| May 31 | Why are we making this harder than it really is? |
| May 25 | I got nothing. |
| May 24 | Grown-up Republican Watch |
| May 23 | Shorter Rudy Giuliani Commencement Address |
| May 18 | The New York Times' Fuzzy Math |
| May 17 | Michael O'Hare's Fuzzy Math |
| May 17 | Glug Glug |
| May 13 | Friday Chinchilla Blogging & Shuffle! |
| May 11 | Duty calls |
| May 7 | What Presidential Leadership? |
| May 7 | UK Election Wrap-Up, Part 2 |
| May 6 | Friday Chinchilla Blogging and Shuffle! |
| May 5 | British Invasion |
| Apr 30 | Law and Medicine: Wrap-up |
I seem to be the only person on the left half of the blogosphere to have a handle on immigration. Today the folks at Liberal Oasis, and previously P&W's own Dan Munz have written that Democrats should look to the long term and not run to the right of the GOP on the issue. But, I think there is a real difference between running to the right on policy and running to the right on rhetoric. Here is my Democratic strategy on immigration:
Hey! It even fits on a bumper sticker!
You go in front of La Raza and LULAC and say "path to citizenship" (or even "camino a ciudadanía"). You go in front of anti-immigrant groups and say "fewer immigrants". That's it, your done!
Now, the policy question that reporters will ask you will be something along the line of "how do you get fewer immigrants"? The standard answer is "more money for border patrol". Well, that may be true, but Democrats have to get past the "big spenders" label. So, let's get creative:
And here is the attack on the Bush-Walmart "guest worker" plan:
I'm a big fan of this combination of ideas. It's clearly to the right of the GOP on border enforcement and cozying up to Mexico for the sake of cheap labor. But it's to the left of the GOP in that it maintains a path to citizenship. You will notice that I studiously avoided the question of "what do we do about the millions of illegal immigrants already in the US?", to which I don't have any great answers. But considering the Bush-Walmart plan already concedes that deporting millions of people is not a viable answer, ideas like granting Permanent Resident Alien status after paying backtaxes and a penalty seem like a practical, moderate idea.
Why am I the only one who thinks it isn't really that hard to finesse this issue? Would someone please poke holes in my rhetoric?
I should point out that, absent any sort of polling data among legal immigrants, it's not immediate obvious that this demographic would have a favorable opinion of plans that appeared soft illegal immigrants, as the Bush-Walmart plan. Now, clearly, this is the sort of thing where a good survey would be immensely valuable information.
Shakespeare's Sister asks a very tough question:
Can you praise a single decision, policy, action, initiative, program, anything relating to Bush’s presidency?
I asked this to people in person from time to time, though, my phrasing is usually "can you name one Bush policy initiative that you would keep"?
I got nothing.
I'm for a couple of things Bush has done in principle, but in the Reality-BasedTM world, they have been so horrible in execution that I'm agains them. In principle, I don't think I'm against relying on religious organizations for social service delivery. But I'm not for Bush's execution of "faith-based initiatives", which is really a redirection of money to the religious right. In principle, I'm for Medicare covering prescription drugs. But the Bush Medicare bill is quite possibly the worst piece of legislation to appear in the last thirty years. I support the invasion of Afghanistan, but we obviously haven't filled the power vacuum or done enough to eliminate the opium trade.
Oh, wait, I do have one case of unqualified support for a Bush action! In the wake of the Iranian earthquake, Bush temporarily suspended sanctions to help Tehran rebuild. So, there. I am not some blind eyed Bush-hater. Once every four years, he does something I support wholeheartedly.
However, I cannot find a single long-term policy initiatives that are worth a darn.
[I'm off to Drinking Liberally tonight. Cheers!]
