financial situation” is better than “most” Americans’ (Q.25, disclosure: the poll was commissioned by my old employer)? Why are you against the middle class?
Mike says that when I say some problem affects a tiny fraction of the population, that’s like a hit man saying that he doesn’t kill that many people as a fraction of the population – the “Marty Blank gambit” as he calls it. But look, that’s not an apt analogy. If I were saying that we shouldn’t give a rat’s ass about the tiny share of the population that experiences a bankruptcy, that would be using the Marty Blank gambit. I never said that, and I wouldn’t. But if you convince everyone in the middle class that they are just one bad break away from bankruptcy, then you shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t spend their money and the recovery continues to stall. It’s important to convey the facts correctly. Mike is stalling the recovery! Why are you against the middle class, Mike??
Finally, I think the best chart I’ve seen that puts all of this into perspective (which I made myself) is the following showing health insurance trends:
Anyone who wants the data can email me at scott@scottwinship.com.
And contrary to Mike’s assertion, the fraction of under-insured has not increased. You can read the conclusion of my dissertation if you want to see what the facts show.
I’ll keep being concerned about the people who are in crisis, but I’m not going to buy in to the conventional wisdom among progressives that the middle class is in crisis.
*added note: Mike informs me that I missed the joke in his title, a Scott-Pilgrim-Versus-The-World nod. I like to think I’m clever and witty, but clearly my lack of sleep from parenting a newborn has left me not so quick on the uptake…)
U.S. officials say they have al Qaeda on the ropes in Pakistan. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for al Qaeda’s homicidal ideology, which is spreading to extremists in other Muslim countries. This poses new risks for Americans, and highlights a big hole in President Obama’s counter-terrorism policies.
