Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

And the prestigious Jane Galt endorsement goes to . . .

What a long, agonising trip its been. Throughout the process, I've been subjected to approximately 8 zillion exhortations along the lines of "How on earth could you consider voting for that son-of-a-bitch?" People who bemoan the increasing partisanship of our society will be pleased to hear that both parties seem to be thoroughly united in the belief that anyone who is not voting their way is either a drooling moron or a venal hatemonger, out to destory All That Is Good and Fine in This Great Nation of Ours.

So before I give you my endorsement, I thought I'd run you through the metrics I've been using to weigh the election, and how I ultimately came out on them.

The Environment: Kerry wins by a hair here, but only a hair, because he supports moronic CAFE standards instead of sensible emissions taxes. He's made idiotic promises about getting to 20% of our energy from alternative fuels, a promise which is made as predictibly as the rising of the sun by presidential candidates, to little effect. Bush is better on nuclear energy, but not much. Kerry gets the bonus here because he cares more, though not a whole hell of a lot more, about the negative externalities of various economic activities, than does Bush. Warning to Dems, though: you almost lost this over his grovelling to the coal industry.

Education: Bush by a landslide. The Democrats are simply too hostage to the teacher's unions to be even marginally credible on education: any attempts to reform the system end up being captured by the unions, and do little more than funnel extra money into teachers' pockets. (An approach I'm all in favour of if it gets us better results, which so far it manifestly hasn't). I'd prefer that Bush go farther, with vouchers for example, but I've been pleasantly surprised by NCLB. As Gerard Baker said about Bush, NCLB has made all the right enemies.

Health Care: In a normal year, I'd look at Bush's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Medicare prescription drug plan, and be tempted to call it a wash. However, John Kerry has managed to scare the bejeesus out of me with his health care plan. Play semantic games all you want; when you've got a plan that would qualify half the families in America for Medicaid, that's what I call a government takeover of the healthcare system. I'm against it. Reallly really really against it. Bush easily gets my vote here.

Gay marriage: Kerry. I'm against the FMA; regardless of what you think about gay marriage, writing the damn thing into the constitution is, in the words of PJ O'Rourke, pinning a "kick me" sign on the backside of the majesty of the law. However, since the thing has not a snowball's chance in hell of passing the state legislatures, I can't say this swings my vote much one way or the other.

The Supreme Court: Bush. A number of commenters have tried to convince me not to vote for Bush by trying to scare me with dire tales about another Scalia or Thomas appointed to the bench. Folks, this is like trying to scare me with a free Porsche. I'd be in heaven with nine Clarence Thomases on the bench. Why am I supposed to be so scared, again? Oh, right, abortion. News flash: libertarian does not equal pro choice, and pro-choice does not equal pro-Roe. As it happens, I'm pro-choice (reluctantly), but I'm against Roe v. Wade; I think the matter should be decided at the state level, and NARAL can use all the money it raises to lobby to provide bus tickets and nice hotel rooms to women wanting abortions in states where it is illegal.

The Economy I don't think the president has much, if anything, to do with how the economy runs, unless he's one of those disastrous tinkerers, like FDR and Richard Nixon. Neither of the current candidates is such a lackwit, meaning that their impact on the economy will be minimal indeed. Neither candidate gets my vote here.

Trade George Bush. Yes, he did steel tariffs, but the way I look at it, he enacted something he knew was going to be overturned in order to get important concessions from congress, on fast-track, trade promotion authority, and the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Now we have freer trade and no steel tariffs. Trade is an area where the president is really important. There's a lot an unwilling president can do to scuttle trade, and there are big talks coming up at the WTO. Kerry's advisors are going around telling people he's lying about trade, and he may well be; his record in the senate seems to be pretty good. But George Bush's record seems to be pretty good as well, and he's not making anti-trade noises, or nominating a protectionist to his ticket.

Corporate Welfare Kerry. The recent tax bill, which was supposed to provide adjustment assistance to exporters who lost a subsidy that was ruled illegal by the WTO, turned into a shameless giveaway to every business interest with a lobby and a dream. Not that George Bush could stop congress from larding the bill up with anti-market tax favours, but he could veto the bill, which he won't. Kerry might; he gets my vote on this issue.

Tax policy: George Bush. Not because I'm one of those super-gung-ho supply siders who are committed to Bush's rate reductions with their dying breath. I'm in favour of the rate reductions, but it's not one of my primary issues. Lucky for George, he hit one of my primary issues: mitigating the adverse affects of the tax code on capital formation. I'm hugely in favour of equalising the treatment of cap gains and dividends; definitely in favour of lowering the tax rate on cap gains (at least until we eliminate the corporate income tax); and pretty much in favour of getting rid of the estate tax.

Poverty policy Liberals will scream, but George Bush gets this one. Kerry has one plan I like--increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit--but the rest of his programme is just standard Democratic same-old, same-old. I think raising the minimum wage is a moderately bad idea, and will have at best a trivial effect on welfare policy (most former welfare mothers already make above what John Kerry is proposing to raise the minimum to; the hike will disproportionately benefit middle class teenagers.) I wrote a piece on poverty recently, and what struck me is how excited the Republicans were about eradicating poverty, compared to the Democrats; Republicans are actually trying to change the environment in which poor kids grow up, rather than just raising the amount of money they spend. Education is a major piece of this, and there also George Bush has won my heart.