Via the excellent Carpetbagger Report, it appears that Governor Mike Huckabee (R-AR) is continuing to make noise about running for president. Now, I'm not some closet Republican, so I'd surely vote against him, but I'm a big fan of Huckabee's willingness to thumb his nose at the Norquistas and their monomaniacal obsession with tax cuts:
It has a little bit of that "he can get his gun and saddle up; we'll meet in front of the saloon at eight. I do my killing before breakfast", doesn't it? Huckabee doesn't limit his trash talking to unelected heads of lobbying groups; he'll even take some shots at legislation produced by the GOP-run congress. Here's Huckabee on the Real ID Act:"Grover's never been in government, doesn't have to balance a state budget, never had a state constitution forcing him to deal with a balanced budget," Mr. Huckabee said at a meeting with editors and reporters from The Washington Times.
"Grover's never been in a situation where he couldn't borrow money so he didn't have to raise taxes or tell old people he's just going to take them out of the nursing home and drop them on the curb," he continued.
"If Grover wants to run for governor, there's an election next year in Arkansas. He can get his residency requirements lined up. And there are 36 other states he can run in next year," the governor offered.
Now, he's more pro-life than you could possibly imagine. And he's not a big fan of "teh gay" [sic]. And he might start abandon all of this balanced budget tough talk when he suddenly discovers that the President has a credit card with a very high limit. But so far, he beats the pants out of the rest of the non-McCain, non-Giuliani field, who, lets face it, can't win a Southern Primary without a miracle."Governors are looking at all their options. If more than half of the governors agree we're not going down without a fight on this, Congress will have to consider changing this unfunded federal mandate," said Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, vice chairman of the National Governors Association. A Huckabee aide said the options include court action.
[Until June 3rd I'll be guest-blogging on Politics and War along with some other fine lads and lasses. All my posts will be cross-posted to Electoral Math, though they may appear there first--say, if I write something on the bus ride in to work and post it as soon as I get there].
This weekend I engaged in some actual "journalism", by which I mean "attended my sister's graduation where 2008 Presidential Candidate Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani gave the commencement address". The speech, which he gave with only notes rather than a prepared text, can be summarized thusly:
There are four qualities that are important to leadership:
- Knowing what you stand for
- Being optimistic
- Having ethics (please ignore my extramarital shenanigans and the stench surrounding some questionable patronage by my police comissioner)
- Be prepared
You are all prepared to be leaders. Go out into the world and do good things. Give back to your community.
Also, I was the mayor of New York during 9/11.
All that was missing was I'm Rudy Giuliani and I approved this message. There really should be a statute of limitations on taking credit for stuff that happened years ago.
The front page story on steroids in today's Times featured an alarming graphic showing that almost half of all players suspended for steroid use are pitchers. This should come as a shock to no one, since almost half of all baseball players are pitchers.
Okay, that's not entirely fair, since the perception exists that muscle strength doesn't matter as much to pitchers as it does to hitters. But simply reading that sentence carefully should make it clear enough how preposterous that notion is. The graph is wildly misleading.
UC-Berkeley professor Michael O'Hare wrote an op-ed, which got this whole game started, and now he's got both Mark Kleiman and Matt Yglesias extolling the virtues of some state-run archive of all music, books, or movies ever made, that provides the citizenry with on-demand access to the entire catalog, with the government doling out money to artists based on the number of times their work is heard. Before this gets out of hand, I feel the need to burst some balloons. In short, producing a system capable of delivering more content than our existing television/cable/radio infrastructure is an immense problem. Professor O'Hare needs to go across campus and ask David Patterson if he (qua Patterson) thinks his (qua O'Hare) National Media Center idea is even remotely feasible.
