The Truth According to Mark

Obama the fiscal conservative?

2012-05-25T10:18:00.001-05:00

A column by Rex Nutting has been making the rounds. It shows conclusively that the Obama spending spree never happened and that Obama is actually a fiscal conservative who cut taxes and spending.

Huh?

So how did Nutting come up with his figures? He fudged them.

He began with a true statement, that the president takes office part-way into the fiscal year and he has limited influence over it. Obama's first year was an exception in many ways.

When fiscal year 2009 began, the Democrats wanted to increase spending. President Bush refused and threatened to veto any major increases. To keep government running, Congress passes a series of continuing spending resolutions. These kept the government running at 2008 funding levels. Soon after taking office, President Obama signed a new omnibus spending bill. This had all of the increases that Bush refused to approve. Nutting assigns these to Bush instead of Obama.

There is also the TARP. This was divided into two pieces. The first piece was to be spent before January 1, 2009. If it was not enough then the President could go to Congress to authorise the second half. Both parts were passed under Bush but he asked for the second half at Obama's request as a courtesy. The actual spending of the second half was totally under Obama's direction.

So that is several hundred billion in spending that Nutting attributed to Bush but should have gone to Obama.

There are other factors that distort these figures. Bush's biggest spending came in his last few months as a response to the international financial crisis. The bailouts and the TARP were unplanned and one-time occurrences (we hope). They inflate Bush's spending (especially the way that Nutting applied them). Anything following these special cases would look restrained.

Obama started his administration with an enormous stimulus. This also distorts spending, making it look like regular spending has gone down.

The biggest ticket item for Obama is totally unaccounted for - Obamacare. That is the biggest expansion in entitlement spending in a generation but the spending for it has not started yet so Nutting ignores it. Worse, some of the taxes to pay for it are already in place which temporarily reduces the deficit. These taxes will not actually pay for Obama care but by figuring the taxes over a ten year period and the costs over a seven year period, it looks like Obamacare is paid for.

Obama appears to be a fiscal conservative only because the emergency spending levels of 2008 and 2009 are unstastainable, not because Obama is a model of restraint.

UPDATE: Obama is using a version of this in his campaign speech. The AP's factchecker is not kind to it.

The MarketWatch study claims that spending is grown only 1.4 percent over 2010-2013, or annual increases averaging 0.4 percent over that period. Those are stunningly low figures considering that Obama rammed through Congress an $831 billion stimulus measure in early 2009 and presided over significant increases in annual spending by domestic agencies at the same time the cost of benefit programs like Social Security, Medicare and the Medicaid were ticking steadily higher.

A fairer calculation would give Obama much of the responsibility for an almost 10 percent budget boost in 2009, then a 13 percent increase over 2010-2013, or average annual growth of spending of just more than 3 percent over that period.

Two narrative

2012-05-24T13:35:00.001-05:00

Here is the original narrative of the Travon Martin shooting as represented by his parents and girl friend:

Travon was visiting his father's girl friend and had a desire for Skittles and a Coke so he walked to the convenience store. On the way back he was spotted by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighbourhood guardian. Zimmerman, who is white, had a suspicion of blacks, especially ones wearing hoodies, in his neighbourhood and made a 911 call while following Trevon. Trevon spotted Zimmerman and tried to lose him but Zimmerman left his truck and caught up with Trevon, overpowered the small teenager, and shot him. When the police showed up Zimmerman claimed that he had been attacked even though he did not show any injuries. The police had to let him go because of Florida's Stand and Defend law which tied their hands.

This incident led to nation-wide protests. Even the President entered the affair saying that if he had a son, he would look like Travon.

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Here is a more accurate narrative:

After being suspended from school for two weeks over graffiti and suspected drug use (confirmed by the autopsy), Travon was sent to stay with his father's girl friend to try to get his head straight. Even though he had visited there before, this was a punishment and everyone knew it. Wanting to spend some time on the phone with his girlfriend, Travon made a run to the convenience store but took the slow way back.

George Zimmerman, a man of mix race with a Brazilian mother and black grandmother, was on an errand when he noticed someone acting strange. The area had been hit by several break-ins by black youths wearing hoodies. This is a mixed-race neighbourhood so it was Travon's behavior, not his race that Zimmerman noticed.

A few months earlier Zimmerman had been asked to organize a neighbourhood watch. After a dog attack, Zimmerman acquired a gun and concealed carry permit and he had his gun holstered at his back.

Travon realised that he was being followed and, not knowing that this was the neighbourhood watch, tried to lose Zimmerman. He went down a sidewalk between buildings with no nearby street. Zimmerman started to follow but turned back at the 911 operator's instruction.

The two ran into each other. Travon, already mad at the world confronted the shorter man. Despite the old photographs his family had released, Travon had grown into a 6' 2" football player with tattoos and grills (gold teeth).

Zimmerman was not expecting any violence and never thought to reach for his gun. Instead he tried to run but Travon quickly tackled him, A moment later Travon was sitting on Zimmerman's chest, pummelling his face.

During the scuffle, Zimmerman's gun came loose. In fear of his life, Zimmerman seized it and shot Travon once in the chest.

When the police arrived they found Zimmerman beaten and bloody. His back was wet from being on his back. The only injuries on Travon were the bullet wound that killed him and abrasions to his knuckles.

Because the physical evidence and eyewitness accounts supported Zimmerman's story he was released without charges filed. After the incident became a national cause, a new prosecutor was appointed with the understanding that charges would be filed it at all possible.

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I based the second narrative mainly on public evidence. For motives, I used the best possible motives for each.

Running scared

2012-05-23T11:17:00.001-05:00

I saw a columnist point out that a sign of how close the presidential race is how quickly both sides have resorted to personal attacks, trying to disqualify the other. Romney is the challenger and it is always difficult to unseat a sitting president so we can expect him to be hitting hard. But what about Obama?

At first glance things don't look too bad for the President. The latest poll shows him ahead 49-46 although it is within the margin of error. The last two sitting presidents to be unseated faced primary opposition and Obama does not.

Things look worse beneath the surface. That most recent poll under sampled Republicans and over sampled Democrats. I am sure that the White House's internal polling does not make this mistake and they might well be showing Romney ahead.

Like Bush, Romney does not need to win the popular vote. He is pursuing a 3-2-1 strategy. This assumes that he can win all of the McCain states. He then has to flip three big states that usually vote Republican but went for Obama in 2008 plus the two swing states, Ohio and Florida. Finally, he has to pick up one additional state and it does not matter which one. Obama's support is centered in a few very large states so some big wins in those states coupled with tight races in Romney states could give Romney an electoral win.

Conventional wisdom is that primary challenges weakened Carter and Bush (41). I think that this gets things backwards. Those two presidents had primary challengers because they were already weak.

The Democrats have quashed any talk of a serious primary challenge to Obama but a few challengers have gotten on the ballot, anyway and they have been doing well. 41% of West Virginia Democrats voted for an out-of-state candidate currently in jail and 41% of Arkansas voters went for a Tennessee lawyer. "Undecided" got 42% of the vote in Kentucky. Even granting that these are protest votes by people who would not vote for Romney, they show a weak president.

A lot of Republicans are lukewarm on Romney as shown by the success of anyone-but-Romney candidates such as Santorum. The big question is which side is more motivated? Will significant numbers from each side "hold their nose and vote" or will they stay home?

The Obama campaign is trying to tarnish Romney. They are using the Saul Alinsky (and Karl Rove) method of attacking a candidate at his strongest point. The hope is to diminish Romney enough that his supporters will stay home rather than turnign out to vote. The fact that they have started this attack so early shows how desperate they are.

Romney has a long way to go to win the election but at this point he had the Obama people running scared.

About that TED Guy

2012-05-21T12:55:00.001-05:00

A video from the TED convention has been making the rounds. It features a man named Nick Hanauer making a case for raising taxes on the rich and on corporations and investing the money in ways that would help the middle class. The TED organizers decided that the talk was too political and did not release it but it made its way into the Internet. The Left loves it. It is similar to the Elizabeth Warren speech, both in its justification for more taxes and in its mistakes.