Entitlements George Bush. For all the hysteria, Bush's plans for Social Security and Medicare are excessively modest. But he's a dynamic go-getter compared to Kerry, whose plan for Social Security is to stand there watching while it collapses around our ears, and who wants to make Medicare more insolvent. Democrats are screaming that Bush's plan will be expensive, but of course, if we actually showed the country's current liabilities, rather than keeping the country's books on the weird, not-quite-cash-basis our government uses, privatising would come out as at worst neutral. Meanwhile, it would keep the government from making more promises to people it can't fulfill . . . people who will be badly hurt when the system goes bust. And it would take money from the government, which spends it on things that are at best economically neutral, and redirect that money into investments that will increase future productivity, helping us to bear the burden of an older population.

Civil Liberties Neither. I used to think that Janet Reno was the embodiment of all evil, after she helped gut the fourth amendment and pioneered the use of the paramilitary force to resolve child custody issues. Now I think that whoever becomes attorney general is driven mad by dreams of all the good they could do if only they had a lot more power. Both sides endorse the execrable drug war, which has done more to destroy civil liberties than any post-9/11 moves.

The Budget I'm against running deficits, not because of the economic effects, which I think are pretty small, but because we shouldn't buy things for ourselves by writing IOU's for our children to pay. But both candidates are pretty much equally bad on this measure; the deficits they're promising are within a couple hundred billion of eachother over ten years, depending on which party you believe. I suspect that if Kerry passes his plan that number will be higher, because health care plans always seem to cost many times what they were promised to cost. But I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, and call it even-steven.

Foriegn policyHere it is: the big ticket. Which way do I go?

Let me outline what I think about the way the administration approached Iraq.

I think we chose to go to Iraq, we didn't have to. But I'm okay with that, unlike a lot of libertarians.

I think that the decision to invade Iraq had a lot of reasons behind it, of which only a few were discussed with America. And I'm also okay with that, unlike a lot of libertarians. The government, unfortunately, can't have a secret closed-door meeting with the entire country in which it tells us what it is thinking. It has to conduct its discussion by press release. Imagine how much information you'd get from your family and friends, much less your boss, if the only way they could talk to you was to broadcast their words to a world listening with bated breath. Make the negotiations on the house you're buying a little complicated, hmmm? Think your boss would give you the quarterly sales numbers, what with the competition breathing down your neck?

I think that there were people in the administration who were obsessed with Iraq, and that that drove the decision-making to some extent. That doesn't mean the invasion was a bad idea, but it does worry me about the administration's decision making.

I think that Iraq was not necessary to the war on terror, but I still think it's possible that it could be a successful battle in it. A democratic Iraq would be a major victory in the region. Even an Iraq run by a Mubarrak would help, by making the region more stable, and denying terrorists a base; and it would be much better for the people of Iraq. It gets US troops off Saudi soil, which can only help.

I'm unconvinced by anti-war people screaming about screw-ups in the early weeks of the war, including the latest explosives flap. As a project manager, I know too well that when you operate in a tight time frame, no matter how much you plan, nothing goes according to plan. Something comes out of left field and makes half your planning obsolete, and the other half irrelevant.

I think that the administration drastically underestimated the popular resistance to our invasion. This allowed the insurgency to grow, which in turn has steadily eroded our popularity, as we are blamed for the sabotage-induced decline in infrastructure, and the growing insecurity. I think the administration failed to act decisvely against the insurgency, betraying a stubborn unwillingness to admit when they are wrong, or change plans even when the plans are clearly failing. I am deeply troubled by this. I think the administration was unwilling to take the political risk of asking for more troops, and have thus brought greater political risk upon themselves. This is my biggest concern with the administration.

I think that the administration's plans worked very well on state actors: Libya, Syria, and Pakistan, to name a few, seem to be more cooperative now that they know we really might invade. Iran and North Korea are working on nuclear weapons, but they've been working on nuclear weapons since long before we invaded Iraq. I think they have had the opposite effect on non-state actors: I'm pretty sure we're making terrorist recruiting easier.

But I'm not as sure as anti-war types that this makes us less secure. The biggest threat we face is nuclear or biological terrorism, and that's the kind of terrorism that requires cooperation from state actors. Moreover, right now at least, all the new recruits are fighting soldiers in Iraq and not civilians in America. That could change, of course, but the only existential threat we face is nuclear terrorism. And nuclear terrorism is constrained not by the supply of recruits, but the supply of nukes, which terrorists wanted long before 9/11. The administration's actions certainly haven't increased the supply of nukes, and they may have decreased them. But I would like to see the administration pay more attention to non-state actors.

I think Abu Ghraib was a disgrace to the name of America, and Don Rumsfeld should have resigned. I don't think that he caused it in any way, but I do think that when something this bad happens, high heads have to roll to show how deeply we regret the stain on our honor.

I think that retreating from Iraq would be a disaster. Even if it turns into a quagmire, I would far rather see us stay too long than bug out before we have to.

I think that George Bush has cost us a lot of goodwill in Europe. I am less convinced that Europe's governments left us much choice.