The amount of audio and video media the US produces is completely dominated by television, because there are so many stations and they produce new content with great frequency. One year's worth of television programming stored at DVD quality would consume between 4 and 12 petabytes, or 12 million gigabytes, of disk; for comparison, that's equal to the disk storage of 200,000 60 GB iPods or ten times the amount of disk space used by all computers at Amazon.com. Radio broadcasts would consume a similar amount of disk (they consume far less space, but there are many more stations). Every year, then, it would costs $2.5 billion dollars just to store the media produced that year at current enterprise storage costs. So if we started taping tomorrow, by 2030 we would be spending $62 billion in today's dollars just on storage under the "high cost" estimate ($25 billion under the 4 PB/year "low cost" estimate). By comparison, the budget for all of NASA was $16.4 billion last year. Sure, some technology breakthrough might cut costs in the mean time, but a different breakthrough might also cause storage demand to explode.
The even bigger challenge is piping all this data out to the masses. Let's assume you'd need about 100 times as many "channels" as we have today to satisfy everyone's viewing habits at any one point in time. Sending that much data would require a network capable of delivering 1.5 terabits per second, or roughly the 1 million times as fast as a very high speed cable modem connection. The world record for sustained network over a long distance, under very controlled experimental conditions, is 101 gigabits per second, or one tenth the required speed. At this rate, in six to eight years some researchers might be able to get close to our bandwidth requirements. Even if I am off by a factor of ten, it will take decades before this sort of network existed under commercial conditions. And it would require a huge capital investment to build.
The moral of this story: Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
Update: The Professor himself comments, saying that he doesn't care about storage and distribution; he just wants to have the government collect royalties based on the frequency that digital media are played. That's an idea I could get behind from a technical standpoint. I don't see how you solve the problems that SETI@Home and other distributing computing projects have had. What if I hack the app that's sending usage data, and claim to have played a song several hundred times even though I've done no such thing? You could make that activity illegal, but how would you tell such illegal activity from sudden surges in demand for a song? And what if I get a thousand people each to fake playing the song once, which will be much harder to detect? What if I just leave a song on repeat but don't actually listen? At first blush it seems like the opportunities for fraud are ripe.
I'll be at Montlake Ale House for Drinking Liberally again tonight. Check out the fancy new button on the sidebar!
Meanwhile, the Sonics battle with the Pacers to earn the title of "most injuries sustaind by a successful NBA playoff team" continues tonight. So far my money is on the Pacers, but a win tonight for the Supes [which has to be the cheesiest nickname of all time] can change all that.
At the end of this week, it's time to let it all hang out again. Even for the chinchillas. Which, to Troy, at least, means "it's time to chew on things":
All while listening to a more eclectic random ten than usual:
I am a slave to my pager for this week, hence the light blogging.
On a separate note, how is it that when I was a kid, I could finish Mega Man III without dying, and some levels without getting hit, but today I have to fight tooth and nail to finish the thing? Has my fast-twitch response atrophied that much? Was it muscle memory?
Economist Donald Ratajczak, who is much smarter than I am and has a PhD and several awards for his economic forecasting to show for it, displays an awful lot of wishful thinking in his latest Economic Outlook:
However, even the best investment of that surplus will not fund all the promised benefits. Either benefits must be cut (by lowering the payout or delaying the retirement age) or funding must be increased. When will the President show leadership in outlining a program that really will restore the soundness of social security?
Are we starting a pool? If so, I'm going to put my money on "never". The modern Republican party has shown very little interest in policy and an awful lot of interest in rewarding campaign contributors and scoring political points. The Bush Social Security pseudo-plan is the latest in this long line that includes the energy bill, placing the Iraq War vote before the midterm elections, criticism of NATO's intervention in Kosovo, Monica Lewinsky, shutting down the government, filibustering the Clinton health care plan, and Whitewater.
Ratajczak also swallows the right-wing claim that promised benefits exceed projected revenues and that it's finances are getting worse, when in fact they're getting better. A shortfall exists in Social Security's financing only if you assume the trustee's projections of economic growth, immigration, and life expectancy are accurate. What's more, the media focus on the medium-cost projection overstates social-security's long term fiscal health; historically, the low-cost projection, which forecasts no trust fund shortfall, has been significantly more accurate.
