Same-sex marriage has made its way to the West Coast:

OLYMPIA, Wash. — Gov. Chris Gregoire has signed into law a bill that legalizes gay marriage in Washington state, making it the nation’s seventh to allow gay and lesbian couples to wed.

It’s a historic moment, but same-sex couples can’t walk down the aisle just yet.

The law takes effect June 7, but opponents are already mounting challenges on multiple fronts.
Opponents planned to file a challenge Monday that could put the law on hold pending the outcome of a November vote.

Separately, an initiative was filed at the beginning of the session that opponents of gay marriage say could lead to the new law being overturned.

Gregoire signed the bill Monday morning. It passed the House on Wednesday, a week after Senate approval.

After Gregoire announced her support earlier this year, it was largely inevitable that this would become law. As for the proposed initiative, last week’s ruling from the 9th Circuit with regard to Proposition 8 in California would suggest that such a move would be unconstitutional.

When Congress and the President finally reached a debt ceiling deal at the last minute back in August, the intention was that we would not have to relive the showdown we saw throughout the Summer of 2011 again before the 2012 elections. Now, however, it appears that there is  a growing concern on Capitol Hill that we could have to deal with debt ceiling concerns before the Presidential election in November:

Last year’s torturous congressional debate over raising the federal debt ceiling eventually resulted in a deal that President Barack Obama and congressional leaders believed would keep the federal government funded through the 2012 elections. Not so fast.

In what one top congressional aide calls a “nightmare scenario,” the federal government could wind up hitting the debt ceiling at the height of the presidential campaign. The Treasury Department is now contemplating the prospect of invoking “extraordinary measures” to keep the government funded through November.

Barring a major economic shock — a financial meltdown in Europe, for instance — the emergency measures should be enough to get the federal government past the election. But even under a rosy scenario, the next Congress will be forced to raise the debt ceiling as one of its first orders of business in 2013, if the lame duck outgoing body doesn’t do it. And if the Treasury does have to invoke “extraordinary measures” before the election, it’s easy to imagine a re-run of last year’s political circus, magnified many times over.

There are several reasons why the projections in August that the deal would be sufficient to get the nation past the 2012 elections may turn out to be wrong. The failure of the Super Committee means that several trillion dollars in expected long term deficit reduction are off the table, for one thing. For another, the extension of the Payroll Tax Cut, even with offsets, would still require the Federal Government to borrow money, thus adding to the total debt. And finally, there’s the fact that economic growth is not what analysts expected it to be back in August:

At the time Congress cut the debt ceiling deal, OMB expected real gross domestic product growth of 2.7 percent and an average interest rate on 10-year Treasury bills of 3 percent for 2011. For 2012, the office expected GDP growth of 3.6 percent and interest rates of 3.6 percent. That resulted in expected tax revenue of $2.2 trillion for 2011 and $2.6 trillion for 2012.

Growth missed the 2011 target, with OMB now expecting final 2011 growth of just 1.6 percent, more than 40 percent below the predictions, according to new data published on Tuesday. OMB has now downgraded its 2012 growth projections from 3.6 percent to just 2 percent, a 44 percent decrease.

Lower growth translates to less tax revenue from income and corporate profit. Lower tax revenue means a bigger deficit, which calls into question whether the debt deal from August will prevent the government from hitting the debt limit before November.

The good news, to the extent there is any, is that interest rates on new debt remain historically low so borrowing costs have not increased, although it’s unclear how long that will be the case if we continue to play games like this with the full faith and credit with the United States.

A debt ceiling fight right before an election would likely be a disaster. As I noted when we saw this last year, voting to increase the debt ceiling is the one vote that no member of Congress really wants to cast because it lays bare the Federal Government’s fiscal problems, and because it is easy for a political opponent to demagogue.  Explaining why voting to increase the debt ceiling is, in reality, a fiscally responsible move because it means authorizing the government to pay for things that Congress has already authorized is hard. Denouncing a Congressman or Senator for voting to “raise the debt” is very, very easy and you can guarantee that this is exactly what we’d see in the event Congress had to vote on this issue before November. The debt kamikazes would be back in full force, and the world would be sitting back and watching while the United States argued down to the wire over an issue that shouldn’t even be in doubt.