I think that the greatest revelation of the Iraq war has been that we lack the military force to invade a smallish country with terrain that provides easy surveillence and movement. That's a big problem; whether or not we should have invaded Iraq, I think it's pretty important that the world's last superpower should be able to, if it needs to. I also think that neither candidate has credibly addressed this issue, the administration because it doesn't want to admit failure, and the Kerry team because they're still wallowing in some fantasy where the UN sends us troops it doesn't have and wouldn't commit if it did.

What about Kerry? He's been on the wrong side of pretty much every foriegn policy issue he addressed before he began running for president, from nuclear freeze to the first Iraq war. He's been a borderline incompetent as a senator. I like Joe Biden, who is advising him on foreign policy, but that's about all he has going for him. His votes since 9/11 have been so coldly opportunistic that I, the ultimate political cynic, actually feel a little tinge of disgust. So though liberals keep telling me that 9/11 changed everything, I have no way of knowing whether they changed John Kerry. Columns telling me to listen to what he's saying elicit only a hollow laugh, since John Kerry has already made it abundantly clear that he'll say pretty much anything to get elected. Not that this is exactly surprising behaviour in a politician.

Does it matter? There's a pretty compelling argument to be made that the Bush administration has screwed up so badly that it's practically impossible that the Kerry team could be worse. I have two problems with this argument. The first is that the people who've been making it to me mostly hated Bush before Iraq, before 9/11, and indeed before he got the Republican Party's 2000 nomination. Bush could have been running the greatest foreign policy since Machiavelli, and they would still be arguing for me to take Kerry's prospects on blind faith. And second, I'm not sure it's true. Pulling out of Iraq would be worse than leaving a blundering administration there, and as Mickey Kaus said of The Economist's Kerry endorsement "it's always a shaky moment in these non-peacenik endorsements when the writer tries to convince himself or herself that Kerry won't bail out on Iraq prematurely, isn't it? (Kerry has been 'forthright about the need to win in Iraq,' but do you trust him and if so why? Because Andrew Sullivan's blogging will keep him honest?)" Still, the administration has screwed up in some major ways, leaving me wrestling with the question: how bad could Kerry be?

In the end, it comes down to how much risk the candidates will take. The Democratic policy on foriegn policy risk has been pretty much the same since McGovern: they won't take any. They bug out at the first sign of casualties, and go in only when the foe is so tiny that we can smash them without committing ground troops.

The Republicans take risk. Bush took on a lot of it -- and with it, the possibility that something could go wrong.

What does the country need now? Someone risk averse, to shepherd us through, or someone who will take bold action and possibly land us in a disaster? I think a lot of people have concluded, from the fact that Bush's risky move has gone wrong, that risk aversion is therefore the superior strategy. But that doesn't follow. Jimmy Carter running right now would to my mind be inarguably worse than George Bush for all his screw ups. On the other hand, Bush I would certainly be preferable to Bush II.

Unfortunately, I have neither Bush I nor Mr Carter on the stump to make my choice easy. I have the choices I have: between someone whose foriegn policy has been so risky as to be foolhardy, or someone who will not take the political risk of voting his conscience (whatever that may be) on the war; between someone whose commanding ability to chart a course and stick to it veers into pigheaded refusal to admit he's wrong, and someone who takes four weeks to decide on a campaign bumper sticker design. Above all, I have to guess how Mr Kerry will be in office, because the president doesn't have the luxuries of a senator or a campaigner; he has to decide what to do without the other senators to hide behind, and he cannot just go out and talk about his never-never plans when action is required. He doesn't get to skip a vote, and dithering could be fatal to a lot more than his political career. When something goes badly wrong in Iraq, will Kerry stay the course, because it's important, or will he take counsel of his fears, and his party's left wing, and cut and run as soon as he decently can? Daniel Drezner advocates a minimax strategy, but it's not clear to me that Kery represents a win.

Then there's the question of what message electing Kerry would send. Does it make the world love us, because we got rid of the president they hate, or does it make them despise us, because we've just held a referendum on the Iraq war, and Bush lost?

Ultimately, I've decided to take the advice of a friend's grandmother, who told me, on her wedding day, that I should never, ever marry a man thinking he'd change. "If you can't live with him exactly the way he is," she told me, "then don't marry him, because he'll say he's going to change, and he might even try to change, but it's one in a million that he actually will."

Kerry's record for the first fifteen years in the senate, before he knew what he needed to say in order to get elected, is not the record of anyone I want within spitting distance of the White House war room. Combine that with his deficits on domestic policy -- Kerry's health care plan would, in my opinon, kill far more people, and cost more, than the Iraq war ever will -- and it's finally clear. For all the administration's screw -ups -- and there have been many -- I'm sticking with the devil I know. George Bush in 2004.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why I am not voting for Badnarik, Part II

Radley Balko says it all. Make sure you click through all the thinks. Here's a taste of what you'll find, from an interview of Mr Badnarik on the radio, conducted by Dave Kopel:

Dave Kopel took the chance to ask Badnarik to clarify his views on tax liability and fraud:

Kopel:Let's talk a little bit about the IRS. You've run seminars that people pay to come to attend, which tell people about the Internal Revenue Service and express the view that they're not legally required to pay income taxes?

Badnarik: That's not the outline of the class at all. The class is a class on constitutional fundamentals. Basically, the idea is that "we the people" ordain and establish the Constitution. "We the people" invented our form of government in 1789, therefore our government works for us, not the other way around. "We the people" give government privileges, and those are listed in Article I, Section 8.

