Quote of the day

"The architects of the euro assumed that it would foster political unity, in much the same way as some couples think that having a baby will help to save their marriage". —Felix Salmon, Reuters

Next steps in social democracy

From the Times of London:

Brussels decrees holidays are a human right

An overseas holiday used to be thought of as a reward for a year’s hard work. Now Brussels has declared that tourism is a human right and pensioners, youths and those too poor to afford it should have their travel subsidised by the taxpayer.

Under the scheme, British pensioners could be given cut-price trips to Spain, while Greek teenagers could be taken around disused mills in Manchester to experience the cultural diversity of Europe.

The idea for the subsidised tours is the brainchild of Antonio Tajani, the European Union commissioner for enterprise and industry, who was appointed by Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister.

The scheme, which could cost hundreds of millions of pounds a year, is intended to promote a sense of pride in European culture, bridge the north-south divide in the continent and prop up resorts in their off-season.

Tajani, who unveiled his plan last week at a ministerial conference in Madrid, believes the days when holidays were a luxury have gone. “Travelling for tourism today is a right. The way we spend our holidays is a formidable indicator of our quality of life,” he said.

Tajani, who used to be transport commissioner, said he had been able to “affirm the rights of passengers” in his previous office and the next step was to ensure people’s “right to be tourists”.

I figure it's only a matter of time before mainstream U.S. progressives start bemoaning our status as one of the few developed nations without a universal tourism right.

Copenhagen dispatch

Nate Silver doesn't have much to report yet, but what he does say is amusing:

It's been a long 20 hours or so in various sorts of planes, trains and lines. I'm used to keeping a relatively, uh, abstract schedule, but the overnight flight left a little bit too early for me to be tired, and then by the time I was getting tired, it was light out, and now -- even though it's just 2:30 PM here -- it's already about to get dark again.

The conference, at this point, feels more like a trade show than a political event, but it's cool to be surrounded by so many people from all over the world -- imagine the international terminal at JFK, but with even worse food and people walking by in giant tree costumes.

I did have a good conversation with a couple of Brits while waiting in line for my NGO badge. They were very bright and keyed in -- they run a green taxi company in London -- but I was surprised at how confusing they found American politics to be. How can the Senate require 60 percent to pass something? How can Delaware have as many senators as New York? What's up with the whole electoral college thing? How can Obama go from 70 percent popularity to 50 percent in a half a year? Could Sarah Palin really become President someday? The Guardian, among others, has some very good Washington coverage, but I think there's an opportunity for one of the UK dailies to provide a Washington column that's specifically geared toward a British or European audience: we tend to take for granted how freakin' weird our politics can be to the rest of the world.

Link blag

The Economist looks at America's fiscal deficit.

Ezra Klein explains how the filibuster morphed into a routine 60 vote requirement, which was eye opening for me.

Later he bemoans the neglected House. One wonders whether Ezra would be making the same argument if we had a Speaker Gingrich or Speaker Delay.

FiveThirtyEight eyes European intolerance.

Kurt Vonnegut was hard-as-nails badass.

The top 20 unfortunate lessons girls learn from Twilight.

People eating Bhut Jolokia, world's hottest pepper.

Today's kid reporter winner had an odd reaction.

The tradeoffs of health reform

Mankiw:

David Brooks gets it right today about the debate over healthcare reform. The fundamental question is, Should Americans embrace a more robust social safety net at the cost of much higher marginal tax rates, reduced work incentives, and a smaller economic pie?

From a strictly economic perspective, there is no right answer to this question. Arthur Okun said long ago that the big tradeoff in economic policy is between equality and efficiency. The pending healthcare reform bill moves us along that tradeoff. Let's just not pretend, as some healthcare reformers would have us do, that we can easily get more equality without paying the price in efficiency.

Put simply, the healthcare reform bill would make the United States more like western Europe. That may mean more security about healthcare, but it also means that future generations of Americans will likely spend more time enjoying leisure (.pdf)

I think Brooks and Mankiw are using the wrong terminology here. This is a tradeoff of subsidizing expanded health coverage, not a tradeoff of reforming the system.

