An admirable explanation that hits on the distributional ins and outs I referred to earlier this week.

Paul Krugman explains how we should think about all those claims that this or that trust fund is going broke. But one of my favorite explanations comes from Explananda’s friend Steve Laniel from an October 2009 post:

In any case, Medicare is “headed for insolvency” because it works off a fixed budget. Well, Part A (hospital insurance) does. Parts B (reimbursing doctors), C (Medicare Advantage), and D (the drug benefit) are funded out of general revenues, so they can only go insolvent when the U.S. government goes insolvent. Medicare Part A is forced to be responsible in a way that the rest of the U.S. government is not. Why does no one ever talk about the Department of Defense being “headed for insolvency”? If Landrieu is so concerned about the public fisc, why doesn’t she push for the DoD to be funded out of a dedicated payroll tax? Then every few years, we could go through a public rending-of-garments ritual over the DoD’s impending bankruptcy. I would enjoy this very much. At least then we’d have parity: conservative Republicans shedding crocodile tears over how Medicare will have to be cut to keep it afloat, and my party doing the same for the military.

Finally, a point from Dean Baker that I’ve not seen made before:

[W]orkers, and only workers, pay Social Security tax. It is a payroll tax that is capped at just $106,000, so the chairman of Goldman Sachs pays no more in Social Security tax than a senior teacher or firefighter who may also hit the wage cap. By contrast, most of the general budget is financed through personal and corporate income taxes, which disproportionately come from higher income taxpayers. So it matters hugely that the bonds held by the trust fund are repaid from general revenue, as opposed to coming from additional Social Security taxes.

I need to think more about the full distributional implications of this point. But I think the takeaway is that while a regressive payroll tax raised general funds for years under the guise of a medicare or social security “trust fund,” the accounting vehicle of the Trust Fund ensures that the inevitable “fix” when outlays outstrip revenues will not add insult to injury by also being regressive. Instead of increasing the regressive payroll tax, the revenues used to fix program deficits are those supplied by more progressive taxation on upper income individuals and corporations.

So everyone knows about Robert Gibbs’ remarks quoted in The Hill:

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.

The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

Today Think Progress has a post documenting many occasions on which Obama himself has insisted that the American people hold him accountable. But they forgot one:

It is also worth noting that in this clip Obama praises the grassroots “agitating” that ultimately “forced elected politicians to be accountable.” This marks an interesting contrast with his Nation magazine interview with David Sirota, in which Obama

gently but dismissively labeled Wellstone as merely a “gadfly,” in a tone laced with contempt for the senator who, for instance, almost single-handedly prevented passage of the bankruptcy bill for years over the objections of both parties.

I’ll admit that I have always wondered whether Obama took the tone and stance that Sirota ascribes to him.

Among the many reasons to look forward to the day when Republicans don’t espouse gay-hostile policies is that when that finally happens Democrats won’t have the excuse of Republican hypocrisy (about marriage, the family, etc.) to point to as they attempt to make political hay out of the infidelities of Republican politicians.

The Krugster:

To be blunt: recent events suggest that the Republican Party has been driven mad by lack of power. The few remaining moderates have been defeated, have fled, or are being driven out. What’s left is a party whose national committee has just passed a resolution solemnly declaring that Democrats are “dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals,” and released a video comparing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Pussy Galore.

And that party still has 40 senators.

The plight of the Republican party has me as worried as anything else about the future of the country. The worst part about it is that the rot that has sunk all the way into the core of the Republican party is impossible to contain there. The more confident the Democrats are that they’re entitled to the vote of every non-insane person in the country, the less they’ll do to deserve that vote, the more corrupt, self-satisfied and unprincipled they’ll become.

So long as the country alternates power between the two parties, the US needs a functioning, non-insane Republican party almost as much as it needs a principled Democratic party. Here’s hoping it gets one sooner rather than later.

Hunter S. Thompson. Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72

“What I would like to preserve here,” Hunter S. Thompson writes in the opening pages of Fear and Loathing, “is a kind of high-speed cinematic reel-record of what the campaign was like at the time, not what the whole thing boiled down to or how it fits into history.” This conveys fairly accurately what Fear and Loathing includes, as well as what it leaves out. Except in the most general terms, there is almost no discussion of policy in this book—what the candidates stood for in the presidential race of 1972, whether their platforms were realistic or feasible, how they differed from one another. This isn’t a book about that kind of politics. It’s about the daily horse-race in the polls, about spin and counterspin, about the tedium of campaigning, and the thrill of high-stakes convention maneuvering.