On a separate note, has the esteemed Mr. Ratajczak tried to take Dean Baker's "no economist left behind" test?
In the immediate aftermath of the UK election, I claimed that many of the Conservative gains were due to an increased protest vote for the Lib Dems. Was I right? BBC has been kind enough to put up a list of gains and losses for each party. Let's have a closer look at Tory gains to see whether or not my hypothesis turned out to be true. We're mostly concerned with Tory gains from Labour:
| Seat | LAB +/- | CON +/- | LD +/- | Margin of Victory |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Braintree | -4.9 | +3.2 | +2.0 | 7.3 |
| Monmouth | -5.8 | +5.0 | +1.4 | 9.9 |
| Lancaster & Wyre | -8.3 | +0.6 | +5.9 | 8.0 |
| Kettering | -5.0 | +2.1 | +2.2 | 5.9 |
| Northampton South | -7.3 | +2.6 | +2.8 | 8.1 |
| Welwyn Hatfield | -6.9 | +9.2 | 0.0 | 13.3 |
| Shipley | -5.8 | -1.9 | +3.8 | 0.9 |
| Clwyd West | -2.9 | +0.6 | +1.9 | 0.4 |
| Bexleyheath & Crayford | -8.0 | +6.4 | +1.0 | 10.7 |
| Milton Keynes North East | -6.1 | +1.2 | +1.7 | 3.3 |
| Hornchurch | -4.8 | +0.5 | -0.6 | 1.3 |
| Hammersmith & Fulham | -9.1 | +5.6 | +2.6 | 10.2 |
| Forest of Dean | -6.8 | +2.1 | +4.3 | 4.3 |
| Wellingborough | -5.3 | +0.6 | +2.3 | 1.3 |
| Ilford North | -6.0 | +3.2 | +2.0 | 3.8 |
| Rugby & Kenilworth | -6.6 | +1.5 | +4.0 | 2.7 |
| Harwich | -5.3 | +1.9 | +3.2 | +1.8 |
| Peterborough | -9.6 | +4.1 | +2.2 | 6.6 |
| Shrewsbury & Atcham | -10.5 | +0.3 | +10.4 | 3.6 |
| Scarborough & Whitby | -8.8 | +1.4 | +7.6 | 2.7 |
| Preseli Pembrokeshire | -6.3 | +3.3 | +2.3 | 1.7 |
| Putney | -9.0 | +4.0 | +2.7 | 4.8 |
| Hemel Hempstead | -7.3 | +1.8 | +4.4 | 1.1 |
| The Wrekin | -7.2 | +3.5 | +3.3 | 2.1 |
| Croydon Central | -6.6 | +2.3 | +1.8 | 1.5 |
| Wimbledon | -9.8 | +4.6 | +5.1 | 5.3 |
| St Albans | -11.1 | +2.1 | +7.5 | 3.0 |
| Gravesham | -7.7 | +4.9 | +1.5 | 1.4 |
| Domfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale | -4.6 | +11.4 | -1.5 | 3.9 |
| Reading East | -10.5 | +3.4 | +5.7 | 1.1 |
| Endfield Southgate | -11.3 | +6.0 | +4.2 | 4.1 |
Of the 31 Tory gains at the expense of Labour, votes that moved from Labourite candidates to Liberal Democrats represent the margin of victory in 18 seats. In Wimbledon, a first-time Green Party candidate ran; adding his votes to Labour along with the new Lib Dem voters would have been enough to keep the seat in Labour's hands. With 12 additional gains at the expense of Labour, the surge in Lib Dem voting is responsible for 30 of Labour's 47 losses. So I think my initial hypothesis holds, and while a credible Conservative party has allowed the Tories to gain a tiny percentage of the vote, James Forsyth is just wrong; the Lib Dems were clearly the night's big winners.