I've discussed plenty of reforms that would increase the efficiency of health care in the US with no costs of higher marginal tax rates, reduced work incentives, or a smaller economic pie.

(The political problem, of course, is that most such reforms run afoul of entrenched interests like the AMA cartel, the AARP, large employers, etc).

The other walls

Hoje Macau

Comparing Western Europe

Over at the League, Koz commented:

Liberalism should be seen as an unmitigated failure by anyone under 30.

To the extent that it isn’t, part of the reason is that American prosperity seems to them as a fact of nature. For anybody with any historical consciousness of the modern industrial state for the last thirty years or so, the rules are pretty simple: low taxes/free markets = prosperity, bloated welfare state = corrupt dependence on the state.

That's some pretty run-of-the-mill conservative boilerplate, which I think misses half the story. Hopefully my response is more interesting...

Koz, I deplore welfare and love myself some low tax rates and free markets as much as the next libertarian--but you should note that Western Europe's welfare states are doing quite well, in no small part because their governments (parliamentary: executive makes policy, legislature approves) and tax systems (consumption tax: VAT) are more efficient than the American model.

You ought to check out Bruce Bartlett's The New American Economy; he offers some good clear-headed explanations of the economic side of things.

My own thesis, in a nutshell, is that the better governance and taxation in Europe is what makes their welfare states politically palatable and attractive to their peoples. Whereas America's bad governance and absurd tax system are what make higher rates and more welfare politically unpalatable and unattractive to Americans.

I believe that if America kept its relatively-low welfare and tax rates but improved its governance and tax system, it would be better off.

And I believe that if Europe kept its good governance and tax system but reduced its welfare state and taxation rates, it would be better off.

Alas, the politics don't seem conducive to either outcome, because good governance/taxation seems to make people tolerant of the welfare state, whereas maintaining enough popular outrage against state expansion seems to depend on having inefficient governance/taxation like America's.

Ich bin ein Berliner

BBC:

Chancellor Angela Merkel has been returned to power in Germany, exit polls suggest, after her conservative [CDU/CSU] bloc won more than 33% of the vote.

Mrs Merkel's bloc now looks set to form a centre-right alliance with her preferred partner, the pro-reform FDP [libertarian].

If you need an introduction to Germany's parties, check out 538's. The entry on the FDP is amusing.

Yglesias editorializes:

Angela Merkel wound up winning a strange kind of election victory, the kind where your party gets less support than it got before. Still, the CDU’s support only went down a little while the Social Democrats’ support collapsed and the liberal (in a European sense) Free Democrats gained a lot. The Greens and the Left Party also picked up support. The result is going to be some controversial free market reforms for Germany (I think the evidence suggests that most Germans actually don’t want the kind of reforms that this election result will lead to) and a real moment of crisis for the SPD that needs to really rethink some things:


I note that following on the European Parliament election results and some other national results, there seems to be a continent-wide crisis of social democracy. In a great many countries, social democrats are really getting squeezed by rising far-left parties and the fact that Europe’s center-right parties tend to be inconveniently non-crazy.

Why do Americans like Europe?

The architecture?

Quote of the day II

I would like to reassure the contributors to this unusual Web site. You don’t need to go through such acrobatics to oppose marriage equality. You can just be against gay marriage without any justification. You guys could find a comfortable place here in Europe. We have a lot of far right parties that are based on identity and tradition, and they reject gay marriage as a question of national honor. They want heterosexual superiority because their national group is supposed to be more macho than the other countries. That is good enough, really. Unfortunately you’re stuck in the US where pure ethnic and cultural arguments don’t work. Americans are just too fair-minded and so astoundingly dynamic.

&mdashDanilo at Secular Right, Gay marriage and unintended consequences

Decline of US favorability during Bush years

More graphs, charts, tables, and analysis here

Obama on exceptionalism

Conor flags this answer as deftly handled:

You’re the President of America. At a NATO summit, a European reporter asks you whether you believe in American exceptionalism. How do you negotiate that fraught question without undermining the cooperation you hope to secure abroad, or else angering the folks back home? I’m sure I couldn’t have managed any better than this. It sure would’ve been easier to be president on a mission abroad before the advent of the television camera. I’d love for some historian to sift through the records of presidential visits, and the visits of envoys in the days before presidential travel, noting all the times words were spoken that never would’ve been said had they been transmitted to an American audience.

