Category: Political Science
Ahem, a lot of the spending cuts are frauds
Via the cool-minded Kevin Drum (I have added no extra indentation, it is Kevin and then the AP, and then Kevin again, not me):
Here’s AP reporter Andrew Taylor digging into the $38 billion in spending cuts that Republicans agreed to and finding that an awful lot of it is smoke and mirrors:
Instead, the cuts that actually will make it into law are far tamer, including […] $2.5 billion from the most recent renewal of highway programs that can’t be spent because of restrictions set by other legislation. Another $3.5 billion comes from unused spending authority from a program providing health care to children of lower-income families.
….The spending measure reaps $350 million by cutting a one-year program enacted in 2009 for dairy farmers then suffering from low milk prices. Another $650 million comes by not repeating a one-time infusion into highway programs passed that same year. And just last Friday, Congress approved Obama’s $1 billion request for high-speed rail grants — crediting themselves with $1.5 billion in savings relative to last year.
About $10 billion of the cuts comes from targeting appropriations accounts previously used by lawmakers for so-called earmarks….Republicans had already engineered a ban on earmarks when taking back the House this year.
Republicans also claimed $5 billion in savings by capping payments from a fund awarding compensation to crime victims. Under an arcane bookkeeping rule — used for years by appropriators — placing a cap on spending from the Justice Department crime victims fund allows lawmakers to claim the entire contents of the fund as budget savings. The savings are awarded year after year.
And this report from CBS News notes two other phantom cuts: $1.7 billion left over from the 2010 census and $2.2 billion in subsidies for health insurance co-ops that are going to be funded anyway via the healthcare reform bill. This stuff alone adds up to $27.4 billion, all of it money that wouldn’t have been spent anyway. I suppose you can argue that some of it might have gotten reallocated if it hadn’t been removed legislatively, but I doubt that the tea party true believers are in a mood to buy that. If these reports are correct, the bill contains only about $11 billion in hard cuts. Basically, it looks as if the tea partiers may have gotten snookered by their own side.
Sentences to make you angry (or not)
In a recent paper, James Lindgren of Northwestern reports:
…compared to anti-redistributionists, strong redistributionists have about two to three times higher odds of reporting that in the prior seven days they were angry, mad at someone, outraged, sad, lonely, and had trouble shaking the blues. Similarly, anti-redistributionists had about two to four times higher odds of reporting being happy or at ease. Not only do redistributionists report more anger, but they report that their anger lasts longer. When asked about the last time they were angry, strong redistributionists were more than twice as likely as strong opponents of leveling to admit that they responded to their anger by plotting revenge. Last, both redistributionists and anti-capitalists expressed lower overall happiness, less happy marriages, and lower satisfaction with their financial situations and with their jobs or housework.
Further, in the 2002 and 2004 General Social Surveys anti-redistributionists were generally more likely to report altruistic behavior. In particular, those who opposed more government redistribution of income were much more likely to donate money to charities, religious organizations, and political candidates. The one sort of altruistic behavior that the redistributionists were more likely to engage in was giving money to a homeless person on the street.
This is much more to this paper. For instance, at the U.S. national level, racists tend to be pro-income redistribution on net. Anti-capitalist attitudes are associated with higher levels of intolerance. I thank an MR reader for the pointer, I am sorry that I have lost the identifying email.
The wit and wisdom of Garett Jones
Questions that are rarely asked
By email, from Joshua Miller:
Do you think there is an audience for a public policy game show? The idea would be to ask contestants to solve policy problems instead of asking them to navigate obstacle courses or eat spiders.
Much of my research is on deliberative democracy and civic engagement, but though Obama used that rhetoric in his campaign there haven’t been any major policy moves to increase civic engagement. So I wondered:
If you have any comments, I’d appreciate them. I don’t imagine this as some sort of televised town hall meeting; rather, I envision judging contestants’ policy choices according to realistic projections of their impact.
Here is Alex’s proposal for, So You Think You Can Be President?
Will the government shut down?
Here are the Bookmaker’s odds:
Will the U.S. Congress reach an agreement on the federal spending cut bill for the rest of the fiscal year before March 4th?
YES -140 58%
NO -110 47%[The +/- Indicates the Return on the Wager. The percentage is the likelihood that response will occur. For Example: Betting on the candidate least likely to win would earn the most amount of money, should that happen.]
For the pointer I thank Samuel Arbesman. Why is there no InTrade.com market?
Addendum: InTrade now shows a 39 percent chance of a shutdown before the end of June.
Haiti fact of the day
At the time the United States intervened in Haiti in 1994, the U.S. defense budget of $288 billion was 20 times the entire gross domestic product of Haiti.
[TC: And yet we still did not quite achieve our war aims.] That is from the new and interesting book by Sarah E. Kreps, Coalitions of Convenience: United States Military Interventions After the Cold War.