Even if we manage to avoid a necessary Congressional vote before November, though, things are unlikely to be pretty. If Treasury has to start doing what it did last year to avoid the day of reckoning we’ll see the same rhetoric we did last time around. More importantly, though, whether it happens before the September elections or not, we’re going to have to deal with this issue again sooner rather than later either in a December 2012 lame duck session, or when the 113th Congress convenes next January. Whenever it happens, I doubt it will be handled any more responsibly than it was last year.

Ezra Klein notes that one of the items in the President’s new budget includes giving the U.S. Mint the authority to explore the use of cheaper metals in U.S. coinage. That’s a good thing, because we’re apparently losing money on at least two of them:

The Mint’s primary cost driver is the price of metal, a factor over which it has no control. Daily spot prices of copper and zinc, the Mint’s two main metallic materials, have fluctuated in excess of 400 percent, and the price of nickel by 500 percent over the past 10 years. This contributes to volatile and negative margins on both the penny and nickel: recently, the penny has cost approximately 2.4 cents, and the nickel approximately 11.2 cents to produce.

There are other options, of course, including eliminating coins like the penny entirely, but this seems like a good, albeit ultimately temporary, idea.

No.

The deaths of more than 25,000 children in the Somalian famine and brutality cannot but provoke intense sadness.

The ongoing enslavement of 27 million people worldwide, many of them women and girls in sexual bondage, cannot but provoke intense sadness.

The bloody repression in Syria cannot but provoke intense sadness.

(They would also provoke intense anger, but Andrew’s statement isn’t limited to sadness).

Cue George Will, from 1997, on the reactions to Princess Diana’s death:

When it is the celebrity of the deceased that triggers behavior that gets identified as “grief” and “suffering,” what words remain to describe what occurs in, say, a pediatric oncology ward?

Enough.  She had a great voice.  She sang some really silly songs.  She destroyed herself, with an assist entertainment industry culture.  That is all.

This is . . . nonsense.

Now, it’s true that I didn’t much give a damn when Diana Spencer was killed in a car crash. And, while I thought the passing of Whitney Houston not only noteworthy but “A tragic waste,” I can’t claim to have been overly broken up about it. It’s sad when young people die but it happens all the time and I don’t get particularly upset about it unless there’s some personal connection.

But people feel sometimes feel intense connections to celebrities. We can feel that we “know” athletes, entertainers, politicians, and others that we’ve followed, rooted for, or whatnot over a period of time and feel a genuine sense of loss when they’re gone.

In his tribute to Houston, Andrew writes, “ don’t know what to say except that I came out to her in her heyday. ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ was my disco favorite back when I went out every weekend in my 20s, and it felt weirdly liberational.” That’s a meaningful connection at a particularly formative period in his life–particularly, one imagines, for a young gay man in an era where being openly gay made him a pariah in his own conservative, Catholic circles. Surely, he’s entitled to “intense sadness” over her death at a young age. (Indeed, if their Wikipedia entries are correct, Houston was born but a day before him.)

House Republicans are now offering to extend the Payroll Tax Cut without offsetting spending cuts or tax increases, which has been the issue holding up an extension since December:

Feb. 13 (Bloomberg) — Congressional Republicans are offering to drop their demand to finance a 10-month extension of the payroll tax cut with spending reductions, three aides of both parties who are familiar with the talks said today.

The Republican proposal reflects the desire to avoid being blamed for an impasse, as they were for a breakdown in talks that almost caused the tax break to expire at the end of December, said one of the staffers, a Republican leadership aide who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Democrats have proposed a surtax on the income of those earning more than $1 million a year. The Republicans’ proposal is an attempt to defuse the tax issue, the Republican aide said.

This offer doesn’t include the extension of unemployment benefits, which would still have to be paid for in some way, but it’s an interesting offer politically since it essentially puts the ball firmly in the Democrats court.

Here’s the statement from the House GOP:

“We support the work of our conference negotiators and continue to support a responsible resolution that extends current payroll tax relief, reforms and extends unemployment insurance, and includes a Medicare ‘doc fix.’  Republicans have attempted to reach an agreement and negotiated in good faith for months, and we will continue to do so.  Unfortunately, to date, Democrats have refused virtually every spending cut proposed – insisting instead on job-threatening tax hikes on small business job creators – and with respect to the need for an extension of the payroll tax cut, time is running short.