Link blag

Mark Thompson: Whaddaya Mean, "Activist"?...

I wanted to give a lawyer’s perspective to the discussion of judicial activism the decision has spawned between William, John, and E.D., arising in part due to Mr. Sullum and Mr. Whelan. To be sure, I think E.D. is wrong to the extent he argues that the Iowa decision is justified because it reaches a rights-enhancing, morally just result; William is exactly right in arguing that the process by which the Court reached its decision is more important than whether the result is just.

Politico: Defense cuts deepen old wounds...

It took a while for the magnitude of the cuts to sink in, but once it did, the ritualistic wailing from congressional leaders and defense contractors that always accompanies Pentagon budget-slashing began with unprecedented fury.

And that’s because the cuts proposed Monday by Defense Secretary Robert Gates — axing six major defense weapons systems, including missile programs, helicopters, fighter jets and a communications satellite — were themselves unprecedented. Or to borrow an Obama term, audacious.

[...] “I strongly support Secretary Gates’ decision to restructure a number of major defense programs,” McCain said. “It has long been necessary to shift spending away from weapon systems plagued by scheduling and cost overruns to ones that strike the correct balance between the needs of our deployed forces and the requirements for meeting the emerging threats of tomorrow.”

This is McCain's best area of expertise, so hopefully Congress can get some of that elusive bipartisanship going. Other Republicans don't seem very cooperative, however, preferring to milk "you're cutting defense!" for political points when from a cost-benefit standpoint many programs should be cut.

Yglesias: Praise for the New Defense Budget...

For more analysis on yesterday’s defense budget analysis see Robert Farley, Spencer Ackerman, Fred Kaplan, and James Fallows. All are impressed, and all rightly so.

This is the move that justifies the decision to keep Robert Gates on at the Pentagon. Any new Defense Secretary, no matter how brilliant, would have had to have spent his first three months in office building relationships with the top military commanders and focusing on filling out the DOD civilian staff. Only a Secretary who’s already been in office could have the ability to propose sweeping change. But only a president who’s brand new could have the popularity and honeymoon effect necessary to have any hope of driving the changes through congress. Hence the appeal of the odd alignment of new president and old defense secretary.

Mark Lynch: Obama scores again, but the game is just starting...

Obama's speech in Turkey's Parliament has gotten heavy coverage and rave reviews across the Arab political spectrum. Even influential newspapers and personalities who are usually quite critical of American foreign policy have expressed frank admiration. Despite the disarray in the public diplomacy bureaucracy (where there is still no nominee for the Under-Secretary of State), I would say that Obama has already succeeded at the initial public diplomacy phase of his effort to transform America's relations with the Muslim world. And he's not done -- I'm fairly sure that despite the fact that he has lived up to his promise to give a major address from a Muslim capital, this was not even "the" speech to the Muslim world that he promised during his campaign. But now will come the real challenge: transforming the words into deeds and delivering on the promise.

Obama has conquered Europe? Video of town hall in Turkey

Overcoming Bias: occupational licensing sucks.

Digg: Man commits suicide while watching Watchmen...come on, it wasn't that bad, was it?

Gay comedy: SNL, Fast & Furious ...and this:

Link blag

The Post: Short '06 Lebanon War Stokes Pentagon Debate...

A war that ended three years ago and involved not a single U.S. soldier has become the subject of an increasingly heated debate inside the Pentagon, one that could alter how the U.S. military fights in the future.

When Israel and Hezbollah battled for more than a month in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the result was widely seen as a disaster for the Israeli military. Soon after the fighting ended, some military officers began to warn that the short, bloody and relatively conventional battle foreshadowed how future enemies of the United States might fight.

Drezner: 13 Unexpected Consequences of the Financial Crisis...