Kopel:Right, but let's get to the IRS part.

Badnarik: The IRS can collect taxes that you're liable for. Neither you nor I are required to pay more taxes than we're liable for. You don't have to pay $1,000 more than you owe.

Kopel:Right.

Badnarik: The question is, how much do I owe? How am I liable? Show me the law that says I am liable for these taxes. All I've done is ask the IRS to answer certain questions.

Kopel:"Show me the law that says you're liable." So, when somebody gets the federal 1040 form that says, fill in how much money you made, fill out your deductions, the IRS is just sending that out frivolously, it doesn't have a law that creates the authority to say people have to pay taxes.

Badnarik: That is the question, isn't it? The question is, if there is a law that supports them sending out that 1040 form, they should be able to show it to us. There have been several groups, one of which is wethepeople.org, I believe, which have filed 570 questions to the IRS. And the IRS and the Justice Department refuse to answer. If they work for us, they don't have the authority to not answer our questions.

Kopel:So you think Congress just created this tax code of gargantuan proportions, but forgot to put a line at the very beginning: "Everybody should pay taxes according to the following?"

Badnarik: Wouldn't it be interesting if that were true.

Kopel:Is that true?

Badnarik: I would like to know if it's true.

Kopel: Well, you can read the statutes as well as everyone else. Is it true?

Badnarik: I think that it is true. I think that since 1913, our Congress has created the presumption that Americans are required to fill out this 1040 form and mail in half of everything they owe. I would like to see the law. I am under the impression that there has been a lot of fraud involved.

Kopel: So you've studied the Internal Revenue Code, and you believe there's nothing in the Internal Revenue Code that says that people are actually required to pay taxes.

Badnarik: I believe that much of what the IRS does is done under fraud. That's correct.

Kopel:So you believe there's nothing in the United States statutes, in the Internal Revenue Code, that says you have to pay income taxes.

Badnarik: I believe that is true.

Kopel: When's the last time you paid income taxes?

Badnarik: I pay all the income taxes I'm liable for. I have sent letters to the IRS requesting information, and I am waiting for the IRS to respond.

Kopel:Requesting information about the questions we discussed, which is show me where it says "Mother May I" in the Internal Revenue Code.

Badnarik: That's correct.

Kopel:When's the last time you've filed an income tax return?

Badnarik: It's been several years.

Kopel:When?

Badnarik: I don't remember. It was back in 1997, I believe.

Kopel: 1997.

Badnarik: Right.

Kopel:According to the theory of people who believe that federal taxes are mandatory, if you make more than a certain amount per year, you're required to file an income tax return.

Badnarik: No, you're required to file an income tax form, or a statement. And I have filed a statement and have complied with my understanding of the IRS code. I have asked the IRS for information, and they have neglected to respond to my requests. I've never been indicted for anything. I'm trying to resolve this question with the IRS, and they have never answered my questions.

Kopel:So since 1997 you've paid no federal income taxes.

Badnarik: Well, most of that time, much of that time, I've been unemployed.

Kopel:In some years, have you earned more than the federal taxable threshold?

Badnarik: Yes.

This is how he does when he's being interviewed by a libertarian. As Mr Balko says, "Given how close this election is, even if Badnarik does worse than Harry Browne did in 2000, there's a small chance that the LP could draw enough votes in a few states to tilt the outcome one way or the other. Should that happen, both Badnarik and the LP could get more media exposure than the LP's gotten in years. I'm sorry, but I'm just not convinced that either Badnarik or the LP speaking on behalf of libertarianism to a national audience with limited exposure to the ideology would ultimately be good for libertarianism, the philosophy."

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The Swing Voter Decides!

No, not me. As some of you may be aware, I am related to The Swing Voter: a relation of mine has voted for every winning presidential candidate since Nixon. I have been hounding said relation for months to tell me which way she is going to go, so that I could share my own private electoral indicator with my readers.

While we were talking on the phone this weekend, she revealed all: she's voting for Bush. So is another of my near and dear ones, who was undecided, and who made up her mind after reading the comments section of this web site. So you have not laboured in vain, my precious commenters! (Although it sounds like the Kerry pushers might want to get the lead out -- there's only nine shopping days until the election.)

I've been incommunicado all weekend, holed up on a Secret Project to Save Civilisation. But I am working on another sort of secret project, which I'll share with you now.

As y'all know, I live in Democratic Central. I hear rumours all the time that one side or the other is more viciously partisan, keying cars with GOP bumper stickers or stealing Kerry signs. I thought it might be interesting to run a little experiment: send one person out on Monday in a Democratic zone with a Bush/Cheney shirt, and one person out in a Red area with a Kerry/Edwards t-shirt. I'm willing to be the Republican shirt guinea pig, if there's a blogger in, say, Alabama, who's willing to take the other side and write up their experiences.

Now I have to go read all those comments and figure out to vote for. More later . . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

It seems so much more sophisticated in French . . .