It’s also very much a book about Hunter S. Thompson. “Gonzo journalism,” Thompson’s brand, allowed him the freedom to insert himself in all his frenetic, drugged up glory right smack into the story he was telling. Since Thompson is so consistently strange and funny and out of control, this adds interest to what is already a pretty interesting, if sad and frustrating, story: the rise and fall of George McGovern from an obscure unknown at the outset of the primaries to the crushing defeat he suffered against Nixon on election day.

It wasn’t supposed to end that way. Nixon was a polarizing figure in a time of widespread discontent, committed to an unpopular war, and facing 25 million new potential voters, who could be expected to skew against him. Watergate had only started to penetrate the national consciousness, but there were considerable forces arrayed against Nixon already.

The setting convinced many that the Democratic nomination would be harder to win than the Presidency, since any Democratic nominee was expected to have great odds against Nixon. The Democratic nomination went to McGovern, who beat out party insiders Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie in the course of a grueling struggle through the primaries by campaigning as a principled outsider, a refreshing and authentic voice for substantive change in a party that many felt offered a poor alternative to the Republican option.

But after a promising start, the McGovern campaign crashed in a messy convention, and a string of disasters that kept the campaign on the defensive right up until the vote. The worst of these was McGovern’s decision to back Thomas Eagleton, his (first) Vice-Presidential running mate, “1000%” after the news broke that Eagleton had been hospitalized several times with fairly serious psychiatric difficulties (for which he had undergone shock therapy)—only to reverse course later and dump Eagleton in favour of a new running mate. The stunning reversal following an agonizing period of indecision badly tarnished McGovern’s image as an unusually candid politician. It was a terrible shame. As Thompson points out a number of times, McGovern was a decent candidate whose faults and considerable missteps were hardly worth mentioning in comparison with the sins of his opponent in the White House.

After years of complaining about horse-race coverage of political campaigns, I was a bit chagrined to find Thompson’s account of the ‘72 campaign so gripping. The superficiality of the approach makes it a poor substitute for a serious discussion of how a society ought to organize itself. But there really is a place for accounts of the machinery of political life and for accounts of life on the campaign trail, especially when they’re this strange and original.

I just watched a bit of the Bobby Jindal response to Obama’s pseudo-SOTU speech. Jindal’s voice resembles the voice of the character Kenneth from the show 30 Rock with such creepy precision that I assumed at first that the video was some kind of spoof. Take a look. Apparently I’m not the only one who noticed.

I thought this was a classy touch in Obama’s inaugural address:

We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers.

Damn straight “non-believers.” Without intending any disrespect to Hindus, they appear to comprise 0.4% of the country, whereas “Unaffiliated” (broken down into Atheist, Agnostic, and Nothing in Particular) make up a whopping 16.1%, according to the same source. If I’m not mistaken, they also make up 100% of this august blog.

I watched the address on the video feed of the NYT side. Some cheeky producer made the decision to flash over to the camera trained on Bush during this bit:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.

It was a nice, though not terribly subtle, acknowledgment that Obama was taking a good swipe at Bush and his legacy with those words—though it also clearly wasn’t the only swipe in the speech. I hope Obama remembers those words, and I hope you do too.

Josh Marshall tells those of us wringing our hands over some of his (potential) appointees to cool it. Appointees implement policies; they don’t set them.

Maybe Josh can forgive us for taking Obama at his word:

One of the great economic minds of our times, Larry [Summers] has the global reputation for being able to get to the heart of the most complex and novel policy challenges. With respect to both, our current financial crisis and other pressing economic issues of our time, his thinking, writing, and speaking have set the terms of the debate. I am glad he will be by my side, playing the critical role of coordinating my administration’s economic policy in the White House and I will rely heavily on his advice as to navigate the unchartered waters of this crisis.

Obama tells us that Larry Summers, who argued that regulating financial derivatives markets would “cast[ ] a shadow of regulatory uncertainty over an otherwise thriving market,” will be a guiding force. Why shouldn’t we believe that?

Matthew Yglesias scoffed recently about Obama’s press staff’s decision to release a seating chart for Obama’s Economic Transition Advisory Board. James Wimberley points out in response that seating arrangements can actually be highly significant.

If I can just take this up a notch in geekyness, I’ve had a healthy respect for the complexities of seating arrangements ever since I was present to hear George Steiner’s lecture series, Two Suppers (reprinted in his book No Passion Spent). The two suppers in question are the last supper as described in the Gospels and the dinner party depicted in Plato’s Symposium. Where each person sits and why is an important but easy to miss issue in the literary depictions of both suppers, and my recollection is that Steiner has an interesting and challenging discussion of the topic.

Steiner can be a bit annoying, but if you’re interested in the issue of seating arrangements, those lectures are one place to start.