“Because the president and Senate Democratic leaders have not allowed their conferees to support a responsible bipartisan agreement, today House Republicans will introduce a backup plan that would simply extend the payroll tax holiday for the remainder of the year while the conference negotiations continue regarding offsets, unemployment insurance, and the ‘doc fix.’  If Democrats continue to refuse to negotiate in good faith, Republicans may schedule this measure for House consideration later this week pending a conversation with our members.  Democrats’ refusal to agree to any spending cuts in the conference committee has made it necessary for us to prepare this fallback option to protect small business job creators and ensure taxes don’t go up on middle class workers.

“This is not our first choice.  Our goal is to reach a responsible agreement in conference.  But in the face of the Democrats’ stonewalling and obstructionism, we are prepared to act to protect small businesses and our economy from the consequences of Washington Democrats’ political games.”

Leaving aside the partisan rhetoric, which is to be expected, it does put the Democrats in an interesting position vis a vis the Payroll Tax Cut.

Four years ago, Mitt Romney won the Michigan Republican Primary quite handily. It wasn’t really a surprise, of course, since Romney’s father had been Governor there back in the day and Michigan was considered as much “Romney Country” as Massachusetts was even though he hadn’t lived there in many years. According to a new poll from Public Policy Polling, though, Romney has fallen behind Rick Santorum and is now trailing in what most people thought would be an easy end-of-the-month win for him:

Rick Santorum’s taken a large lead in Michigan’s upcoming Republican primary. He’s at 39% to 24% for Mitt Romney, 12% for Ron Paul, and 11% for Newt Gingrich.

Santorum’s rise is attributable to two major factors: his own personal popularity (a stellar 67/23 favorability) and GOP voters increasingly souring on Gingrich.  Santorum’s becoming something closer and closer to a consensus conservative candidate as Gingrich bleeds support.

Santorum’s winning an outright majority of the Tea Party vote with 53% to 22% for Romney and 10% for Gingrich. He comes close to one with Evangelicals as well at 48% to 20% for Romney and 12% for Gingrich. And he cracks the 50% line with voters identifying as ‘very conservative’ at 51% to 20% for Romney and 10% for Gingrich.

Santorum’s benefiting from the open nature of Michigan’s primary as well. He’s only up by 12 points with actual Republican voters, but he has a 40-21 advantage with the Democrats and independents planning to vote that pushes his overall lead up to 15 points. Santorum is winning by a healthy margin in every region of the state except for Oakland County, where Romney has a 40-26 advantage, and the area around Lansing where Paul actually has an advantage at 30% to 27% for both Romney and Santorum.

(…)

Michigan is perceived as a state where Romney really has a home field advantage, but only 26% of primary voters actually consider him to be a Michigander while 62% do not. Only 39% have a favorable opinion of George Romney with a 46% plurality having no opinion about him.  Romney really doesn’t have some great reservoir of goodwill in Michigan to fall back on. Only 49% of voters have a favorable opinion of him to 39% with a negative one. That’s down a net 28 points from our last poll of Michigan in July when he was at +38 (61/23).

For all that, Santorum probably shouldn’t get too comfortable. There is a lot of potential for fluidity in the Michigan race, with only 47% of voters saying they’re strongly committed to their candidate while 53% are open to changing their minds in the next two weeks.

Thanks to that last statistic, you can expect that the race in the Wolverine State will get a lot more heated over the next 15 days. Most likely, Romney will attempt something similar against Santorum to what helped win him Florida two weeks ago; a relentlessly negative media saturation campaign. The problem for the Romney campaign is that it seems to be more difficult to run a negative campaign against Santorum than it was against Gingrich. Say what you will about him, but Santorum at least comes across as a likeable person and doesn’t have nearly the amount of baggage that Santorum did. That said, there is plenty in Santorum’s own record to call his fiscal conservative bona fides into doubt so, I’m sure the Romney campaign will give it try. What I’m not sure of if it’s going to work like it did in Florida. This much I am sure of, though. If Mitt Romney happens to lose Michigan it’s going to be a pretty devastating blow to the electability argument, which is all Romney really has in the end.

It’s worth noting, of course, that there’s a possibility that this poll is an outlier. Up until now, all previous polling in Michigan showed Romney with a comfortable lead. There is a poll from ARG out this morning that also shows Santorum leading, but ARG’s polling hasn’t been all that reliable so I’m not going to count that as corroboration of the PPP results just yet. Nonetheless, Romney possibly trailing in Michigan is big news and the next two weeks should be very interesting.

Slate recycles an old Explainer piece on “What Makes Toxicology So Slow?”