Both speeches deal with a stereotyped version of the real world. They talk as though the rich and corporations were not currently being taxed or were being taxed at an incredibly low rate. In reality, by some measures such as the proportion of the tax burden born by the wealthy, we have one of the world's highest tax rates. Our corporate tax rate is by far the highest in the world although it is riddled with exceptions. Even taking those into account, we are one of the highest. Hanauer and Warren fail to recognize this or to say what they think the tax rate should be, just that a higher rate would be preferable since it could be redistributed.

Hanauer starts with a strange concept - that employers do not create jobs, the middle class does.

That's why I can say with confidence that rich people don't create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is a "circle of life" like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist like me.

It is true that no one gets rich by offering a product that no one will buy, it is also true that consumers cannot buy a product that does not exist. Consumers cannot set anything in motion. First someone has to offer goods or services that people want. That is what starts the "virtuous cycle".

Hanauer also says:

Anyone who's ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalist's course of last resort, something we do only when increasing customer demand requires it. In this sense, calling ourselves job creators isn't just inaccurate, it's disingenuous.

It is Hanauer who is being disingenuous. There are a multitude of reasons for hiring people. Businesses hire people when they think that it will increase profits. Sometimes this is in response to increased demand. Sometimes it is because the business wants to enter a new market. They also hire in response to increased regulations. If regulations become too burdensome then the business might outsource jobs. Other times they might insource jobs that are more economical to do domestically.

Hanauer acts as if there is a direct relationship between demand and workforce. The relationship is more nuanced. Sometimes the cost of adding more employees is prohibitive. If an office only has room for 100 employees then the cost of adding the 101st employee includes acquiring new office space. If it takes fifteen workers and a factory line to produce a product then adding one or two workers will not improve production. The point here is that Hanauer is oversimplifying.

Hanauer also rewrites history:

[O]ur current policies are … upside down. When you have a tax system in which most of the exemptions and the lowest rates benefit the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.

Since 1980, the share of income for the richest Americans has more than tripled while effective tax rates have declined by close to 50%.

If it were true that lower tax rates and more wealth for the wealthy would lead to more job creation, then today we would be drowning in jobs. And yet unemployment and under-employment is at record highs.

From that statement you would never know that the 1980s and 1990s were the longest economic expansion in history and during much of that employment was at an all-time high and the unemployment rate was below the "full employment" rate of 5%. Hanauer is indicting a 30-year period on the basis of a four-year downturn and sluggish recovery. Instead of tarring the entire period, he should be looking at what was done differently 30 years ago which led to such a strong recovery.

Another reason this idea is so wrong-headed is that there can never be enough super-rich Americans to power a great economy. The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the median American, but we don't buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. Like everyone else, we go out to eat with friends and family only occasionally.

I can't buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans can't buy any new clothes or cars or enjoy any meals out. Or to make up for the decreasing consumption of the vast majority of American families that are barely squeaking by, buried by spiraling costs and trapped by stagnant or declining wages.

This only makes sense if you accept his premise that consumer spending is the only force in the economy so, by possessing money he is keeping it out of the hands of consumers who would be happily spending it.

This is just a wild guess but I doubt if his wealth is sitting around in a huge vault that he swims around in like Scrooge McDuck. I will bet that he has most of his money invested in businesses which hire people.

Here is where he really goes off the rails:

The extraordinary differential between a 15% tax rate on capital gains, dividends, and carried interest for capitalists, and the 35% top marginal rate on work for ordinary Americans is a privilege that is hard to justify without just a touch of deification.

That 35% top rate only applies to amounts above $388,350/year. For the last four years the Democrats have been insisting that anyone who makes more than $200,000/year ($250,000 for families) is rich but Hanauer calls them "ordinary American". Also, a lot of people who make less than that earn some amount of capital gains.

Here is his summary:

In a capitalist economy, the true job creators are consumers, the middle class. And taxing the rich to make investments that grow the middle class, is the single smartest thing we can do for the middle class, the poor and the rich.

This sounds good but it is terrible public policy. "Investments that grow the middle class" means spending on targeted constituencies. We just tried that with Obama's stimulus. Guess what? It didn't work. A review of spending by county shows that the money did not go to places where unemployment was highest, it went to places that had well-connected congressmen. This is known as "crony capitalism" and leads to all sorts of abuses. For an example, see the John Murtha Airport where a powerful congressman sent $150 million to a tiny airport. If we adopted Hanauer's proposals then this would be the future of our economy.

Campaign Obama

2012-05-17T12:07:00.001-05:00

Here's how the winning campaigns worked since 1988:

In 1988, the economy was doing well so the campaign centered on wedge issues - the Pledge of Allegiance, etc. Bush won by promising to continue Reagan's economic policies including no new taxes and by painting his opponent as being a typical tax and spend liberal.

In 1992, the economy was doing poorly. Clinton's winning campaign's motto was "It's the economy, stupid." Clinton painted Bush as being to out of touch to understand the economic issues facing typical Americans.

In 1996 Clinton was able to coast to reelection against Dole whose candidacy never caught on.

In 2000, Gore ran on a class warfare platform. He lost the election but won the popular vote.

In 2004, George W. Bush was able to paint his opponent as an out of touch rich guy.

The Obama campaign is using an "all of the above" strategy. They are trying hard to paint Romney as being rich and out of touch. They are also trying to remind us that he is "different". They also threw in some class warfare and some wedge issues.

To date, their approach is not working. Unlike Kerry who was born rich and married into money, Romney earned his fortune. Yes, his father was well-off by the time Romney went to high school but he worked his way up.

Attempts to remind us that Romney is "different" (code for Mormon) are doomed to failure. Romney may be from an exotic religion but he was raised in the country. Obama was raised in Indonesia by a Muslim step-father. That is why the "Obama ate dog" counter-attack was effective. No one really thinks that he acquired a taste for Lassie but it does remind us of how different Obama's upbringing was from most people's. Reminders that Romney's great-grandfather was a polygamist also flounder since the rejoinder is that Obama's grandfather was also a polygamist.

Gay marriage as a wedge issue also flopped. It helped Obama raise some campaign funds (or kept some contributors from closing their wallets) but more people are against it than for it.

Attacks on Bain Capitol are also risky since they let Romney talk about the jobs he created.

The class warfare (soak the rich) is more useful for energizing the base than for converting undecideds.

There are three modern campaigns that Obama cannot use as a model. His own 2008 campaign cannot be reproduced since he ran as a blank slate.

In 1980, Reagan won on the question, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" He repeated this in 1984 as part of his Morning in America campaign. The last thing Obama wants to do is remind people about the economy.

In the end, the Clinton campaign had it right - during an economic downturn it is all about the economy.

Just to be clear on where Obama stands

2012-05-14T12:58:00.001-05:00

Politifact recaps Obama's many positions on gay marriage and gave him a Full Flop.

When filling out a questionnaire in 1996 questionnaire, Obama said, "I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages."

In 1998 he was undecided.

In 2004 he said, "I am a fierce supporter of domestic-partnership and civil-union laws. I am not a supporter of gay marriage as it has been thrown about, primarily just as a strategic issue. I think that marriage, in the minds of a lot of voters, has a religious connotation. ..." He reaffirmed this in 2007.

In 2008 he said, "I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God's in the mix." and "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage."

In 2010 he said that his views were "evolving". Many gay activists took this as code words for "I'm for gay marriage but I am not ready to say so in public."

After Biden said on May 6 of this year that he was in favor of gay marriage, the White House issued a statement saying that the President's position had not changed and that Biden was talking out of turn. Gay activists began pressuring Obama to announce that he was in favor of gay marriage.

On May 8, North Carolina became the latest state to pass an anti-gay marriage/civil union constitutional amendment. Obama did not insert himself into the issue.