Look what just hit my inbox at work:

AIDE MOI S'il vous plait

Cher ,
Permettez-moi de vous informer de mon desir d'entre dans le rapport d'affaires avec vous. J'ai obtenu votre nom et contact de la chambre de commerce de cote d'ivoire. J'ai prie plus et après cela j'ai choisi votre nom entre tant d'autres.
je pense que vous etes digne de la recommandation de ma prière. je me nomme Mlle marie kamara la seule fille des defunts M. et Mme kamara herve.
Mon père etait un negociant de cacao et exploitant d'or à Abidjan la capital economique de la Cote d'Ivoire, mon père a ete empoisonne par ses associes d'affaires. j'aimerais que vous me temoignez votre confiance afin que je fasse des affaires avec vous. Ainsi je n'aurai aucune hesitation, me fier vous pour des affaires simples et sincères.

Ma mère est morte quand j'etais un bebe et depuis lors mon père
m'a pris a sa charge. Avant la mort de mon père le 29novembre 2002 à abidjan.
Avant son deces il m'a appelé au chevet et m'expliqua qu'il avait la somme de douze millions cinq cents mille dollars USD ($12,500.000) dans un compte d'ordre fixe/ordre dans la banque principale ici à abidjan il l'a deposé à mon nom comme etant le beneficiare de cet heritage.
Il m'a egalement explique que c'etait en raison de cette richesse qu'il a ete empoisonne par ses associes d'affaires. Il à aussi conseillé de chercher un associe etranger dans un pays de mon choix ou je transfererai cet argent et l'employerai dans des investissements tel que la gestion de biens immobiliers ou la gestion d'hotel.

Monsieur, je cherche honorablement votre aide des manières suivantes:
(1) pour fournir un compte bancaire sur lequel transferer cet argent.
(2) pour servir de gardien de ces fonds puisque j'ai seulement 22 ans.
(3) Pour m'aider à immigrer dans votre pays avec une attestation de residence afin que je puisse y poursuivre mes etudes.

Ainsi dit , je suis dispose à vous offrir 15% de toute la somme qui represente mon heritage en compensation pour votre effort après le transfert de ces fonds sur votre compte.

En outre, vous indiquez vos options pour m'aider sachant pour
moi, j'ai la foi que cette transaction peut se faire le plus vite possible.

J'aimerai avoir votre point de vue sur la question et cela selon votre disponibilite.

Vous pourrez me joindre dès reception du present message a mon
email.

Merci , que Dieu vous benisse immensement.

marie kamara

Just think what I could do with a 15% commission on $12.5K! Vegas, here I come!

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Debate thread: Bush and Kerry supporters

Okay, so I care about civil liberties. Social policy at the federal level strikes me, in general, as a topic too trivial to care about: I think that the words "under God" shouldn't be in the Pledge of Allegiance, but it will be a cold day in Berkely before I give money to someone to go to court and get the justices to write it out again. But things like illegal search and seizure, habeas corpus, and government surveillance get all the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.

The problem is, I can't really feel that one party has shown any greater committment to civil liberties than the other. They're both gung-ho about the hideously costly and grotesquely ineffective war on drugs, though no one has ever managed to offer a coherent explanation as to why a few thousand more live heroin addicts are worse than a few thousand more dead inner-city residents. Bush I gave us Ruby Ridge. Clinton gave us the gutting of the fourth amendment, and the pioneering use of the paramilitary raid to resolve child custody disputes. Bush gave us the Patriot Act, but the most objectionable passages were apparently simply clearing up inconsistencies from far more objectionable legislation that Clinton signed.

On the other hand, I'm not a lawyer, though I did work for one during the Clinton administration, who was liberal but could be set off into the most delicious arm-waving, hair-pulling rants by the mere mention of the fourth amendment. So maybe I'm wrong. How about some lawyers in the audience trying to convince me that one party or the other really is better than the opposition on protecting ordinary citizens from unwarranted government interference?

But please don't mention Abu Ghraib. Y'all know I was horrified -- I called on Don Rumsfeld to resign. But no one has made a convincing argument that it was adminstration policy, rather than a screw-up. I'm more than happy to indict the administration for screwing up, but not for having an evil human rights polciy.

Nor is Gitmo a civil liberties issue in the sense that I mean. My reading has left me pretty sure that the treatment of combatants in wartime is a thorny issue without good settled law, and that the government is thus operating within a gray area, rather than taking action that goes against our previous legal tradition, or writing new, bad law. The fact that seven of the guys we released from Gitmo seem to have gone out and taken up arms against us again highlights the reason that wartime has different rules, and why those rules are so hard to set.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Who? Who? Who?

Still haven't made up my mind. And hte more I meditate on the matter, the less I can work up any emotional interest in which man occupies the White House for the next four years. I definitely prefer Laura Bush to THK, but that's not helping much.

I'll probably have more questions for supporters of both candidates up this weekend. Meanwhile, some thoughts:

I agree with Jonathan Rauch entirely:

There is nothing wrong with Kerry's senatorial "flip-flops." Maneuvering is what senators do. More disturbing has been his irresolution on Iraq since becoming a presidential candidate. Most disturbing of all is that, with only days to go before the election, I still don't feel I have a handle on what he is really all about. Perhaps Kerry is the scion of Dukakism, the doctrine that the election is about competence, not ideology. But Kerry is running for president, not city manager.

I don't believe he is an empty suit. I just wish I knew what was inside the suit. I can understand why my father fears that Kerry might be captured by the Left.

Bush is a dynamic leader, but he lacks what a president most needs: guardrails. Kerry has guardrails, but where is the road? A dispiriting choice.