The piece was published a couple years back on the occasion of the death of Kanye West’s mother and is being renewed in the wake of Whitney Houston’s untimely death. Those who grew up on TV shows where forensics experts establish a cause of death in 15 minutes are shocked to learn that it takes several weeks–if not months–to get back a simple toxicology report in real life.

The answer is that, in real life, there are multiple cases going on simultaneously and very limited staff and lab resources to handle them.

Because there’s a backlog. Analysts typically work on multiple cases at the same time, and they’re always behind schedule due to staff shortages. For example: The 20-person team at the Washington state toxicology lab, which will handle the Tamayo-Fajaro screening, handles approximately 10,000 cases per year. To make matters worse, toxicologists often serve two masters; when they’re not in the lab, they’re at court offering expert testimony. In Washington state, lab scientists may spend as much as two days a week on the witness stand while their blood samples languish in a refrigerator.

Thorough tox reports require lots of effort. First off, labs try to collect at least 25 mL of heart blood, 10 mL of peripheral blood, and 50-gram tissue samples from the subject’s brain, liver, and kidney. An analyst then carries out an alcohol screening and a generalized immunoassay test, which can detect broad-based drug groups like opiates or tranquillizers. In the event of a positive drug test, the analyst must complete a confirmation procedure, designed to ferret out the exact nature of the offending substance. Next, a supervisor reviews the analyst’s report and either approves the conclusions or requests more tests. This whole process, barring glitches or lengthy tests for hard-to-detect drugs like neuromuscular blockers, could take just a couple of days ifanalysts were able to devote themselves exclusively to a well-preserved specimen. (They rarely get this opportunity.)

Not every case proceeds up the lengthy toxicology queue in the same amount of time. Labs handle screening requests for living as well as deceased subjects, and the living get first priority. Some evidence gets rushed to the top of the list because of an upcoming court date or because it might shed light on an ongoing investigation.

I’m currently caught in this backlog following the death of my wife over the Thanksgiving weekend. It’s been ten weeks now and I’m still waiting.

Aside from the obvious closure issues, there’s a huge practical effect to this backlog: Without a completed toxicology report, there is no final death certificate. Without a final death certificate, insurance companies won’t pay off on life insurance policies. Indeed, they won’t even start processing the claim without one.

In my own case, I’m fortunate enough to be making a decent living and to have accumulated a decent amount of savings. But for a stay-at-home parent who has lost their breadwinner–or even a struggling family who lived paycheck to paycheck and depending on both partners bringing in money every two weeks–this inordinate wait can be financially devastating. People are surely losing their homes, having cars repossessed, and ruining their credit ratings trying to get by in the meantime.

Given that this is a problem created by government, it’s one that has to be solved by government. The most obvious–but prohibitively expensive–solution is to radically ramp up the government’s capacity to do toxicology analysis. A related–but probably even more expensive–solution would be to outsource the job to private industry. The cheapest solution would be to mandate that insurance pay off based on the preliminary death certificate absent strong reason to suspect suicide or foul play.

Laboratory glassware image via Shutterstock

It was just two weeks ago that Newt Gingrich was saying publicly that Rick Santorum should drop out of the race. Of course, that was before Gingrich’s own campaign went into a seemingly tailspin while Santorum enjoyed a renaissance that was most recently capped off with a sweep of three largely inconsequential, yet momentum-boosting, races last Tuesday, Now the Editors of National Review are telling Newt Gingrich it’s time to go:

At the moment Rick Santorum appears to be overtaking Newt Gingrich as the principal challenger to Mitt Romney. Santorum has won more contests than Gingrich (who has won only one), has more delegates, and leads him in the polls. In at least one poll, he also leads Romney. It isn’t yet a Romney-Santorum contest, but it could be headed that way.

We hope so. Gingrich’s verbal and intellectual talents should make him a resource for any future Republican president. But it would be a grave mistake for the party to make someone with such poor judgment and persistent unpopularity its presidential nominee. It is not clear whether Gingrich remains in the race because he still believes he could become president next year or because he wants to avenge his wounded pride: an ambiguity that suggests the problem with him as a leader. When he led Santorum in the polls, he urged the Pennsylvanian to leave the race. On his own arguments the proper course for him now is to endorse Santorum and exit.

The NR editorial board hasn’t been entirely sympathetic to Newt during this election cycle to begin with, their position being epitomized perhaps best by a scathing editorial back in December. Nonetheless, they are largely correct here. With money apparently drying up and Santorum having the advantage of actually being likeable, the path to anything but irrelevance for Gingrich seems hard to find. The longer he stays in the race, the longer he drags out the inevitable while simultaneously risking ticking off conservatives who have been generally supportive of him over the years.