On May 9, Obama announced that he had changed positions and now favored gay marriage. A few days later he took in record amounts at a Hollywood fundraiser.

So, on May 7 when it might have made a difference to voters in North Carolina, Obama was against gay marriage but on May 9 with a fundraiser approaching, he changed his position while making it clear that he would not support any legislation.

So the only person who got any real benefit from the announcement was Obama, himself.

Just so you know where things stand.

The bullying smear

2012-05-11T10:30:00.001-05:00

Recently the Washington Post accused Mitt Romney of bullying a gay student in high school. The story was poorly researched and they were in such a rush to push it out that it first appeared in their on-line edition. Within hours it began to appear that they had gotten some facts wrong. This shows that the story was nothing but an attempt to contrast President Obama's about-face on gay marriage with Romney's supposed anti-gay history.

There are a couple of things about this story that bother me beyond the obvious attempt to smear Romney as violently anti-gay.

First, "bullying" has changed meaning in the last couple of years. Before then it was completely neutral. Jocks picked on nerds, the strong and popular picked on the weak and unpopular. See dozens of episodes of the Simpsons for examples. But in the last couple of years it has taken on a different meaning. The current anti-bullying campaign is mainly aimed at stopping bullying of gays. No one mentions giving wedgies to poindexters when talking about bullying.

The other point is that gays in the early 1960s were very deeply in the closet. Boys were not even supposed to be having sex with girls. The idea that they might be having sex with other boys was unthinkable. Even in the more open 1970s when I was in high school and college, gays didn't really come out until after high school. So the idea that Romney targeted someone because he was gay is highly unlikely, especially since Romney is known for playing pranks on everyone around him. He may have gone too far in one of his pranks but that does not show that he was anti-gay.

The double-standard here is obvious. Obama admits to smoking pot and using cocaine and relates incidents of bullying in his autobiographies but the press never picked up on this. But with Romney, as with Sarah Palin four years ago, they make a point of digging up much lighter offenses.

Whose troops?

2012-05-10T15:16:00.001-05:00

[W]hen I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that 'don't ask, don't tell' is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I've just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married. - Barack Obama

Wait a minute. They are fighting at the President's command but on his behalf? I thought that they were fighting on behalf of their country, not their leader.

Obama's Evolution

2012-05-10T09:19:00.001-05:00

Yesterday President Obama announced that his views have "evolved" to the point that he now supports gay marriage. What does this mean? Not much.

Obama was forced into this announcement after Vice-President Biden stuck his foot into the issue over the weekend. The White House tried to have it both ways - that the President was against bans on gay marriage but was not actually in favor of it. The press corps would have none of it. Coming out in favor was the quickest way to make the story go away. Granted it generated its own headlines but those will have faded by the weekend.

Despite his "evolution", most people believe that this has been Obama's position all along and that he took other positions for political reasons. Outspoken atheist, Penn Jillette, has said that he supports Obama for the same reason - that the President is secretly an atheist but lies about it for political reasons.

Even though Obama official came out in support of gay marriage, he has made it clear that he will not actually do anything to advance it. Plus, the Democrat National Convention will be held in North Carolina which just banned gay marriage by a 20% margin.

Romney continues to be against gay marriage but in favor of civil unions being passed at the state level. This was Obama's official position on Tuesday.

Obama and Julia

2012-05-08T12:19:00.001-05:00

Last week the Obama campaign released "The life of Julia" contrasting the effects of an Obama 2nd term and a Romney presidency on milestones of a woman's life from the age of 3 through to retirement at age 67. The object of this exercise is to show how Julia is better off with an Obama administration.

I considered doing a parody of Julia but that has already been done to death. So, I will limit myself to looking at the meaning of this whole campaign gimmick.

First, it is dishonest on many levels. There is no way that today's three-year-old will continue through the next 64 years unaffected by any presidents except for Obama or Romney. Julia is a composite which is just as well. Otherwise the slideshow is missing some elements. Young Julia is enrolled in Head Start which is reserved for the poor. When Julia retires the text says that she would have had a 40% cut in Social Security under Romney. There are multiple assumptions here. There was a proposal by two Congressional Republicans to do means testing of Social Security as a way of saving it. That is the only plan on the table that would cut her Social Security benefits by that much. In order to be affected by that, Julia would have had to have done very well for herself so there should have been a couple of slides about her paying higher taxes under Obama than under Romney.

Most of the assumptions about what Romney would do are based on questionable assumptions. Romney is treated as a rubber stamp for an Republican proposals in the last few years (this is likely to be a major theme of the overall Obama campaign so Julia is not an aberration). Further, proposed cuts are treated as across the board. In the case of student loan rates, the Obama campaign ignored what Romney said (that he wants the rate cut extended) and projects that it the rate would rise because it is not specifically mentioned in the Ryan budget.

There is another point where Julia misquotes what happened. The Romney campaign was asked if the Governor would have signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act. His staff said that they would have to ask Romney before answering and the following day said that he would have signed it. According to Julia, Romney refused to answer if he would sign it.

The only campaign pledge that Julia quotes accurately is Romney's promise that he would work to repeal Obamacare (a position shared by a majority of the electorate). The rest is somewhere between inaccurate and outright falsehood.

Since we cannot trust anything that Julia says about Romney, what does it say about Obama?

The most obvious point is that Obama's America is one where a woman requires constant help from the federal government to shield her from the rest of the world including local government (schools). I am sure that this accurately reflects the Obama Administration but I am not so sure about the rest of the country.

A related point is that the Obama Administration is confident in the ability of government programs to accomplish their goals. Head Start and Race to the Top are given three mentions even though outside evaluations of these programs are not so glowing. Numerous studies have shown that the benefits of Head Start fade over time. Most of them vanish by the end of First Grade and students who have been through Head Start are indistinguishable from their peers by the third grade.

Race to the Top encourages new teaching techniques but the program has not existed long enough to judge its effectiveness.

Julia also overstates the effectiveness of Obamacare. One of the milestones is when Julia needs an operation while in college. While it is true that Obamacare allows parents to cover their children up to the age of 26, it is also true that most policies allowed parents to cover their children while in college.

Similar arguments can be made for nearly all of the slides.

The final point about Julia is that it shows just how thin Obama's achievements have been. It mentions three - Obamacare, Race to the Top, and Lilly Ledbetter. These get multiple mentions to fluff them up a bit. The rest consists of "saving" programs from Romney cuts while ignoring that the current rate of spending is unsustainable and something is going to have to be cut. It is a wonder that the creators of Julia didn't include a slide where Julia grows up safe because Obama killed bin Laden, just to throw in a real achievement.

By exaggerating Obama's accomplishments and misrepresenting Romney's positions, Julia shows a remarkable disdain for the voter's intelligence.

Leaving the Center

2012-05-03T14:00:00.001-05:00

I keep seeing articles on how far the Republicans have moved to the right. Most of these insist that the Democrats either have not moved or that they have moved to the center. This one at least admits that the Democrats have moved to the 20-yard line before accusing the Republicans of moving to the end zone.

The question is how do we measure this? Everyone has their own measure so I may as well contribute mine.

First, I am going to start with Reagan in 1980. The vast majority of Congress post-dates 1980. Also, Reagan is the defining leader of the current Republicans. Democrats have to look back to FDR for such a leader (which explains a lot about their current policies).

Next, I am going to propose that one valid proxy for a party is its presidential candidate. The candidate represents a consensus and a winning candidate leads the party.

There is no question that Reagan was the most conservative presidential candidate the Republicans have run in the last 30 years. His major domestic achievements were slowing the growth of government and lowering and flattening the tax rates (yes, rates fluctuated during his administration but they were substantially lower at the end than the beginning). Not even Reagan could actually shrink government.