Here are music videos by Sweet Micky, the new President of Haiti. I’ve seen him in concert three times and it was always enjoyable.
Libya and our budget
From Ezra Klein’s Wonkbook:
The war in Libya is making defense cuts less likely, reports Carrie Budoff Brown: “For once, the unthinkable in Washington seemed within reach. From liberals to tea party conservatives to a defense secretary who served in a Republican administration, all agreed — it was time to begin reining in the Pentagon budget. Then along came Libya. Just as the debt debate ramps up on Capitol Hill, the lead role the United States is playing in the military action against Libya threatens to scramble an emerging consensus over the need to trim defense to reduce the deficit…The airstrikes are already being used by some in the Republican establishment to blunt momentum in favor of the cuts, long considered heretical in a town in which defense contractors constitute a formidable lobby and members of Congress view the Pentagon budget as a jobs program and fear being tagged as unpatriotic.”
Fragments of truth
This time, not even an entire sentence is required:
…the Republican position appears to be: “How do we preserve current tax rates and most current spending while getting Democrats to accept deep cuts to the small fraction of the budget called non-defense discretionary spending?”
(Could you improve that fragment by subbing in “is” for “appears to be”?) Ezra Klein’s associated prediction is that a government shutdown is on its way.
Lazy Boys Shakedown Chinese Furniture Makers
James Hagerty at the WSJ has an excellent piece showing how trade policy really works at the ground floor level:
Some U.S. furniture makers and their lawyers have found a reliable way to extract cash from Chinese competitors deemed by U.S. officials to have “dumped” their products in the U.S., selling them at unfairly low prices.
Each year since 2006, they have asked the Commerce Department to review the U.S. duties paid by Chinese manufacturers on imports of wooden bedroom furniture. Many Chinese firms, fearing a steep rise in duties, agreed within months each time to pay cash to their U.S. competitors in return for being removed from the review list.
“Everybody in the industry in the U.S. and China understands that these payments are clever shakedowns,” said William Silverman, a lawyer representing U.S. furniture retailers, big importers of Chinese products, at an October hearing of the U.S. International Trade Commission.
The Chinese firms have paid millions of dollars to Lay-Z-Boy (really, I am not making this up) other US furniture makers and to their bagmen lawyers to avoid having the ITC sicked on them. I suppose one could argue that the payments are an efficient way of redistributing the gains from trade. The question then becomes why are US firms assumed to own the rights to sell to US consumers?
Hat tip to Chuck Sicotte.
Does a government shutdown boost fiscal conservatism?
Matt Mitchell says no:
It turns out that in 23 U.S. states, the government will automatically shut down in the event that the governor and the legislature fail to agree on a budget. In his work on budget rules, David Primo examined the theoretical impact of these provisions from a game theoretic perspective. He noted that in states with an automatic shutdown provision, “the legislature will be able to achieve its ideal budget, so long as the governor prefers it to no spending.” (p. 102)
He therefore predicted that states with such a provision will spend more than states without such a rule. He then tested the hypothesis, controlling for a number of other factors known to impact state spending and found that states with an automatic shutdown provision actually spend about $64 more per capita than other states. As he notes, “This effect is remarkably large, given that shutdowns occur rarely.” (p. 103)
This suggests that the federal government’s automatic shutdown provision—by making Congress’s desired spending level a take-it-or-leave-it offer—tends to bias the government toward more spending. By extension, it also suggests that a government shutdown will shift negotiating power toward those who favor more spending. So, paradoxically, fiscally-conservative Tea Partiers stand to lose the most if the federal government shuts down.
Maybe you’re not convinced by that $64 difference. Maybe you ascribe it to unobserved variables. Still, it is hard to argue, based on the evidence, that shutdowns help the cause of fiscal conservatism.
The history of Libyan unity and partition
In 1949, Benjamin Rivlin wrote an instructive piece “Unity and Nationalism in Libya” (JSTOR), excerpt:
…the Big Four have been sharply divided on the question of Libyan unity…In supporting the Sanusi claims, Great Britain has become the chief advocate of a divided Libya…Similarly, the United States has given support to a divided Libya by abandoning its original proposal for an international trusteeship, in favor of support for the British position…Not to be forgotten is…France, also, advocated a partitioning of Libya, but a partition of its own special variety. Under the guise of “border rectifications,” France has laid claim to the Fezzan in southwestern Tripolitania and to all of Libya south of the Tropic of Cancer…The French claim is based primarily on the fact that Free French troops wrested this desert region from Italian control, and is an attempt to bolster the sagging prestige of France as a world power by a tangible reward for its role in the war.