However, the news is not all rosy for the Liberal Democrats. In particular, their head-to-head contests between Lib Dems and Conservatives were a complete disaster. The Liberal Democrats pursued a "decapitation strategy" against the Tories, hoping to reduce the Conservative party even further, which would force a set of old cranks into the party's leadership that would render the Conservative party unacceptable for an entire generation. Quite simply, this didn't work at all. Of the Lib Dems' top 20 target seats, Conservatives held 14. The Lib Dems won 2 of those seats, reduced the Conservative majority in 3, and lost ground to the Tories in 9 of them. In addition Lib Dems also lost five seats to Conservatives, so while in some areas the party made gains among rural voters, in others they lost ground. Their newfound strength in urban areas, which netted the party two seats in London, one on Manchester, one in Leeds, and Cambridge, has no offset.
Over at BOP, Stirling Newberry has a very effective analysis of the outcome of the British election. The job of Conservatives is to restore its image among the young before the party is literally driven to extinction. The Lib Dems must carefully balance between urban sophisticates, Muslims, and rural areas, and establish themselves as a credible governing party. It still has a ways to go in this department, since at the moment the Lib Dems cannot even credibly threaten enough seats to take control of government. The job of Labour is to restore trust in the party, probably by remaking itself in a way that appears slightly less made-for-television. So far, it appears that Blair's wants the party to address its losses by moving further to the right on crime, school discipline, and make slight nudges towards fixing the asylum system. It's unclear whether or not this sort of thing will honk of the Lib Dem voters, or if all they really want is an end to the perceived untrustworthiness of the Blair government.
In other news, I got raisins:
Election results in the UK are almost entirely in, and it would appear that the Labour party has won a third term as majority government, albeit with a much reduced majority. I've got several quick notes, with no overarching theme:
Update: Now that the full returns are in, I've changed the first bullet to match actual figures.
After all of this reading, what do I think the US should do about its malpractice system? Well, as with everything related to health care, it's a difficult question. But here are my initial ideas.
The costs of the medical malpractice system in the United States are definitely much higher than in other OECD nations. However, it's clear EU member nations are able to have a much cheaper malpractice systems because they have much more generous welfare states. Therefore any system which reduces the cost of the American tort system should be accompanied by changes that increase health insurance coverage for those currently uninsured, as well as changes to increase disability or workers' compensation benefits. Perhaps, however, the end result of such reforms would be a net decrease in overall costs of the health care/disability compensation system.
Assuming such welfare state improvements occurred, the Scandinavian system of no-fault compensation is very appealing, since it speeds the processing of claims and gets claims in the hands of more patients. Conservative critics will claim that this is simply more "big government", but my response is that having an agency that specializes in processing your claims is almost certainly better than waiting years while the trial lawyers, courts, and insurance companies haggle over how much you get paid, which can often take years. The Scandinavian system also separates compensation from doctor/nurse/hospital discipline, which probably improves the ability of the disciplinary agency to take its job seriously and mete out meaningful punishment to bad doctors. Separately, almost all countries seem to have problems indemnifying ob-gyns. Therefore, I think it's a good idea to provide a generous set of benefits to the parents of children with birth-defects, similar to the benefits package used in the United Kingdom, which can be received only in exchange for waiving the right to bring a malpractice claim against the doctor. Since many of the largest malpractice awards occur in cases of injury at birth, such a policy would at least provide some cost certainty to the insurance industry. Such an "Unlucky Mothers' Childcare Relief Act" would both be good policy and good pro-family politics -- it would be great to see a Republican Presidential candidate complain about how this idea hurts the economy.
In the end, I think that meaningful tort reform that puts some downward pressure on individual malpractice payouts could reasonably reduce health care costs by 2%, while still providing smaller, quicker compensation payments to a larger number of injured patients. It's unclear whether or not such reforms would further reduce health care spending by eliminating some "defensive medicine", but I am skeptical of such claims.
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updated by Nicholas Beaudrot on 06:15 20 September 2005