Since Reagan we had George H. W. Bush who expanded the regulatory state in numerous ways, and George W. Bush who pushed through the Medicare Drug Plan - the first new entitlement since LBJ. We also had Bob Dole and John McCain who were widely regarded as moderate senators. The big complain this year is that all of the candidates are to the left of Reagan and Romney is the most moderate of the bunch.

On the Democrat side we had Bill Clinton, a "moderate" who tried to pass health care reform, and did pass gun restrictions and Obama who did pass health care reform and has expanded the regulatory state. We also had Mondale who ran on a tax and spend platform (really), Dukakis - a liberal governor, Gore who ran to the left of Clinton and Kerry. It should be pointed out that Kerry, Edwards, and Dean were all running against Clinton's moderate record as much as against Bush.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Edwards all identified themselves as "progressives" rather than "liberals" and indicated a desire to return to the days of FDR's New Deal. Of all of these, Bill Clinton was the only moderate and that was only after his disastrous congressional midterm election. More recently, the Democrats have run senators with voting records far to the left of most of the party.

So, presidential candidates indicate that the Democrats have moved a long way to the left while the Romney represents a half-step to the right.

What about issues?

When Democrats complain about Republicans they usually go on to taxes. They accuse the Republicans of favoring the rich. It has been a goal of the Obama Administration from day one to raise taxes on people making more than $200,000/year.

But the Republicans have their own arguments. Based on some measures, America already has the world's most progressive tax rates. They argue that raising taxes will hurt a weak economy.

Who is further from the center here? Both sides have some statistics on their side. The Democrats are correct that the rich have gotten richer and the Republicans are correct that the rich already pay a disproportionate share of the income tax. The issue of "fairness" keeps coming up. When the Democrats use this term they are justifying punitive tax rates. They see taxes as a leveler. In 2008, Obama said that he would support raising the capitol gains tax for the sake of fairness, even if it would not produce any more income.

To me, this puts the Democrats way off-center on taxes.

One other consideration, the last time Republicans supported a tax increase was during the George H. W. Bush Administration. Most Republicans see this as a major factor in his defeat and are convinced that a Republican who raises taxes will lose the next election. This is not a new position. They have held that view since 1992.

Spending is another issue that the parties have split on. Republicans want to see spending restrained. They worry about the size of the national debt and the future obligations of entitlements. Democrats are against any moderation in spending or entitlement reform. This represents movement by both parties. The Republicans under George W. Bush went from a moderate surplus to a deficit. The Democrats ran on a platform of fiscal responsibility in 2002 but now embrace ever-expanding deficits. During the Reagan years, both parties worked together on entitlement reform but the is off the table for Democrats.

On health care reform, the Republicans flirted with the idea briefly under George H. W. Bush but ultimately rejected it. The Democrats have always been for it and many were disappointed with what was passed. This represents a deep ideological commitment from the Democrats who passed Obamacare without any Republican support and against the wishes of a majority of the country.

The Democrats have conceded one issue - gun control. Even after moderating, Clinton was anti-gun and tried to outlaw private sales of guns. Exit polls indicate that Gore lost his home state of Tennessee because the gun-owner vote went for Bush. Had Gore won Tennessee, Florida would have been irrelevant. The Democrats backed away from gun control since then.

All told, I don't see much movement from the Republicans. All of their current positions are rooted in the Reagan years. Their position on taxes is even supported by the former head of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. The Democrats seem to be more ideologically motivated than the Republicans. Their insistence on punitive taxes, their fondness for unsustainable spending, and their refusal to even admit to problems in the entitlement programs are all signs of a party that has lost touch with reality.

Granted, the Republicans have consolidated their positions more but these have been central to the party since Reagan. The Democrats have rejected their more recent moderates and long for a return to the heady days of FDR and expanding government. It only looks like the Republicans have moved to the right because the left has moved the center.

Obama's Victory Dance

2012-05-01T10:43:00.001-05:00

On the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death, President Obama is doing sort of a victory dance. He and his administration (especially Vice-President Biden) are reminding people that bin Laden was killed under Obama's watch and that Obama authorized the mission that killed bin Laden.

A year ago they were proud that they did something that President Bush did not. Now they are running and ad questioning if Governor Romney would have made the same decision?

Romney's answer is quick and to the point, "Even Jimmy Carter would have made that decision."

The Obama campaign picked up on a speech that Romney gave a few years ago where he questioned the wisdom of devoting so many resources to finding bin Laden when he could be replaced as al-Qeada's leader. Romney felt that more emphasis should be spent on the organization instead of the man. This is a valid point. At the time of his execution, bin Laden was isolated and had no direct contact with the organization. As satisfying as it was, killing bin Laden was mainly symbolic.

Obama has been less than generous with the credit. He announced that he made finding bin Laden a top priority but Osama bin Laden was the country's top target going back to the Clinton administration. US Intelligence began finding clues that eventually led to bin Laden in 2004 (four years before Obama was elected).

In 2008, the most effective ad that Hillary Clinton ran was the 3 am phone call? The bin Laden ad is Obama's version. It implies that Romney would not make the right choices with no justification. Even people on the hard left thing that the ad is outrageous.

A year ago an SNL sketch showed Obama slipping references to killing bin Laden into everything he said. With few accomplishments to run on, Obama is reduced to acting out that SNL sketch for real.

Regulations and Employment

2012-04-25T12:53:00.001-05:00

The Republicans in general and Mitt Romney in particular are running against "job-killing regulations". This drew an angry response from Ruth Marcus, one of the Washington Post's stable of left-leaning columnists.

If an employer's costs increase as the result of a regulation, Livermore notes, that is another way of saying that the employer has to hire workers to, say, install new technology while other employers hire workers to produce the new equipment.

At the same time she does admit that there are problems with estimates from both sides.

Lesson One: If you plug your cherry-picked assumptions into your preferred model, it's easy to obtain the desired result. Lesson Two: Jobs are only part of the larger picture

Starting with the first quote, it is true that regulations often result in hiring new workers. From a short-term, limited basis, new regulations can create jobs. But let's look further than that. If costs increase because of regulations, it means that productivity has decreased. While some small losses in productivity can be absorbed, large losses have to be passed on. This means price increases.

Things can go in three different ways from there. If a producer has foreign competition without the additional regulatory burden then it places the American company at a disadvantage and leads to lost sales. From there a company may have to reduce its workforce (think GM) or move its operations overseas (think Apple). Both lead directly to long-term job loss.

The final possibility is if a product has no foreign competition and outsourcing is not possible. Examples of this are power companies and gasoline. In both cases, new regulations lead to increases in costs which are passed on to the consumers. This acts as a drag on the economy as a whole. The new regulations may have helped a few sub-industries but the money to pay for them come from everyone's pockets. That means less money is available for other things.

This is known as the Broken Windows Fallacy. If I break the windows of the shoemaker's house then I have created economic activity for the glazier (window maker) but taken money from the shoemaker. There is no net economic gain.

Marcus is correct that jobs are only part of the larger picture. We have clean air laws today because in decades past the air quality was bad enough to affect people's health. But, the environment is much cleaner than 40 years ago. Additional improvement carries a high price tag so the benefits of the new regulations have to be measured against the economic hardship they cause.

As a member of the left, Marcus sees expanding government authority as a good thing and excuses it by insisting that it creates jobs but, as she pointed out, different models give different results. The models that show net job gain tend to look at it fromt he point of view of the glazier and ignore the shoemaker.

Who trusts the news?

2012-04-24T12:03:00.001-05:00

Major, formerly reputable, news operations like NBC have given up completely on journalistic integrity in favor of controlling the message. Two recent incidents with NBC show my point.

First there is the matter of the edited 911 call made by George Zimmerman in the Travon Martin case. By the time NBC picked up the story it was already being cast as an instance of racism. The 911 call did not support that so a senior NBC editor doctored it. In the original call, Zimmerman described Martin's behavior as suspicious but only added martin's race when prompted. NBC (and CNN) removed the 911 operator's question leaving the impression that Zimmerman included Martin's race as something that made him suspicious.