7. Skirts will get longer. Here’s a piece of Wall Street folk wisdom: There is a rough correlation between bull markets and bare knees. During boom times, skirts get shorter. In these bearish times, prepare for hemlines to head south. Somewhat in relation, we’ll see something else go north: the age and weight of Playboy centerfolds. Evolutionary biology encourages people to seek “more mature” mates during times of economic insecurity, argue Terry F. Pettijohn and Brian J. Jungeberg in one of the more interesting studies published recently in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. To support their claim, the researchers showed that during recessions, centerfolds get older and, well, rounder. Similar studies have confirmed an identical trend in movie comedies—male and female leads get older during recessions.

Unreligious Right: Another Strange Poll...

Sixty-five percent of conservative Republicans have an unfavorable view of Islam. I'm surprised it's not higher. But what about liberal Democrats? Sixty percent of them have a favorable view of Islam. Really, 60% have a positive view of Islam. Is it any wonder liberals are so clueless? What causes this favorable view? Simple ignorance? Living in a dream world? Blaming problems involving Islam on the U.S.?

FiveThirtyEight: Whigs, Federalists Strongly Differ on Support for Obama...

[..] measurements of the partisan split in support for the President, as Pew Research has done here (they found a record partisan split in Obama's approval ratings, with 88 percent of Democrats but just 27 percent of Republicans approving of Obama's performance) are not quite as straightforward as they might seem. This is because partisan identification is at least somewhat fluid. The Republicans, in particular, have lost quite a bit of support over the past several years; those persons who continue to identify as Republicans are a hardened -- and very conservative -- lot. Just 24 percent of voters identified as Republican when Pew conducted this survey in March, which is roughly as low as that total has ever gotten.

Radley reminds you that libertarian free market proponents are not corporate apologists:

The U.S. Chamber has released its rankings of “business-friendly” members of Congress. Next time someone accuses libertarians and other free market proponents of being corporate apologists, send them this Tim Carney analysis of the Chamber’s list. Ron Paul, for example, scored lower than 90 percent of the Democrats in the House. Pro-free market, anti-tax Republicans scored lower than left-liberal Democrats like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. When you look at the issues the Chamber considers pro-business, it pretty quickly demolishes the notion that free markets and big business have much of anything to do with one another.

Why did the housing crash ruin the financial system while the dot-com collapse did not? WSJ has a longish article by a 2002 Noble laureate.

NewMajority tells Wall Street Bankers how to be capitalists.

It's not often I get to say this, but The Weekly Standard's budget recommendations are better than both Obama's and the House GOP's. Apart from defense spending, of course, where they're as nuts as ever.

TMV rounds up opinions on Obama's European tour.

NY Gov. Paterson is toast, voters say 63-22 he does not deserve election to full term.

Farm subsidies won't be cut? Fraking bastards.

The next Alien vs. Predator?

Police in Detroit break up pillow fight. NYC has better luck.

Link blag

The Post: Gates Planning Major Changes In Programs, Defense Budget...

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is expected to announce on Monday the restructuring of several dozen major defense programs as part of the Obama administration's bid to shift military spending from preparations for large-scale war against traditional rivals to the counterinsurgency programs that Gates and others consider likely to dominate U.S. conflicts in coming decades.

Gates's aides say his plan would boost spending for some programs and take large whacks at others, including some with powerful constituencies on Capitol Hill and among influential contractors, making his announcement more of an opening bid than a decisive end to weeks of sometimes acrimonious internal Pentagon debate.

Yglesias: European aid to Afghanistan...

Obama’s haul looks pretty modest—about 3,000 extra troops to provide election-related security plus about 2,000 troops to do embedded police trading, plus $100 million more for training and $500 million more for humanitarian aid. Still I’d say the negative tone of the press coverage suggests the perils of expectations more than anything else. The Bush administration has been trying to get more out of the Europeans for years and failing. Obama tried and he’s got something.

[...] the real time to ask for additional European support in Afghanistan would have been 2002 and 2003 when many countries were eager to cooperate with the United States. Instead, the Bush administration leaned on America’s best friends in Europe and around the world to contribute tens of thousands of soldiers to Iraq.