It strikes me that Gingrich is unlikely to heed this advice regardless of where it comes from, largely because he may feel he has nothing left to lose. No matter what happens in the next few months, this is likely Gingrich’s last foray onto the public stage as a candidate and most assuredly his only and last run for the Presidency. He may believe that all he needs to do is go back to his strategy of late 2011 and things will turn around for him. He may think that once the debates start back up he’ll start wowing the crowds again. He may think that his strategy of waiting until Super Tuesday and the primaries in the south that follow will be the ticket to getting him back into the race. Or, he may just be doing all of this for sheer ego.

What seems unlikely is that Newt Gingrich is simply going to step aside and let himself be eclipsed by the likes of Rick Santorum. That just doesn’t strike me as a Gingrich-ian move. He’s more likely to stay in the race as long as he can, drawing off votes, donations, and supporters, and tossing verbal grenades into the race that cause problems for both Romney and Santorum. In other words, he’s going to be Newt Gingrich. Something that nobody should be surprised about in the end.

H/T: Rick Moran

I went to Crooked Timber to see if Henry Farrell had written anything interesting about the Greek riots (he hadn’t; or even anything uninteresting) and stumbled upon a recent post by Michael Bérubé, newly installed president of the Modern Language Association, and that organization’s push for improving the plight of adjunct professors.

The outlines of the proposal:

Following a review of best practices in various institutions, the MLA recommends minimum compensation for 2011-12 of $6,800 for a standard 3-credit-hour semester course or $4,530 for a standard 3-credit-hour quarter or trimester course. These recommendations are based on a full-time load of 3 courses per semester (6 per year) or 3 courses per quarter or trimester (9 per year); annual full-time equivalent thus falls in a range of $40,770 to $40,800.

UGA adjunct writing instructor Josh Boldt, not surprisingly, loves the idea:

I personally have taught at schools that pay right at or below $2000 maximum per course. Feel free to do the math on that one (Hint: a 5/5 pays $20,000 annually). You can be a terrible human being and still recognize that a full-time teacher should earn much more than that. Just in case you’re not familiar with the usual procedure, full-time professors generally teach much less than 10 courses per year. Some teach as few as three. The MLA’s recommendation is based on the assumption of a 3/3 teaching load, which sounds about perfect. I would venture to say most adjuncts would agree. Three courses per semester is ideal because it allows teaching to be the primary focus (as it should be), and it also permits some time for research and professional development. So, about $40,000 a year. That isn’t too much to ask I don’t think. Especially considering all adjuncts have advanced degrees in their fields.

Bérubé responds,

It is not too much to ask. We think it’s the bare minimum: it certainly doesn’t constitute making a comfortable living. It merely allows NTT faculty a standard of living a bit higher than the one Boldt references later on in this post, in which college professors “eat Ramen noodles for dinner, and worry about whether or not they have enough gas in the tank to coast to work the rest of the week.”

He’s pushing an effort by something called the Coalition on the Academic Workforce to gather and publicize data on what various institutions around the country pay adjuncts, apparently in the hopes that doing so will shame the worst offenders and encourage a race to the top.

Not only does this elide the fact that  strong market forces–a glut of PhDs in English and some other fields who can’t find tenure track jobs and are thus desperate to build a CV in hopes of improving their odds–push adjunct salaries down but it’s based on absurdly idealized view of what life is like for most full-time academics.

With few exceptions, colleges and universities have been facing severe budget pressures for the better part of two decades. One presumes that the ongoing global recession has added to that. It’s just absurd to expect them to double or triple the pay for adjunct faculty–especially when there are likely half a dozen highly qualified applicants for every adjunct opening at current prices.

Additionally, having spent all of my brief teaching career in institutions where a 4/4 load (that is, four classes per semester) was standard for tenure track faculty, I have to chuckle at the notion that adjuncts ought to be able to make a decent living teaching a 3/3 load while having zero obligation for institutional service.

Additionally, it’s aimed in exactly the wrong direction. The problem isn’t that adjuncts don’t make enough money but that colleges employ far too many adjuncts rather than hiring full time faculty. While I suppose raising the pay of full-time adjuncts to that of tenure-track faculty would indirectly lead us in that direction, it’s emphasizing the wrong problem.