Later analysis of all of Zimmerman's 911 calls showed that he never identified someone's race until asked. Further, it was a mix-ed race neighborhood so simply seeing a black youth would not have been suspicious. It was his behavior, standing in rain in a yard instead of on a sidewalk, that Zimmerman was reporting. By editing the tape, NBC made it seem that Zimmerman was reporting someone for walking while black.

More recently, NBC reported on Rudolph Giuliani had endorsed Mitt Romney. Except the footage they played was from earlier when Giuliani was supporting Newt Gingrich and complained about Romney flipping on issues. Showing an anti-Romney soundbite is likely to leave more of an impression than reading a pro-Romney endorsement. So, by choosing the right footage, they turned a pro-Romney story into an anti-Romney one. This is a rather stunning case of bias.

A dog-eat-dog campaign

2012-04-23T13:00:00.001-05:00

It started out as a funny story that one of Romney's sons told about how strictly his father stuck to plans:

Around 30 years ago the Romney family was taking a road trip to Canada. They wanted to bring their dog but there was no room in the car so Mitt figured out a way to strap the dog's carrier to the roof. Along the way the dog had a case of diarrhea and they had to pull over so that Mitt could hose off the car and clean the cage. Since this was an unscheduled stop, the family was not allowed out of the car for a bathroom break.

The Obama campaign has seized on this with mock outrage - he strapped a dog to the roof of a car! That's abuse!!!!!

This is ridiculous. The Romney family says that the dog enjoyed the ride and there is no reason to doubt them. Since then many states have passed laws requiring that dogs be transported in dog crates. Most dogs, when loose, will stick their head out the window. The Romney family dog was better off than the dogs that ride in the back of pickup trucks but no one is calling that abuse.

Still, if someone yells "Abuse!" loud enough, people listen and nod their heads in agreement.

So, the right has begun to push back. Someone discovered a passage in President Obama's first autobiography where he tells about eating bugs, dog, and snake as a child. A thousand jokes were born overnight.

Obama's defenders correctly point out that the dog-eating took place when he was a child and he never indicated a preference for dog. This is true but irrelevant. He wrote the book as an adult (assuming that it was not ghost-written) and included this passage as an example of how exotic his life has been. When running for president in 2008, he pushed his background as a major qualification for the office. He never indicated that any of it was distasteful. Instead he describes seeing a chicken being killed for the first time and going to bed that night thinking how lucky he was.

Obviously Obama's detractors do not think that he is only keeping Bo around for Thanksgiving dinner but the dog-eating jokes are no less serious than the faux outrage over Romney's dog.

The Obama campaign wants to keep reminding us that Romney is "different" (code word for "Mormon") and "out-of-touch". Several columnists have reminded us that Romney's great-grandfather was a polygamist. This is a poor strategy since Obama's background is far stranger than Romney's and Obama's father was a polygamist.

Likely this is how the campaign will progress. Obama's surrogates will keep bringing up trivialities. Romney's supporters will find something equivalent and silence that line of attack. During all of this Romney will continue to hit Obama on the economy and Obama will try to convince the country that the economy is doing well.

Is Barack Obama a nice guy?

2012-04-19T09:40:00.001-05:00

What sort of person is Barack Obama? A recent poll showed that more people like him personally than Mitt Romney. Is this valid?

The book The Obama's tells us a lot about the President's personality. He is ultra competitive. He is a bad loser but he is also a bad winner. He is the type of person who will rub it in your face when he wins and sulks when he loses.

There is a picture of the first Superbowl party. Obama wanted to have a small gathering of friends but his political advisers talked him into inviting Congressional leaders from both parties as a chance to socialize and lobby. The problem was that Obama only cared about the game so the picture shows him celebrating a touchdown with his arms up while the rest of the room looks on.

Obama's dislike for politics and socializing forms an iron-clad rule. He spends most nights with his family in private.

The Obamas have few friends and when they went to DC they decided that they would not make any more. After all, everyone has an agenda and they worried that people they met would just be friends to push their agenda. When he was in the Illinois Senate, Obama had no friends among the other legislators.

The President has a temper. It probably is not as bad as Bill Clinton's red-faced rages but he can be sharp. This comes out occasionally in press conferences when he snaps at reporters. He is also convinced of his own superiority to everyone else. He told at least two people that it was difficult for him to select a cabinet because he could do everyone's job better than they could.

Obama is often petty and tends to demonize the opposition. He uses loaded terms like "fat-cat bankers". During the 2010 mid-term election he regularly told a story comparing the economy to a car that the Republicans drove into a ditch then stood on the top drinking a Slurpee while the Democrats did the hard work.

None of this paints a very nice view of the President and much of it comes from supporters.

When Ted Kennedy died, the press was full of stories of his friendship and kindness to people from both parties. No one will say this of Barack Obama.

The Obama Economy

2012-04-18T12:30:00.001-05:00

Three years ago President Obama promised us a new economy based on green energy, health care, and education. Unlike the previous economy it would not be based on boom and bust cycles. With Obama coming up for reelection, let's see how he is doing on that new economy.

Green energy has been a bust. Several factors have gone into this. A big one is natural gas. With new drilling techniques we now have a glut of natural gas which has pushed the price to historic lows. This is a big blow to green energy since it was already expensive. Gas burns cleaner than coal which removes some of the urgency for green power.

When Obama refers to green power he usually means solar and wind. Solar has the obvious problem of night. Wind has similar problems with availability. Both need back-up gas-fired generators in order to deliver constant power which pushes up the cost even more. In addition, there are transmission problems with both. Both need big open spaces. Wind generators are noisy and have to be away from nearly everyone. This means stringing a lot of power lines and building a lot of switching equipment. Up to half of the power generated this way is lost in transmission.

Green power, especially solar, has been through a speculation bubble. Originally a lot of Silicon Valley investors got in on it figuring that they were smart enough to solve all of the problems. These are people who expected a return on investment within three years while industries like solar need at least ten year cycles. A huge difference between the software that these investors were used to financing and manufacturing processes is that manufacturing does not necessarily scale well. The only way to find out is to build a factory and see if it works. That's where the money went with Solyndra.

Even if everything worked, green power does not generate many jobs. Ten years ago we were exporting wind generators to China. Now they build their own and market them to the rest of the world.

Spain cut back support for green power after a study found that it destroyed 2.5 jobs for every job created.

What about health care? President Obama was not forthcoming about it but insider books such as Confidence Men show that what he means is jobs nursing an aging Baby Boomer generation. In economic meetings early in his administration, Obama considered this his great solution to the fact that manufacturing jobs are not coming back.

Then there is education. The President is a great believer in higher education but this carries an ever-growing price tag. The overhead of student loans is already slowing the economy. Many graduates continue to live with their parents for years after graduating because of the cost of their student loans.

Student loans were a focal point of the Occupy Movement last Fall. Many of the protestors demanded forgiveness for their loans. the President even mentioned rising tuition costs in his 2012 State of the Union speech, threatening universities if they don't keep down costs.

Clearly we have not made the transition to Obama's new economy and many parts of his goals are hurting the overall economy rather than helping it.

Government by Gimmick

2012-04-17T11:41:00.001-05:00

President Obama stopped governing last Summer, opting instead to make proposals that he knew were unacceptable to the Republicans then castigate them for not acting. Now the rest of the Democratic Party (or at least the ones in the Senate) have followed with their attempt to pass the Buffett Rule.

Keep in mind that the Buffett Rule is not about closing the deficit - it would raise a few billion per year when the deficit is over a trillion. It would not create jobs or help the economy. It might even hurt the economy. It would not close a gaping tax loophole. Only a few thousand would be affected and they are all people who invested wisely. It is not comprehensive tax reform - it would simply add a new level of complexity. It isn't about making the rich pay their fair share. The corporate earnings that translate into capitol gains are taxed at the highest rate in the world.