Timothy Burke writes:

It’s schadenfreudey fun to read the ongoing psychotic meltdowns at various far-right sites like the Corner, I agree. But there’s little need to take the really bad-faith conservatives seriously now. For the last eight years, we’ve had to take them somewhat seriously because they had access to political power. You had to listen to the hack complaints about academia from endlessly manipulative writers because it was perfectly plausible that whatever axe they were grinding was going to end up as a priority agenda item coming out of Margaret Spelling’s office or get incorporated into legislation by right-wing state legislators. You had to listen to and reply to even the most laughably incoherent, goalpost-moving, anti-reality-based neoconservative writer talking about Iraq or terrorism because there was an even-money chance that you were hearing actual sentiments going back and forth between Dick Cheney’s office and the Pentagon. You had to answer back to Jonah Goldberg not just because making that answer was arguably our responsibility as academics, but also because left alone, some of the aggressively bad-faith caricatures he and others served up had a reasonable chance to gain even further strength through incorporation into federal policy.

There are plenty of thoughtful, good-faith conservatives who need to be taken seriously. And the actual conservatism of many communities and constituencies (in Appalachia and elsewhere) remains, as always, a social fact that it would be perilous to ignore or dismiss.

There are plenty of criticisms of academia which retain their importance and gravity, or which will continue to inform policy-makers in an Obama Administration. Don’t expect pressure for accountability and assessment to go away, for example. It doesn’t matter that Chuck Grassley is a Republican: a lot of the muck he’s raking up deserves to be raked.

But I think we can all make things just ever so slightly better, make the air less poisonous, by pushing to the margins of our consciousness the crazy, bad, gutter-dwelling, two-faced, tendentious high-school debator kinds of voices out there in the public sphere, including and especially in blogs. Let them stew in their own juices, without the dignity of a reply, now that their pipelines to people with real political power have been significantly cut.

Making fun of or arguing with crazy ideologues is sort of the intellectual equivalent of junk food: bad for you and addictive at the same time. But as Burke points out it was at the same time often necessary during the Bush years because so many of the crazy ideas floating around the right were popular with extremely powerful leaders and opinion makers. Part of the excitement I wrote about the other day with politics now comes from the hope of moving to a more intelligent and substantive political discourse. And of course I agree with Burke that we would do well to include disagreements with good-faith conservatives as part of that conversation.

But the more I think about it, the more I think sensible, decent people are going to have to brace themselves for a serious storm of resentment-driven insanity, especially on cable television, but also in the print media. Ignoring this is simply not going to be an option. Even though the crazy talk will not be, for the moment, coming from the mouths of the powerful or their proxies, it will be aimed squarely at destroying anything constructive that the Democrats attempt to accomplish. Its electoral setbacks mean that for the next two years at least, the right’s principal focus is going to have to be on shaping, as much as possible, the media’s presentation of the Obama administration.

This is important: Right now, aiming at the media and shaping public discourse as much as possible is all they’ve got. And we already know the basic strategy. You work hard to create an alternative reality on the fringes. You then present a slightly more moderate version of this, call it “moderate,” and then howl that it doesn’t get equal play in the media. When it does get play, you win. When it doesn’t, you strengthen your narrative of resentment. The degree of success in this venture is going to make an enormous difference to how much Obama is able to accomplish.

I do believe that the recent election opened an incredibly exciting space for substantive debate about political issues, but I also think that the most prominent part of American political discourse is about to get much, much uglier and stupider than it has been in my lifetime. I don’t have the time, the temperament, or the inclination for this kind of garbage clean up, but I’m very glad that other folks do.

The Newseum has a fun feature called Today’s Front Pages, the front pages of newspapers from around the US and the world. As of my posting this at 3 AM Eastern time Nov 5, it hasn’t yet ticked over to showing the Nov 5 papers, but maybe it will have by the time you read this. Here’s the link if you’re reading this after Nov 5 2008.

Right now the NYT home page has a tall all-caps OBAMA as its lone topline, then a smaller subhead below. I like this presentation best of the newspaper pages I’ve seen so far.

Another site that should have good stuff tomorrow: The Big Picture, the Boston Globe’s blog of giant-size photos.

My fellow prisoners, the end is near. Here are a few predictions.

Let’s start easy: Obama wins the presidency.

Of the close states, Obama wins Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado, Florida (by a whisker), but not North Carolina or Indiana.

Democrats get 57 seats in the Senate (not counting Lieberman, of course).

Obama doesn’t get assassinated any time in the next four years. (Attempts and woundings don’t count.)