The Kerry supporters whose opinions I most value have so far basically admitted that their man has a lacklustre Senate record, has been wrong on pretty much every major foriegn policy issue he's confronted, has a foreign policy team composed pretty much of the back bench from the Clinton years, and cares little enough about terrorism that every one of his votes since 9/11 has been too politically opportunistic to enable us to divine what, if anything, he actually thinks. Their argument boils down to two things:

1) The world has changed since 9/11

This is true, but not useful, since the central question is whether or not John Kerry has changed. The burden of proof is largely on Mr Kerry, and he blew it with his opportunistic votes. I would be a lot more comfortable voting for him if it weren't for his, yes, flip-flop on the supplemental; Kerry supporters can spin all they want, but all the people I know who worry about this stuff for a living agree that it was pure politics. The fact that he felt entitled to play politics with this worries me at least as much as the fact that I don't know what the hell he stands for, except election.

2) John Kerry would have to be pretty $%@! awful to be worse than Bush

I find this almost, but not quite, sufficient. Everyone who tells me this pretty much hated Bush from the moment he entered office; even though I voted for Gore (albeit with about as much thought as I put into choosing a new shade of lipstick), I lack the fine edge of hatred that enables me to discern otherwise invisible shreds of rectitude and intelligence in his opponent.

Bush supporters have been equally unconvincing. No one has offered any reasonable argument that Iraq is not a cluster [expletive deleted]. And if it was a cluster-[censored], then the blame has to be laid at the Adminsitration's door. Either it was inevitably a boondoggle, in which case Bush shouldn't have started this, or it became a boondoggle, in which case we need someone more competent in charge.

Most disappointing is the failure of Kerry supporters to offer one of the two examples that I asked for which could easily, by themselves, move me into the Kerry camp:

1) A large American government programme, other than welfare, which has been repealed after it was found to cause bigger problems than it solved, or otherwise not function properly

2) A foriegn conflict, on the scale of the current conflict (NOT one of the World Wars) that has had more damaging impact on the power that waged it than, say, the destruction of the medical technology industry would be. Such damage should be concrete, rather than nebulous: i.e. I know we're all mad that the Spanish American War launched the American Century, but the "damage" from the conflict is a little too spiritual to answer my question satisfactorily, especially since we're already well down the road of Dollar Imperialism. And the conflict should have created this damage without the interference of another major crisis, i.e. Russia's czars may have fallen because of WWI, but the rot was there for years before. On the other hand, a conflict that ultimately resulted in a bigger and uglier conflict would be more than fine, provided you can give me some decent parallels with the current situation.

Instead, Kerry supporters have harangued me about my views on entitlement spending, particularly health care, even though I specifically stated that I was not interested in such a debate, and none of my interlocutors so far have been even half as well-versed on the subject as I, in my hamf-fisted and amateurish way, am, making their arguments particularly unconvincing. Do y'all want my vote or not?

Has no one provided me with this information because there aren't good examples? (In the case of #1, I'm almost certain that there aren't, but am willing to stand corrected). Or did it get lost in the rush to castigate me for the heartless wretch I most assuredly am? Anyway, it's important enough that I wanted to give you another chance: provide me with an example of one or the other, or better yet both, and you have a very good chance of swinging me to your side.

Right now, apart from the small chance of a thermonuclear device detonated in an American city, it seems to me that the biggest threat to America is not foriegn policy at all [don't you know we're at war?--ed. Yes, I do, but it's a smallish war. Absent nuclear or smallpox attacks, it doesn't pose an existential threat to us, and I am not clear, despite the best efforst of my interlocutors, that Bush has made us either more or less safe from those two types of attacks, since the bottleneck to those sorts of spectacular operations would seem to be not The Will, but The Way.]

The biggest threat is failing to deal with budget and other problems inherent in the demographic surge towards an older population, until the problem deals with itself, catastrophically. The second biggest threat is screwing up the health care system so that we don't get innovative new drugs and equipment. And the third is running out of oil and/or screwing up the climate with our fossil fuel consumption. Kerry's better, marginally, on #3, though I hate his top-down, market-phobic approach; Bush is better, by a bigger margin, on #2, and while I'd like to believe that Bush means it about Social Security privatisation, I've been waiting with bated breath for four years, and frankly, I'm turning blue.

This is a window of opportunity! Convince me that Bush, even if he screwed up in Iraq, won't do so going forward! Convince me that Kerry's terrible domestic agenda has no chance of passage! Convince me that Bush really, truly means it this time about Social Security! Convince me that a bad American foreign policy will hurt Americans more than bad domestic policy! Convince me that you know what Kerry's actually thinking, and it shouldn't scare the bejeesus out of me! You have that rare breed, the undecided voter, sitting in your lap, begging you to make up her mind, and she's even told you exactly what she wants to hear! Surely there's one fair prince among you who holds the key to unlock my weary heart?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Tall is beautiful

Crikey. Thank God my parents never thought of that. Although it would be a lot easier to find clothes . . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Divining Disaster

Leery though I am of predictions, I'm going to make one anyway: we aren't going to have vote trouble in Florida. We've worried about it so extensively and publicly that I feel it's inevitable that our much hyped fears will fizzle on election day.