What the Buffett Rule aims at is the appearance of tax fairness.

What the Senate voted on isn't even that. They knew that the measure was likely to fail. They were counting on it. It would have been a disaster for them if it had passed.

The Democrats regarded the Buffett Rule as a trap for the Republicans. They wanted it to fail so that they could use it as an election issue. If they really wanted it passed they could have done so two years ago when they had a filibuster-proof majority.

We have reached the point where it is more important to the Democrats to set traps for the Republicans than to govern. The same thing is true for the budget. The White House's budget was voted down overwhelmingly. The Republicans produced their own budget. Granted it is more of a wish list than a working document but it puts them on the record for how they will handle the fiscal emergencies that face the country. The Democrats regard this as another trap and refuse to even offer this much.

What happened to the promises of post-partisanship?

A Nasty Campaign

2012-04-12T15:56:00.001-05:00

If you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. - Barack Obama, 2008

Mr. Obama was right about this and in the next several months we are going to see his reelection campaign attack every aspect of Mitt Romney. The problem with a negative campaign is that sometimes it backfires. Yesterday Hilary Rosen complained that Ann Romney "had never worked a day in her life." Attacking a candidate's wife is always a bad idea. The Romney campaign immediately pounced on Rosen's remark. Rosen tried to explain herself but there is no getting around the fact that she denounced stay-at-home mothers.

For Rosen, this was a natural mistake. A successful professional woman and a liberal, she probably doesn't even know any stay-at-home mothers. It has been a central point of the feminists that a woman only fulfills herself through work.

Not all of the country shares this attitude so her attack on Ann Romney hurt the Obama campaign.

So far the Obama campaign has yet to come up with anything positive. The President has attacked the Republican budget as "social Darwinism" and made fun of Romney using the word "marvelous". Obama's current gimmick is the Buffett Rule which would raise taxes on millionaires. He even admits that this is a gimmick but it is still the centerpiece of his campaign. Vice-President Biden went a step further suggesting that it be renamed the Romney Rule although he didn't give a reason.

The main positive achievement that the President is running on is a small increase in domestic oil production. The problem there is that he had nothing to do with it. Oil production on public lands has been flat. It is oil production on private lands that is up.

A president with a strong record can sail to reelection, ignoring his opponent and acting as if it is inevitable that he will win. That is how Clinton handled his reelection in 1996. Reagan had an even stronger record to run on and crushed Mondale in 1984 with a 49-state win.

On the other hand, Obama's principle achievement, Obamacare, is deeply disliked and in danger of being declared unconstitutional. He did get us out of Iraq, but he did it on George W. Bush's schedule. The troops are scheduled to pull out of Afghanistan but that country could fall apart immediately after and even if it doesn't, presidents are seldom reelected based on their war records (just ask George H. W. Bush).

So Team Obama will try to pounce on every aspect that they can. It was inevitable that they would try to attack his wife. She is well-thought of, just as Michelle Obama is more popular than her husband. But, Ann Romney not only raised five kids, she is also a cancer survivor and suffers from multiple-sclerosis. Attacking her is a bit like kicking a puppy.

Expect the attacks to get nastier and more personal.

Johnson vs Goldwater

2012-04-11T10:22:00.001-05:00

The newest from President Obama:

President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that the choice facing voters this November will be as stark as in the milestone 1964 contest between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater.

Does he really want to go there? Granted Johnson beat Goldwater by the biggest margin in modern politics but there are plenty of reasons that Obama should shy away from mentioning LBJ.

First, is this really as stark a choice as Obama claims? I would put it closer to 2000 when the far-left Al Gore ran on a soak-the-rich platform against center-right George W. Bush. Another apt comparison would be Carter and Reagan. That's the one that Obama wants to avoid at all costs. In 2000 Carter seemed clueless about the economy and helpless about Iran. Unable to run on his record, Carter ran an attack campaign warning about how bad things would become in Reagan was elected. It is too easy to draw parallels between Carter and Obama.

Second, Johnson did not run as a liberal against a conservative. He ran as a peacemaker against an intolerant war-monger who would get us into an unwinnable nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Remember the "Daisy" ad where a young girl is playing with a daisy until a nuclear bomb goes off? That ad was not about Medicare.

Casting himself as Johnson is risky for Obama. Yes, Johnson was one of the most liberal presidents ever. He expanded Social Security and created Medicare and Medicaid. All of those programs face financial crisis in the foreseeable future. Johnson also lied us into Viet Nam. His administration was marred by race riots and violent anti-war protests. No one who lived through that period wants to see it happen again.

Casting Romney as Goldwater is also problematical for the President. Few people remember much about Goldwater. Those who do are hard-core conservatives. They credit Goldwater with laying the foundation for the Reagan Revolution. Hard-core conservative/libertarians are almost as fond of Goldwater as they are of Reagan. Romney's biggest problem in the primaries was convincing the base that he is a true conservative instead of a moderate. It only helps him to be compared with Goldwater. In fact, I can't think of a presidential candidate this side of Reagan who would help Romney more.

Johnson in 1964 was a special case. Kennedy had been dead less than a year and the country was still in shock. Johnson's victory was equal parts sentimentality over Kennedy's legacy and worry over Goldwater as being too anti-communist. Four years later Johnson dropped out of the primaries when it became obvious that he was likely to lose.

Until now Obama has studiously avoided any comparisons with Johnson. It was probably a mistake to bring him up now.

Are Conservatives Stupid?

2012-04-10T16:03:00.001-05:00

There seems to be a drumbeat of works showing that conservatives are stupid or at least not as smart as liberals. The latest to come to light is a study that shows the cognitive performance as a child is a predictor of "right-wing ideology". A quick summary of the paper can be found on the Huffington Post.

And now there's the new study linking conservative ideologies to "low-effort" thinking.

"People endorse conservative ideology more when they have to give a first or fast response," the study's lead author, University of Arkansas psychologist Dr. Scott Eidelman, said in a written statement released by the university.

Does the finding suggest that conservatives are lazy thinkers?

"Not quite," Dr. Eidelman told The Huffington Post in an email. "Our research shows that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism, not that political conservatives use low-effort thinking."

The actual paper is here. I read the entire paper hoping that the authors would define exactly what they meant by "right-wing ideologies". This is never spelled out although it is alluded to in a footnote:

We focused on social-cultural conservatism rather than economic conservatism, given that the former is more clearly related to prejudice.

Oh. So their definition of right-wing ideology has nothing to do with things like free-market economics. Instead it is based on the notion that far-right equals Nazis. For a discussion about the relationship between Fascism to modern politics, see here. This has nothing to do with modern political parties.

Next we have an article from Rolling Stone: Can Drinking Make You Conservative? Again, this is based on the idea that conservatives use low-effort thinking. The reasoning is that something that would impair your higher-effort thinking might make you conservative. The Rolling Stone article was written by Chris Moody who is pushing his book The Republican Brain. His thesis is that conservatives look at the simple answer while liberals think the issue through and see aspects of the issue that elude conservatives. Here is one of his examples:

Or think about global warming. It's easy and, in a sense, natural to dismiss the reality of climate change whenever there's a big snowstorm. ("See, it's getting colder, not warmer!") It takes more effort to understand that climate is the statistical average of weather, to model the climate system and consider different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, and to try to craft policy that will stave off a future risk, while fully admitting there's some lingering uncertainty about how quickly and strongly it will manifest itself.

I love this one because we have just seen several articles saying "We are having a warm Spring so it must be global warming!" even though global temperature has not increased significantly in 15 years. Maybe Moody's superior liberal brain has an explanation for this that goes beyond his example... but I doubt it.