McCain doesn’t run again. His health declines precipitously sometime within the next four years, provoking a collective shudder in the US (and the rest of the world), and setting forward a few years the age considered acceptable for a presidential candidate.

Sarah Palin does not become the Republican nominee for President in 2012. Neither does Guilliani.

North Korea attempts to back out of its non-proliferation agreement with the US within a few months. Result: Big fuss. Widely considered Obama’s first big test.

Some time in the next four years, North Korea suddenly collapses. Handling the fallout becomes a much more significant foreign policy priority for the Obama presidency than almost anyone expected.

US troop presence in Iraq is reduced quickly, but there are still at least 5,000 US troops in Iraq in 2012.

The Republican party bounces back surprisingly quickly.

The Obama Presidency becomes the best thing that has ever happened to Fox News. Fox News plays its role as Unofficial Opposition with great gusto and makes a ton of money doing so.

Here’s an easy one: The Bush team behaves in a deeply unprofessional way during the transition. The media’s response is disappointingly tepid.

Politics becomes interesting again. For eight long years, the country has been run by hateful, blinkered people. During this time, and especially over the last four years, politics has only been interesting because it involves issues vital to our lives and often to the fate of humanity. What’s been largely missing is a sense that an intelligent contribution to political discourse could ever have a meaningful impact on the people who actually make decisions. For all the disagreements among Obama supporters, I think that there’s going to be a real, and extremely refreshing sense, that political debate is an area in which intelligent, well-argued, evidence-backed contributions might conceivably sway reasonable people in positions in power. A lot of very smart people all over the country are going to find that wildly exhilarating. There’s an incredible amount of pent up energy, enthusiasm and ideas out there. May it make a difference.

It’s been a long, annoying ride, my friends, and right now we all just want it to be over. Looking back, I think this little clip sums up the entire campaign. It’s the contrast between someone who is, for all his imperfections, an adult talking to other adults in an adult fashion, and a glib, uninformed college kid struggling very unsuccessfully to fake her teaching assistant into thinking that she’s done the readings.

Good luck, Mr. Obama. You’re going to need it.

Gosh, it sure it nice to see Obama kicking McCain’s ass.

How’s he doing it? Well, no ass-kicking this serious has a single cause. McCain has run a campaign that seems almost designed to highlight his weaknesses, among them a lack of discipline and coherence. His basic campaign pitches are so stupid—Obama pals around with terrorists, Obama is a socialist—that they really amount to an insult to the intelligence of the voters he’s trying to woo. And, of course, there’s Palin, the gift to the Democrats that keeps on giving. On top of all this, the media smells blood, and has started to call the McCain camp out on some of its stupider stuff recently.

What else? Ah, let’s not forget the money. Obama has lots and lots of money. And he can spend it too, thanks to his decision to break his earlier promise about accepting public money in exchange for spending limits. It’s been widely remarked that this has given Obama a real advantage, though McCain’s camp is running such a crappy campaign that I’m not quite sure how decisive it is. Still, I’ll bet it’s made some difference, and perhaps quite a significant one.

This is an issue I’ve not been inclined to think about much recently. It’s been simply too sweet to watch McCain getting his ass kicked. And looking around at other blogs I see that other people seem to share my view. But seriously, can you imagine how we’d howl if our preferred candidate were being outspent by such a wide margin? After breaking a promise about accepting public funding?

I’m starting to think that fans of Obama should be more troubled by this than we are presently. For one thing, I think everyone now recognizes that the system of public financing is dead. This is bad. It certainly wasn’t a perfect system, but reforming it would surely have been preferable to seeing it die.

It also seems potentially bad from a long-term tactical point of view. It’s not as if the Democrats’ fund raising advantage is likely to remain a deep structural feature of American politics. (Is it? I’m just guessing.) So long as they make any pretense to look out for the less fortunate, the more fortunate are, all other things being equal, going to be giving more to the other side. Serious reform of campaign finances seems to me to be in the long term interests of any left-leaning political party.

And then there’s this, which the right-wingers are talking about a lot recently, and everybody else not so much. I’m not sure what to make of it, or whether there’s something left out of this story that I don’t know about. But it certainly doesn’t look good, and that matters too.

I’m so happy about Obama’s big lead right now that I have to really work to care about this issue. And of course I’m only letting myself care now that he has a wide lead. But I’m guessing that some time in the not-too-distant future, I’ll find that caring about campaign finance issues comes much more naturally.

Here’s a short video to watch (unless you are sick to death of US election stuff). It’s a take-off on a series of beer ads from several years ago which had a group of friends going “Wassup?” “Wazzzzzzuuuuuupppp?” to each other on the phone.

Wassup 2008

Keep watching to the end.