Is it exploitative that people with some 21 years of education are being paid $2000 for teaching college courses? Perhaps. But, hey, they knew the risks when the went off to grad school. The real crime is that students are paying ever increasing tuition to attend institutions of higher education and then being taught by part-timers with no commitment to the institution and whose prime focus is on landing a job somewhere else.

Having a large part of a department’s workload performed by adjuncts simply reduces the academic quality of the institution. Aside from the lack of continuity and divided focus, there’s the lack of academic freedom. Adjuncts being hired on a course-by-course basis aren’t going to risk their Ramen money by being controversial. So, the adjunctification of the university also contributes to the sense that it’s just the 13th Grade.

The ideal model for adjuncts is not the unsuccessful academic who’s not attractive to tenure track hiring committees but rather successful professionals who can teach a specialized course here and there. And those people really aren’t doing it for the money but for the chance to give back to the community and interact with students.

Reuters

Winners will be announced Thursday PM

Resolving this crisis has taken years, and there’s a reason: a debt crisis has never really been solved this way before.  Here’s Zoe Chace of NPR’s Planet Money team.

[...]

CHACE: Usually, it’s like this: the countries default on their loans – then we talk.

It struck me upon hearing this that yes, that’s true.  The immediate example to me was Mexico in the early 1980s (and then several other Latin American cases that followed suit):  the countries in question basically came out and said one day:  we are suspending loan repayments because we cannot afford to keep paying.  This led to economic crisis (locally and regionally).  Then came the scramble to fix the problem which eventually led to structural adjustment of economies under the auspices of international lending institutions.

The Greek case is different:  instead of going off the cliff and then sending in the rescue crews, the goal here is to find a way to stop form going over the cliff.

Of course, this approach is driven by the fact that Greece is not only in the EU, but part of the Eurozone.   Its partners have every reason to avoid being dragged off the cliff too.

Greece’s parliament has passed a controversial package of austerity measures, demanded by the eurozone and IMF in return for a 130bn-euro ($170bn; £110bn) bailout to avoid default.

[...]

The austerity measures include:

• 15,000 public-sector job cuts
• liberalisation of labour laws
• lowering the minimum wage by 20% from 751 euros a month to 600 euros
• negotiating a debt write-off with banks.

Meanwhile,

The vote came amid some of the worst violence seen in Greece in years.

Protesters outside parliament threw stones and petrol bombs, and police fired tear gas. Several people were injured and buildings were set on fire.

Not only was their rebellion in the streets, but also inside parliament:  “Coalition parties expelled over 40 deputies for failing to back the bill.”

His thesis:

I’ve argued that maybe we need a third party to break open our political system. But that’s a long shot. What we definitely and urgently need is a second party — a coherent Republican opposition that is offering constructive conservative proposals on the key issues and is ready for strategic compromises to advance its interests and those of the country.

This is, I think, a reasonable request as at the moment it does not seem that the Republican, as a coherent political collective, it especially interested in governing.  This is problematic because the nature of our system, one of separated powers and checks and balance, requires some degree of cooperation if governing is to take place.  This fact is further emphasized by the nature of the rules of the Senate.

Friedman focuses on three areas: globalization, debt and entitlements, and energy.

On globalization he is partially doing his Friedman thing, which is make bold assertions that ultimately sound interesting but at ultimately are more glittering phrases than useful analysis, i.e., “This is a world in which there will be no more “developed” and “developing countries,” but only HIEs (high-imagination-enabling countries) and LIEs (low-imagination-enabling countries).”  This leads to a similarly good-sounding but largely void formulation:  “We need strong government, but limited government, which enables our companies and individuals to compete globally.”

However, on debt and entitlements he hits the nail on the head:

The second of our great long-term challenges are our huge debt and entitlement obligations. They can’t be fixed without raising and reforming taxes and trimming entitlements and defense. We absolutely cannot just cut entitlements and defense. That would imperil the personal security and national security of every American. We must also reform taxes to raise more revenues.

But when all the Republican candidates last year said they would not accept a deal with Democrats that involved even $1 in tax increases in return for $10 in spending cuts, the G.O.P. cut itself off from reality. It became a radical party, not a conservative one. And for the candidates to wrap themselves in a cartoon version of Ronald Reagan — a real conservative who raised taxes, including the gasoline tax, when he discovered his own cuts had gone too far — is fraudulent.