However, that doesn't mean that we can't have some entirely unexpected catastrophe somewhere else. (Note: the fact that it is unexpected does not mean that we will not find that some wingnut somewhere was warning of precisely what transpired, in the grand tradition of disaster movie scientists the world 'round.)

In fact, let's offer AI readers the opportunity to be that emotionally damaged, yet eerily prescient, scientist. What do you think will go wrong in the coming election?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Mere words can never grief assuage

I have nothing to say about last night's tragedy. What words could adequately encompass a nation's grief? I will only note that between now and the end of the World Series, I will be crooning myself to sleep every night with a picture of The Babe nestled snugly in my arms.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords

Soon they'll be everywhere! Aiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Can't we all just get along

My entire office has just sampled the new Butterfinger candy bar, which is like the bastard child of a Butterfinger and a Kit Kat. The vote is unanimous: liberal and conservative, we all say that the new candy bar is even more delicious than the original Butterfinger. Which is high praise indeed.

Liberals and conservatives, reaching across the partisan divide to resolve the issues that really matter. You see, my children, it really can be done. Where there's a crisp wafer and rich filling, there's a way . . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Asymmetrical Information is triumphantly vindicated!

I've claimed many times that the real burden of higher taxes falls not on the supperrich, but on the upper-middle class and small business owners, whose wealth isn't fungible enough to arrange not to pay taxes.

Case in point is, of course, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who as it turns out, pays an effective tax rate of 12.4% on her over $5 million in annual income. If you include FICA, and unfortunely I have to, I pay almost twice as high a percentage in federal taxes as Ms Kerry, on an income that is approximately 1/125th of Ms Heinz Kerry's.

I don't know why John Kerry keeps claiming that Bush's tax cuts go to him. It doesn't look like his family paid enough in taxes to get much of anything back.

Update Typo alert: the original post said her income was $6 million; that was a typo. It was actually $5.07 million.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Convince Me Question 7: For supporters of both candidates

This excellent post by Jim Lindgren sums up John Kerry's twenty year record of accomplishment in the Senate:

S.791: Authorizes $53 million over four years to provide grants to woman-owned small businesses. (1999)

S.1206: Names a federal building in Waltham, Massachusetts after Frederick C. Murphy, who was killed in action during World War II and awarded (posthumously) the Medal of Honor. (1994)

S.1636: A save-the-dolphins measure aiming "to improve the program to reduce the incidental taking of marine mammals during the course of commercial fishing operations." (1994)

S.1563: Funding the National Sea Grant College Program, which supports university-based research, public education, and other projects "to promote better understanding, conservation and use of America's coastal resources." (1991)

S.423: Granting a visa and admission to the U.S. as a permanent resident to Kil Joon Yu Callahan. (1987)

H.R.1900 (S.300): Awarded a congressional gold medal to Jackie Robinson (posthumously), and called for a national day of recognition. (2003)

H.R.1860 (S.856): Increased the maximum research grants for small businesses from $500,000 to $750,000 under the Small Business Technology Transfer Program. (2001)

S.J.Res.158: To make the week of Oct. 22 - Oct. 28, 1989 "World Population Awareness Week." (1989)

S.J.Res.160: To renew "World Population Awareness Week" for 1991. (1991)

S.J.Res.318: To make Nov. 13, 1992 "Vietnam Veterans Memorial 10th Anniversary Day." (1992)

S.J.Res.337: To make Sept. 18, 1992 "National POW/MIA Recognition Day." (1992)

This is the entire list of all the things that John Kerry has managed to get passed in the last twenty years.

Kerry supporters: explain why I should want a president who lacked the ability to get more than this pitiful list of bills through the senate.

Bush supporters: explain why this shouldn't gladden my libertarian heart.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why aren't I voting for Badnarik?

I'm a libertarian, right? ANd I live in a state which would go Kerry even if Jesus Christ himself walked across the Hudson to command we support Bush, so why not indulge myself in a third party vote? Short answer: because Mr Badnarik is a barking moonbat. He has, if memory serves, been arrested multiple times for driving without a license, because he views getting one as an unwarranted concession to The State. I believe he also has tax protester sympathies. I am not going to encourage the Libertarian Party to nominate more such by voting for this one.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Convince Me Question 6: For Bush supporters

If we are worried about terrorists getting WMD, as the administration says it is, and as I, living in Manhattan, most assuredly am, then how come the administration hasn't done more to secure loose nuclear materials in the former Soviet Republics?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Convince Me Question 5: for Kerry supporters

One of the issues that I'm debating is the likely long-term repercussions of the things that I don't like about each candidate. And so naturally, one of the questions I must look at is this: if we stipulate that Bush has screwed up in IRaq, why are the repercussions for the world, and/or America, likely to be worse and/or longer enduring than the domestic policies I disfavour? Please be specific about what you think the long term repercussions are (for this discussion, I will regard American soldiers killed and money spent as worth the cost). Also, I would like it if people could provide me with a historical example of a conflict on the scale of this one that offers a similar scale of consequences to the ones they are positing. World War I & II can be considered off the table for both sides; the war on terro is important, but it is vanishingly unlikely to inflict on us the kinds of casualties that those battles inflicated on America in the 20th century, much less what was done to the countries on the front lines (for reference, Britain lost 20% of its upper class, and about 15% of its overall population, in World War I; France suffered even worse.)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Convince Me Question 4: For Bush Supporters

Whether or not you think that the invasion of Iraq was a bad thing, it's pretty clear that the administration was obsessed with Iraq for reasons that no independant observer has been able to coherently discern.

a) Why was the administration so obsessed with Iraq?

b) Why doesn't this presage equal problems in the second term?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Convince Me: Question 3 -- For Kerry Supporters

One of my biggest worries about John Kerry is his health care plan, which looks to me very likely to cost upwards of $1 trillion over 10 years, and to pose a grave danger to medical innovation worldwide, since the US is widely understood to provide the profits that fund basically all medical equipment and pharmaceutical innovation. Removal of the US profit-margin from the business would, in effect, mean the end of new drugs and medical devices.