Just to be sure that conservatives are not offended by this article, Moody ends with this:

Many liberals will be tempted to cite the latest research to argue that they're in some way superior, while conservatives may feel insulted by this new assault from academics (who, they're already convinced, are radical socialists). But in truth, neither interpretation seems to be the correct one. The real upshot, it seems to me, may be that conservatives have a built-in political and communications advantage, simply because human beings, in their busy lives, cannot be expected to be in "liberal" mode all the time, or even most of the time. Or as the study authors conclude: "Our findings suggest that conservative ways of thinking are basic, normal, and perhaps natural."
In other words, you could argue that liberals are really the outliers here. They're the ones in the position of having to spin out complex, nuanced explanations for their views – explanations that, to much of the populace, feel like so much fancy-pants posturing. And while this may work for academia and wonkland, it can also get in the way of political effectiveness and leadership.
No wonder another recent study finds that liberals, on average, drink more alcohol. Perhaps they just need to escape from their liberal brains sometimes. To me, that sounds pretty understandable.

Of course, Moody himself is one of the liberals who feels superior to conservatives. But he tries to mollify us by pointing out that liberals drink more, presumably to escape from the awful curse of knowing so much.

On to the study itself. Researchers stood outside a bar in New England and asked patrons who were leaving if they would answer a 10-question survey in exchange for knowing their Blood Alcohol Content (BAC). They were also asked to rate themselves politically. Later the survey questions were compared to a standard based on their political rating to how well their rating predicted their answers. Follow-up studies rated people's attitudes while under cognitive load which would also interfere with higher thought.

So, does this study prove that liberal viewpoints are the result of deep thought while conservatives think with their gut? No. There are several major problems with the study.

The obvious ones are that their studies were too small (85 people) and too localized (one town in New England). They did not make any effort to determine people's views ahead of time. They simply compared results under stress against a predictor. The smaller the test group the less likely this will be.

The biggest problem with this study is the assumption of how opinions on different issues is formed in the first place. My opinion on ownership of property (one of the ten questions) was formed a long time ago based on serious thought about different economic systems. When asked, I do not recreate that process on the spot. But, the study seems to be based on the assumption that our attitudes are in constant flux. While I do reevaluate my positions over time, I do this when presented with new data, not when given a survey while drunk.

The way that they rated people is a little odd considering their conclusions. They used Kerlinger's Social Referent Scale which was last updated in 1984 (actually they used a subset of it). This was written during the Cold War and ranks attitudes accordingly. Global warming is not on the list so the effect of drinking or stress on belief in global warming is pure speculation. The point of Kerlinger's work was to show that conservatives and liberals have completely different sets of values instead of a simple attitude bipolarity. In researching this post I found that researchers testing variations of Moody's thesis throw out the conservative list of values and concentrate on the liberal list. This had 14 items but Moody only asked 10 so he trimmed Kerlinger by nearly 2/3s.

Anyway, given that the people being tested were college-age and came from a monoculture, it is possible to come up with a completely different conclusion than Moody's. It is likely that the people being tested said that they were more conservative than they really are because it is more socially acceptable. When drunk or under stress, their real attitudes showed through because they didn't have time to self-censor.

I have my own proof that self-censorship happens. During the 2004 presidential election, the only poll that correctly predicted the results was conducted by Rasmussen. This poll used prerecorded questions instead of a live person asking the questions. Rasmussen explained his results were more accurate because people being polled by a live person are more likely to give the answer that they think the pollster wants to hear. People who hated President Bush were far more vocal so people were more likely to say that they were planning to vote against Bush than to admit the truth.

The same probably happened here - someone in a New England town asks you if you are a liberal or a conservative. You say that you are more liberal than you really are because you don't want them to think less of you.

A third possibility is that Kerlinger's SRS is outdated and many people think of them selves as liberal but actually have several conservative viewpoints. There was no sign that Moody tried to control for this.

To summarize - the case for conservatives being stupid still has to be made.

The Conservative Case Against the Volt

2012-04-09T11:11:00.001-05:00

In a recent column, Froma Harrop asked why conservatives hate the Chevy Volt? She throws around a few numbers, mentioning that Chevy sold twice as many Volts in March as in February but she mixes her figures. Examine the following paragraph:

Lo and behold, U.S. car sales were hot last month, with General Motors selling over 100,000 vehicles that get at least 30 miles to a gallon. And sales of its Chevy Volt more than doubled from the month before.

So, how many Volts were sold last month? She doesn't say. That 100,000 figure includes all high-mileage cars. The actual figure for the Volt is 2,289 - just 2% of the high-mileage cars sold. Something else that Harrop doesn't say is that this was the most Volts sold in a month. GM was hoping to sell 45,000 of these cars per year so, even if they continue to sell at the March rate, sales will be half of what was projected. Normally a car that sells so far below projections would be dropped but Chevy is committed to producing the Volt as part of its bailout deal with the government.

Before I go further I have a question of my own for Harrop: why would a liberal support the Volt? The car is basically a Chevy Cruze with an exotic powertrain. At $40,000, it costs more than twice as much as a Cruze. It only seats four and has a tiny trunk (the batteries take up a lot of space). This is not a family car unless the family never leaves town. Even if you want insist on a hybrid you can get a Prius Compact for $19,000. The Volt is a car for the 1%.

But no one pays $40,000 for the Volt. They pay $32,500 and the government pays $7,500. Even with this government incentive the Volt is an expensive car - too expensive for most people.

The Volt's main selling point is that you can go up to 35 miles on battery power. But, it takes hours to charge and you have to have a special charging station (for $2,000). This means that you can save, at most, a gallon of gas per day over a Cruze or Prius. At $4/gallon, it would take you ten years to save enough on gas to recover the extra you paid for a volt. Even if gas jumps to $5/gallon, it will take you eight years to recover the extra cost. And I'm not figuring the cost of electricity into this calculation. Note - if you drive at least 35 miles each way and your employer has a charging station then the cost-recovery figures would be halved.

A couple of other considerations - not many people who can afford a $32,500 car will keep it 8-10 years. They tend to trade every 2-3 years so they would never recover the extra cost. There is also the question of long-term value for the Volt. Batteries have a limited life. Ten years would be amazing. Once the batteries die then so does the car. A new battery pack for the Prius costs $2,000 and the Volt has a lot more batteries so figure that battery replacement will cost a few thousand. How much would you pay for a used car knowing that you would have to pay for this replacement? I suspect that the trade-in value for the Volt is going to be low which must also be counted against the cost of buying it.

For those who worry about greenhouse gas emissions, I should point out that building a car creates a lot of CO2. The longer a car stays on the road the fewer replacements are needed. When you figure this in then the Cruze probably has a lower life-time emission than the Volt.

And that is the conservative case against it. It isn't that much more efficient and it costs far too much for most people to buy. The government is subsidizing a toy for the rich. Drop the subsidy and the mandate for GM to produce it and let it stand or fall on its own. If GM decides that they can keep producing it then conservatives would have no objections.

The President Comes Out Swinging

2012-04-04T13:09:00.001-05:00

On Monday during a joint press conference with the presidents of Canada and Mexico, President Obama was asked to comment on the Supreme Court and the ACA (Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare). He seemed incredulous that the Court could even question a law passed by a "substantial majority in Congress". He went further, commenting on "unelected judges".

The President's comments were incendiary enough to provoke a reaction for all sides. Even liberals thought that he went too far in denouncing "judicial activism". This is understandable. After all, Roe v. Wade is a stellar example of judicial activism.

Obviously the President's handlers let him know that he had gone too far. In a press conference on Tuesday he backed away from the most inflammatory statements. At the same time he made some comments about constitutional law that left observers wondering about his familiarity with the subject. This is not a good thing for a former instructor of constitutional law.

I think that his off-the-cuff remarks on Monday were closer to the President's true feelings. He has already shown that he has little respect for the Court, even lecturing them during the State of the Union address.

After softening his stance on the Supreme Court, Obama launched into his other target - Mitt Romney and the Republican budget. Among other things, Obama outright made fun of Romney:

He said that he's very supportive of this new budget. And he even called it 'marvelous,' which is a word you don't often hear when it comes to describing the budget. It's a word you don't often hear generally.