The Soviet Union opposed a partition of Libya and favored Italian trusteeship. Back then, it seems that Europe took the lead role and the U.S. followed along. Here is one good sentence:
In examining the history of Libya one is struck with the fact that only on rare occasions has the area constituted a unified political entitity…there have never been firm bonds of union.
The difference between the two territories goes back to antiquity, when the territory was divided by rule by Greece and rule by Phoenicia. Even when Italy claimed the country in 1912, it effectively governed over two separate territories, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. What is the fundamental principle of division?:
The division of Libya into Cyrenaica and Tripolitania down through the ages is no mere quirk of history. It reflects, rather, the basic physiographic character of the territory. A great natural barrier — the Gulf of Sirte [now Sidra] and the projection of Libyan desert along its 400-mile shore — divides Cyrenaica from Tripolitania, limiting communication between the two territories and to a very large extent shaping their economies. Trade between the two territories has played a minor role, and the movement of the nomadic tribes in both territories has been and remains north-south, not east-west.
And:
Unity vs. separatism has been the chief concern of all political leaders in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica ever since the relaxation of military administration controls during the past three years…
Here is a summary of the Sanusi. Here is a useful map. Having read this article, I have revised upwards my priors on the likelihood of partition as the result of the current conflict, whether or not Gaddafi falls.
U.S. press coverage of foreign crises
Here is a well-known but now somewhat dated (1991) paper by Zaller and Chiu. It suggests two regularities:
1. U.S. press coverage tends to take its positions from the range of views which exist within government (“indexing”).
2. When a foreign conflict goes well, the U.S. press becomes more hawkish; when the conflict goes less well, the press becomes more dovish. The press swing in opinion is stronger than the swing of opinion from official sources.
Here is an empirical paper, applying this framework to the Libya crisis of 1985-1986. Here is a general look at the indexing hypothesis, again dated and pre-blogosphere. Here is a 2008 paper, showing greater influence for media, relative to the distribution of opinion within government.
A tale of Washington and Iowa and Libya
Sunstein got in such an involved conversation with a voter that he left [Austan] Goolsbee and [Samantha] Power outside, shivering in the snow. The three joked that, between their three sprawling areas of expertise, they had almost any potential question about Obama covered. They failed at the first door, when a voter wanted to know the location of the nearest caucus.
Sunstein and Power, who is 39, soon went on a date, and she asked him if he ever fantasized about doing anything else. “I expected him to say he dreamed of playing for the Red Sox,” she told me. “His eyes got real big and he said: ‘Ooh! OIRA!’ ”
“And I said, ‘What the hell is that?’ ”
The article is here (beware Canadians, not worth the click!). Here is a recent article on Samantha Power as the architect of Obama’s Libya policy. Here is an article on why last chapters disappoint.
*Why Marx was Right*
That’s the new Terry Eagleton book, which apparently needs no subtitle. Most of the claims in the book are correct, and they debunk superficial or incorrect readings of Marx. In that regard it is useful and it is also clearly written. Still, I have to judge it as a bad book, for instance:
But the so-called socialist system had its achievements, too. China and the Soviet Union dragged their citizens out of economic backwardness into the modern industrial world, at however horrific a human cost; and the cost was so steep partly because of the hostility of the capitalist West.
Or:
Building up an economy from very low levels is a backbreaking, dispiriting task. It is unlikely that men and women will freely submit to the hardships it involves.
Or:
…there is a paradoxical sense in which Stalinism, rather than discrediting Marx’s work, bears witness to its validity.
Try this one:
Revolution is generally thought to be the opposite of democracy, as the work of sinister underground minorities out to subvert the will of the majority. In fact, as a process by which men and women assume power over their own existence through popular councils and assemblies, it is a great deal more democratic than anything on offer at the moment. The Bolsheviks had an impressive record of open controversy within their ranks, and the idea that they should rule the country as the only political party was no part of their original programme.
Ahem. Terry Eagleton…telephone!
Is Japanese leadership broken?
Never has postwar Japan needed strong, assertive leadership more — and never has its weak, rudderless system of governing been so clearly exposed or mattered so much…
Japan’s leaders need to draw on skills they are woefully untrained for: improvisation; clear, timely and reassuring public communication; and cooperation with multiple powerful bureaucracies.
Postwar Japan flourished under a system in which political leaders left much of its foreign policy to the United States and its handling of domestic affairs to powerful bureaucrats. Prominent companies operated with an extensive reach into personal lives; their executives were admired for their role as corporate citizens.
But over the past decade or so, the bureaucrats’ authority has been eviscerated, and corporations have lost both power and swagger as the economy has foundered. Yet no strong political class has emerged to take their place. Four prime ministers have come and gone in less than four years; most political analysts had already written off the fifth, Naoto Kan, even before the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster.
I wouldn’t quite put it that way, but the points are well-taken and the article is interesting throughout.