NYT: Liberty, Equality, Envy...

The feeling in Europe, and especially in France, about Barack Obama’s presidency is as clear as day: we are envious.

The Reality-Based Community:

A. A. Gill reports from London that "Mr. Obama is the only popular politician left iin the world. He could win an election in any of the G-20 countries, and his fellow world leaders will do anything to take home a touch of that reflected popularity."

If that's true, it's a substantial foreign-policy advantage.

The Post: The Radicalization of Ben Bernanke...

Timothy Geithner and his predecessor Henry Paulson have been the public faces of the U.S. government's battle against the global economic crisis. But even as the secretaries of the Treasury have garnered the headlines -- as well as popular anger surrounding bank bailouts and corporate bonuses -- another official has quickly amassed great influence by committing trillions of dollars to keep markets afloat, radically redefining his institution and taking on serious risks as he seeks to rescue the American economy. Without a doubt, this crisis is now Ben Bernanke's war.

And why are Asian kids so good at math? Curiouser and curiouser

Respect people, not beliefs

Bloc Raisonneur: "This video, part of the One Law For All campaign in the UK, cannot be shown and distributed enough."


I couldn't agree more. This idea that civil courts should judge Muslims, Christians, and others by the rules of their religion rather than uniform civil laws is patently absurd.

What has happened to secularism in Europe?

Photo of the day

FLOTUS Michelle Obama and fellow spouses of NATO Summit leaders tour Notre Dame —the cathedral, not the university— spreading their anti-Catholic values.

Library Grape notes that this uppity America-hating angry negro lady now living in public housing is nonetheless pretty popular right now:

Europe loves her, too. On a lighter note:

ExCel press conference

Playbook highlights:

“SOME OF THE CONTAGION DID START ON WALL STREET” – In a free-wheeling 50-minute news conference at the ExCel Center in London, President Obama shows he’s a master of the format, giving looooong, thoughtful answers that are impressive even to skeptics. A taste:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I'm going to call one foreigner -- (laughter) -- actually, I'm the foreigner. That's why I smiled. One correspondent not from America. And then I will -- (loud commotion) -- we're not doing bidding here. (Laughter.) But I also want to make sure that I'm not showing gender bias. So this young lady right here -- not you, sir, I'm sorry.

Q Hi, Mr. President.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: How are you?

Q Thank you for choosing me. I'm very well. I'm from the Times of India.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Wonderful.

Q You met with our Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. What did you -- what is America doing to help India tackle terrorism emanating from Pakistan?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, first of all, your Prime Minister is a wonderful man.

Q Thank you. I agree. (Laughter.)

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well --

Q I agree.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Did you have something to do with that, or -- (laughter.) You seem to kind of take -- take credit for it a little bit there. (Laughter.)

Q Really proud of him, sir.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Of course. You should be proud of him. I'm teasing you. I think he's a very wise and decent man, and has done a wonderful job in guiding India, even prior to being Prime Minister, along a path of extraordinary economic growth that is a marvel, I think, for all the world.

IN CALLING ON CBS NEWS’ CHIP REID, who lost his dad during the trip, the President said: “I'm going to call on my last American correspondent, Chip. And, Chip, my heart goes out to you.

Q Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. President. I appreciate that.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I just heard about that.

CBS WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF CHRIS ISHAM writes, in an internal e-mail: “Chip Reid's father passed away shortly after he arrived in London to cover the president. While Chip at first planned to return home, his mother and wife, Nina, insisted that his father would want him to continue on the president’s historic trip. In a note to us today he said ‘My father was my hero and I’m here to make him proud.’ A family memorial is planned once Chip returns home. In lieu of flowers, donations can be sent to: Charles Henry Reid, Sr. Memorial Fund, Hanover Presbyterian Church, 1801 N. Jefferson St., Wilmington, DE 19802-4709.”

Full transcript at WhiteHouse.gov

Link blag

Commonweal Magazine: Obama & Notre Dame...