This is simply true:  serious efforts are needed and pretending like cuts alone will fix the problem is simply wishful thinking (at best).  Likewise, “cartoon” Reagan is about right.

On energy he is likewise right when he states “can’t drill our way out of” the problem.  It sounds nice, but it ignores reality—this is especially true with, as he notes, “7 billion to 9 billion people by 2050, and more and more of them want to drive, eat and live like Americans.”

Fundamentally, the conclusion is spot on:

Until the G.O.P. stops being radical and returns to being conservative, it won’t provide what the country needs most now — competition — competition with Democrats on the issues that will determine whether we thrive in the 21st century. We need to hear conservative fiscal policies, energy policies, immigration policies and public-private partnership concepts — not radical ones. Would somebody please restore our second party? The country is starved for a grown-up debate.

Such competition is needed and is such a debate.  We aren’t getting such at the moment.  And yes, as some will no doubt state, the Democrats are far from perfect.  This is not a post about the virtues of the Democratic Party and it should not be interpreted as such.  It is, however, about the copious vices of the GOP.

An illustration from the piece:

Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government.

[...]

He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region’s long-serving Democratic congressman.

Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.

Now, on the one hand, the programs (EITC, free meals at school, etc.) exist and one can argue that one has the right to take what one can get regardless of philosophical objections.  One the other hand, however, there is a something deeply problematic about what appears to be (both in this specific case, as well as within the general politics of this topic) a serious contradiction in position v. alleged political preferences (or, perhaps even more likely, a profound misunderstanding of these policies in the first place).

Back to the specifics of this example:  Gulbranson is a small businessman, the very definition of entrepreneurial America and hence a “maker” and yet he also is taking free meals for his kids at school, amongst other things, which makes him a proverbial “taker,” yes?  (So much for easy dichotomies in the real world).

In fairness, Gulbranson did say the following in the interview:

Their difficulties, Mr. Gulbranson said, have made it hard to imagine asking anyone to pay higher taxes.

“I don’t think most people could bear to pay more,” he said.

Instead, he said he would rather give up the earned-income credit the family now receives and start paying for school lunches for his children.

“I don’t demand that the government does this for me,” he said. “I don’t feel like I need the government.”

How about Social Security? And Medicare? Can he imagine retiring without government help?

“I don’t think so,” he said. “No. I don’t know. Not the way we expect to live as Americans.”

But, of course, even if we eliminate school meals and the EITC, the major social spending by the federal government is Social Security and Medicare.   Any discussion about the size of government has to address this fact.  Further, these are programs that only work with some substantial amount of redistribution.  To wit:

A woman who was 45 in 2010, earning $43,500 a year, will pay taxes that will reach a value of $87,000 by the time she retires, assuming the money is invested at an annual interest rate 2 percentage points above inflation, according to the Urban Institute analysis. But on average, the government will then spend $275,000 on her medical care. The average is somewhat lower for men, because women live longer.

Medicare is often described as an insurance program, but its premiums are not nearly high enough. In simple terms, Americans are getting more than they pay for.

So, again:  if the Tea Party is serious about less government and even lower taxes, then this issues has to be addressed far more head on than has been the case.  And such an addressing has to deal with the fact that either we have to pay more in taxes, severely cut benefits, or some mix.  Simplistic calls for limited government are just that, simplistic.

One response to the column was by Tom Maguire (and who was quote favorably by the aforementioned Reynolds), who asked:

Wait – Medicare is now a “safety net” program? I thought that,like Social Security, it was an earned benefit – we all paid our taxes, and we are all eligible.  Medicaid is means-tested; Medicare is not.

Now, the distinction he appears to be making is that only non-universal programs are “safety net” programs.  However, this is not the case.

First, I would counter his assertion by stating just because a program is universal does not mean that it does not constitute part of the safety net.  A key rationale for both Social Security and Medicare was to prevent the occurrence of poverty amongst the elderly.  Indeed, as I noted not that long ago, there is a correlation between Social Security and the diminution of poverty amongst the elderly.  As such, these programs are very clearly part of the safety net, even if not all partakers of the policies use them to avoid poverty.  Indeed, one suspects that the vast majority of recipients would be risking poverty without these programs (and certainly a substantial number would not have anywhere near to adequate medical coverage—a situation leading either to an earlier death and/or bankruptcy).

Second, the article is about the fact that many persons who are not poor rely on various social programs despite the fact that they are political inclined to inveigh against government spending.  The issue is, therefore, about contradictory politics regardless of whether the programs are universal or targeted in some way.