That was a cheap shot, especially since Politico found three instances where Obama himself has used the word since becoming president.

Obama spent a lot of energy complaining about the Ryan budget, saying that it would lead to "social Darwinism". This is interesting for a few reasons. First, Obama's speech reminds me of Jimmy Carter warning that electing Ronald Reagan would lead to pitting white againt black, rich against poor, old against young. Following Jimmy Carter's playbook is not a good way to win reelection.

"Social Darwinism" is not a term that is used often, much less often than "marvelous". It also has an interesting pedigree.

"Social Darwinism" was first described by Oscar Schmidt of the University of Strasbourg, reporting at a scientific and medical conference held in Munich in 1877. He noted how socialists, although opponents of Darwin's theory, nonetheless used it to add force to their political arguments.

On the other hand, some major Progressives like H. G. Wells and Jack London were believers in social Darwinism.

The President's attack on the Ryan budget was to be expected. He decided some time ago to pretend that there are no problems with entitlements or the deficit. Instead he lets the Republicans advance proposals for dealing with these problems, mis-characterizes them, and attacks them on that basis. This was a winning formula for him in 2008 when he told seniors that they would have lost their Social Security under a proposal from President Bush, even though Bush excluded people over 50. The Democrats won a special election in Florida by showing a Ryan-look-alike literally throwing a senior over a cliff.

Obama's speech set what will probably be the tone for the campaign. With few achievements to run on, Team Obama will be nagative and play fast and loose with the truth.

Conservatives and Science

2012-04-02T14:56:00.001-05:00

Are Republicans really anti-science? A new book by Chris Moody claims that Republicans are anti-science and deny reality and uses brain scans and other testing to prove its point.

I will admit off the bat that I am not going to spend $14.27 (Kindle edition) to be insulted. Instead I'm going to look at some recent controversies and see how the two sides react.

I will concede evolution to Moody. A lot of creationists seem to be conservatives and there just isn't any hard science to back up creationism.

Climate change is a different matter. A liberal says, "Last month set heat records across much of the US. We have to close coal-fired power plants now!" A conservative says, "The world temperature record as maintained by three separate institutions, all staffed with warming true-believers, says that the warming stopped fifteen years ago. What's the rush?" Which is really looking at science and which is simply reacting to a scare?

Stem-cell research is far more complicated than most liberals let on. No one opposes adult stem cell research and most of the breakthroughs have involved adult stem cells. There is no trouble getting funding for adult stem cell research. The issue is with embryonic stem cells - ones made from a fetus. When this first came up, very little progress had been made so little private money was available for research. Scientists wanted the government to fund it, promising quick and startling breakthroughs. President Clinton passed on providing research money. President Bush did approve government financing but, because of ethical considerations, only on stem cell lines already in existence. This limitation only applied to government money but, because there was so little private money, the world acted as if Bush had ended funding for stem cell research instead of being the first to approve it.

President Obama made a show of lifting Bush's limits on funding. Still, no breakthroughs have been made and other, more ethical, sources of embryonic stem cells have been discovered in the meantime.

The debate comes down to the question of the ethics of fertilizing a human egg cell, producing a unique human being, only to tear it apart before it can develop. This is an outgrowth of the abortion debate in which liberals claim that a fetus is a non-human clump of cells until it is born and conservatives claim is a complete human being while it is still microscopic. Both sides have valid points and declaring the conservative side to be anti-science is pure arrogance.

Childhood Vaccines - A lot of people are convinced that mercury in childhood vaccines causes autism and most of these people are leading liberals. Think RFK jr.

Cervical Cancer Vaccines - this is the exception. Liberals want it administered around puberty, just in case girls become sexually active at age 13 or 14. Conservatives are appalled at a policy that seems to encourage underage sex and want the vaccine given when women are more sexually mature. The exception is Michelle Bachman who confused a story about a normal childhood vaccine with the vaccine for cervical cancer.

Genetically Modified Food - conservatives this that this is the answer to world hunger. Liberals want it banned.

Fracking - conservatives see this as the route to making the US the world's leading supplier of gas and oil. Liberals want it banned.

BPA - this chemical is used to coat cans to prevent the contents from reacting with the metal in the cans. It is also found in many plastic drinking containers. Conservatives point to studies done by the EPA showing that it is harmless in the limited exposure that humans receive. Liberals point to animal studies with mega-doses and want it banned.

Animal testing - conservatives think that this advances knowledge and saves lives. Liberal want it banned on ethical reasons.

High Voltage Power Lines - conservatives thing that these are harmless. Liberals worry that they cause health problems in children.

I could go on but the pattern is clear. Something new is introduced that will help people. Conservatives generally are for it and liberals are against it. Liberals are easy to panic while conservatives are more likely to ask for proof for claims that products are harmful. The one exception (not counting evolution) is stem cell research and even this is more of a political argument than a scientific one.

On a related note, studies have shown that conservatives rank actions according to six different sets of values while liberals only use three of those values. That means that conservatives are often actin in ways that are totally incomprehensible to liberals. Instead of making the liberals wonder what is wrong with their value system, it enforces their sense of superiority (we are smarter because we act rationally and conservatives do not). That is the point of Moody's book, to boost liberal's conviction that they are morally superior because there is something fundamentally wrong with conservatives.

The Individual Mandate and its implications

2012-03-30T11:10:00.001-05:00

It appears that the individual mandate was a legislative overreach. The reaction from the left is interesting. Some are complaining about the idea of a limiting principle and wondering where that came from? (Answer: the Constitution). A few days ago a column appeared on Slate questioning why we even needed legislative review by the Supreme Court. After all, Speaker Pelosi was asked about the constitutionality of the mandate and dismissed it. Shouldn't that be enough?

The individual mandate is a tricky animal. The law's supporters insist that it is necessary to keep people from gaming the system. This puts them at odds with an earlier version of themselves. Just a few years ago they painted insurance companies as heartless for not accepting preexisting conditions. Now they acknowledge that this is a significant cost for insurance companies.

So, what to do about it? There are multiple ways that this could be handled. One would be to reform the relationship between insurance and your employer. Currently you get a significant tax break for insurance paid by your employer. For tax purposes, this isn't even income. You cannot get this tax break if you buy your own insurance. This is a relic from the 1940s wage controls. A few changes in tax law could change this so that your employer paid you your total compensation and you could take the insurance deduction from your personal taxes. That would eliminate many of the anxieties in the current system but it would make life harder for the insurance companies. Instead of signing up large employers they would have to compete for individuals, just like auto insurance.

A different way of handling preexisting conditions would be for the government to compensate the insurance companies through taxation. This was suggested during the Supreme Court hearing.

The reason that the government went with the individual mandate is that it hides the cost and gives credit for bringing coverage to 30 million uninsured. What goes unsaid is that many of these people were uninsured by choice - young, healthy people who are not likely to need insurance for years. The individual mandate is a way of taking money from those with the least money and the least need for insurance and giving it to those who do need insurance. It is a transfer of wealth but it is coming from the poor.

When you look at it this way you wonder why any liberal would ever support the individual mandate? It is nothing but a disguised, regressive tax that is being hidden by being processed by insurance companies. Instead of being straightforward about the costs, they are being hidden under the guise of fairness - making people who will eventually need insurance pay for current costs.

Health care reform (actually health insurance reform) is such an important issue to the left that they are willing to overlook how regressive its funding is or the expansion of government power that it implies. In the modern world, nearly everything affects interstate commerce somehow. Giving Congress the power to demand participation in markets gives it unlimited power. A couple of days ago I pointed out the similarities with 16th century England where people were forced to buy wool caps in order to stimulate the wool and knitting industries. Our Constitution was written to prevent this sort of abuse.

One red herring in the proceedings is the argument that the penalty for not complying is low. There is nothing to stop a future Congress from raising the penalty or turning it into a crime. It is unlikely that this would trigger a future hearing before the Supreme Court.