“The church is not simply the prolife movement, and to the extent that every interaction between the church and our political system is held hostage to the demands of the most confrontational elements of that movement, the church’s social message, including its message about abortion, will be marginalized and ineffectual. The respect and honor owed the office of the president does not depend on any particular president’s merits (as Buckley often reminded his liberal critics). That respect is, among other things, a powerful affirmation of the willingness of Americans to live together peacefully, despite profound disagreement. Notre Dame’s invitation to President Obama is perhaps best understood in that light.”

E.D. Kain: Pop Christianity...

Christianity in America has been weaved into pop culture much to the detriment of that religion. The co-opting of pop culture to try to make Christianity seem more “hip” to the times has backfired. Simply countering every Nirvana or Green Day with a Christian version of the same will not make teenage boys prefer the latter to the former. When cool becomes more important than sacred then we’ve got a problem. The fact of the matter is that secular movie makers will always be able to make more edgy films, and secular musicians will always be able to make cooler music, and the reason for this is they’re just trying to make movies and music - they’re not trying to make explicitly Christian movies and music.

Josh Wimmer:

“It’s not fair for me just to single out the lyrics, because I also know I’m listening to Christian radio immediately because of the shimmery keyboards and amped-up major-key guitar lines — there’s a sound there that Christian pop musicians have staked out as their own, and I get why it sounds “Christian” to them, but it rings about as true to me as a heaven actually full of harp-strumming cherubs. Mainstream pop may suck, but at least it sucks in so many different ways.”

Cato: Democrats Agree on Health Plan Outline: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid...

Given the problems facing our health care system-high costs, uneven quality, millions of Americans without health insurance–it seems that things couldn’t get any worse. But a bill based on these ideas, will almost certainly make things much, much worse.

Atlantic:

Health care isn't a single good, nor, like food, is it easily defined in terms of a minimum to sustain life. Studying other countries' supposedly universal systems only demonstrates how fraught the concept of "health care" is: one bundle of services in British Columbia and a less-generous one in Nova Scotia, one in England and another in Scotland, one in New Zealand before the election and another afterwards. Arguably the U.S. already has universal care, in the sense that everyone can get some care-if only from an emergency room-for some things, and that citizens (a critical word in this context) without money are covered by Medicaid. The real issue is how you define "health care." What gets included is a matter not only of medicine and economics but of culture and politics.

Politico: Budget cuts concern contractors...

Though the details of the $534 billion defense budget are still unknown, there are numerous signs that Gates could take the ax to a major defense weapons program as early as next week.

That has defense industry officials, whose fortunes will rise or fall on the outcome, madly trying to decode which programs are the most vulnerable and scrambling to defend them.

Red State Update on legalization:


A U.S. unemployment map

Finally a true map of Europe

Meet the new America... kind of like the old America

John Schwenkler:

Alex Massie has a splendid post on how American liberals, lately of the “Stop trying to force the Europeans to obey America’s orders” school of thought (and thank goodness for that!) when it came to foreign policy, are … well … less enthused about free-mindedness when it comes to the financial crisis

Quoth Massie:

The President has told everyone what to do, so why won’t our friends do as they’re told? Once upon a time - and not so long ago neither - Democrats thought it was important for friends to speak candidly to friends and stand up for what they thought was right. Now? Not so much. Now friends must remember that their independent analysis of the economic troubles afflicting the globe counts for nothing and they should fall quietly into line and accept their marching orders from Washington.

As I say, how times change. We’ve swapped a military and foreign policy sense of imperial entitlement for an economic one. How refreshing!

What if the Americans are right, however? Well, maybe they are. But what if they’re wrong? Is it really necessary for every country to adopt identical responses to the current difficulties? How likely is it that there can be a global one-size-fits-all answer? Might there not be some sense in sharing eggs between different baskets? That is, different approaches and regional variation might work better than ex cathedra pronouncements from some of the very people who helped get us all into this mess in the first place. Perhaps not, but the costs of the Americans bullying everyone into following a policy that they themselves admit they have no idea of knowing will work seem, potentially, anyway, to be quite high if they are wrong. And, at least putatively, possibly higher than the benefits that might accrue if the Americans (and Gordon Brown) are right.