Third, even if the policies in question are universal, this does not mean that each recipient received back simply what was paid in.  Quite the contrary:  even people well ensconced in the middle class will receive more in benefits than they paid in.

Maguire also asserts “the Democrats have long wanted to deliver middle-class entitlements paid for by “the rich”, because that is where the votes are” ( a point he hopes to return to).  This is, of course, a central theme of many who criticize these program and who call for limited government in general (it also asserts a political conspiracy of a sort that makes the situation sound like some sort of master plan to ensnare the public).  However, I would note, that the examples in the NYT undercut that assertion.  And yes, anecdotes are not data.   However, we know from survey research that there are a large number of people who both support these programs yet vote for politicians who seek to either cut and/or underfund said programs.  In other words, if voting was really about material benefits, we would see very different voting patterns than we do.

Indeed, the NYT piece addresses this issue to a degree:

One of the oldest criticisms of democracy is that the people will inevitably drain the treasury by demanding more spending than taxes. The theory is that citizens who get more than they pay for will vote for politicians who promise to increase spending.

This is correct:  the ancient Greeks criticized democracy (as they defined it**) as nothing more than rule by the poor who would eventually tear done society.  However, reality ends up being a lot more complicated.  As noted, voting preferences end up being more complex than this notion suggests.  One simple fact illustrates this:  citizens do not vote solely on class lines.

Further, ss the article notes:

Dean P. Lacy, a professor of political science at Dartmouth College, has identified a twist on that theme in American politics over the last generation. Support for Republican candidates, who generally promise to cut government spending, has increased since 1980 in states where the federal government spends more than it collects. The greater the dependence, the greater the support for Republican candidates.

Conversely, states that pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits tend to support Democratic candidates. And Professor Lacy found that the pattern could not be explained by demographics or social issues.

Now, granted, the red state/blue state dichotomy is problematic from an analytical point of view because it makes it sound as if states contain only one type of person, which is not the case.  Still, there is a disconnect here that is rather profound.  For example:  deep red southern states often contain a lot of people decrying the federal government and federal spending but seem to ignore the degree to which their own state economies rely upon and benefit from federal spending.

To be clear:  I think that there is a legitimate debate to be had over these policies.   However, I don’t think that an honest, legitimate debate can be had until there is a real understanding of what government actually does.  This has been an ongoing theme for me, and probably is, to me, the most significant fundamental issue for the improvement of our political debate. So,we can debate about the appropriate scope of government: what it should do and how it should be paid for, but to do so we have to fundamentally honest about what government does in reality right now as well as the ramifications of specific changes.  And yet, it does not seem that, in the main, we are anywhere near this kind of conversation.  Instead we get silly maker/taker, 53%/47%, etc. dichotomizations or simplistic appeals to “rugged individualism” that utterly eschew reality.

A side note:  this also gets mixed up in a simplistic dependency/liberty dichotomy (as exemplified by Heritage’s Index of Dependence and that is the hallmark of Ron Paul speeches).  Much could be said on this, but I would suggest that sometimes “dependence” (if defined solely as receiving a government benefit of some kind) can lead to the ability to have more personal liberty.  If I am a retiree who receives Social Security and Medicare to a sufficient level that I can afford to live on my own rather than having to turn to the charity of family, do I not have more liberty than I otherwise would have had?  If I am a parent of school age children, do I not, ultimately have more personal liberty if I have public schools where I can send my children to be educated?  Indeed, as an individual, is not a substantial amount of my personal liberty shaped heavily by the education I received, which is often the result of depending on government in multiple ways?  That is:  public K-12 (free to me) and then public university (subsidized) and perhaps paid for in some way via federal programs, e.g., Pell Grants, the GI Bill, student loans, etc.).  Without those things to depend upon, how much control over my life (i.e., liberty) would I have had?

I am not saying that this programs are perfect, that they must maintain their current funding levels, or that there is no room for alternatives.   I am saying, however, that we have a choice to make before we can have efficacious discourse.  That choice is between ideology/propaganda and reality.  And the reality has to reflective not just the downside of government, but the upside as well (and, indeed, it is an upside that we all enjoy more than we seem willing to admit).

*For anyone unclear on why I am using this specific language, please see the linked post and the Glenn Reynolds column I was discussing.

**Which isn’t really how we define in the modern era, but that’s a whole other conversation.