I am not interested in debating health care economics; I'm firmly convinced that his plan is a very, very bad idea. Kerry supporters are, however, invited to convince me of one of two points:

a) Kerry's plan won't pass I believe Kerry's plan has a high probability of passing, because it's essentially a middle class entitlement: the cutoff for enrollment of 300% of the poverty line, is above the median income in the United States. This will give it a nice constituency among the bottom three quintiles, as well as small businessmen who would like to offload their costs onto the government. It also hits emotional political hotbuttons: the fears of the middle class about being uninsured, health insurance for children, adn the widespread belief among Americans that someone is cheating them out of the cheap, excellent health care they deserve.

But I can be convinced otherwise. Tell me why you think that the Republicans will be able to block it. I'd like you to keep in mind Reagan's ability to get tax cuts through a divided government in the 1980's, as well as who is the natural interest group constituency against this. Also, the failure of ClintonCare is not precisely on point; I subscribe to Richard Posner's notion that the reason it failed is that it threatened those who had health care they liked, which Kerry's plan doesn't. What worries me about Kerry's plan is that it amounts to stealth nationalisation: between the new prescription drug plan, and KerryCare, I estimate that the federal government would control at least 60% of health care spending.

b) If you believe it might pass, convince me that it can be repealed if it is the disaster I so firmly believe it will be. You must do one of two things, and preferably both:

1) Provide an example of one broad-based entitlement programme that has ever been repealed in the history of the country, preferably the modern history. Welfare doesn't count; it was a uniquely unpopular constituency, poorly organised, and completely unfunded.

2) Convince me that any damage done to innovation would be temporary, rather than devastating for decades.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Convince Me Question 2: For Bush supporters

While it is arguable that the Bush administration had a plan for the post-war, but it simply didn't survive, as the military like to say, first contact with the enemy, the Bush administration seems to have substantially bungled the reconstruction. The most egregious errors that I see:

1) Ideological litmus tests for CPA hiring in Iraq
2) Ifnoring the growing insurgency until it had become a major threat
3) Refusing to ask congress for sufficient troops and money, because of the political cost of doing so

All of these were compounded by the administration's utter bull-headed stubbornness in refusing to acknowlege problems. Explain to me how the adminstration will do better in its second term, again, without recourse to administration talking points.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Convince Me Question 1: For Kerry supporters

Without reference to Kerry's talking points, explain to me what a Kerry foreign policy is actually going to look like. In order to convince me, your theory must explain his 1991 vote against Iraq I, his 2002 vote to authorise Iraq II, and his 2003 vote to deny a supplemental.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Convince me

Daniel Drezner is running an interesting series on Bush v. Kerry's foriegn policy, in which he invites Bush and Kerry supporters to assuage his doubts about their candidates.

As it happens, I'm also deciding who to vote for. And I have similar, although not identical questions, about Messrs Kerry and Bush. So I'm also going to open up the opportunity for supporters to assuage my fears about their candidates presidencies over the next few days. My questions are rather more specific than Mr Drezner's, and I hope my readers will stick to answering them, rather than ranging into free-lance criticism of their opponent, or recycling their candidate's campaign propaganda. Which reminds me: I don't want to hear about their talking points; nor am I very interested in gossip about their personalities from washington insiders. I want answers based on

1) Their voting/agenda pushing record
2) Political exigencies
3) Other decisions they have made
4) Their advisors

First of the questions is coming up in a minute. Fire away!

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

A hint of fall

Since someone asked Instapundit for Autumn pictures (and Ann Althouse has posted a few), I'll post some I took three weeks ago, when it was just a hint in the trees. I started a post, left it in draft and never finished.

Small splashes of red here and there mark the arrival of fall. They livened up a 10 mile run today along one of my favorite local routes. I returned in the afternoon to take some pictures:

The Sunday long run also marks the return of fall. I tend not to go over 10k in the Summer and Winter, but 45-70 degrees is wonderful long run weather.

I've been watching quietly as Mr. Henley becomes addicted to running, which I do every fall, partly because of this scenery. Unfortunately, my recent injuries have put a stop to the long runs.

The rest of the pictures are in the extended entry.

While running probably keeps me from getting too fat, it turns out that's not enough to keep me at it. I do it because I get depressed and can't sleep when I don't. I tend towards depression and distance runs seem to keep my 'levels' right.

I'm also a bit of a loner, so I actually enjoy the time to myself. Anyone with a house full of kids can understand this.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Masters of their domain

My wife, an adjunct faculty member at NYU, receives the following communication:

The purpose of this memo is to let you know that, going forward, the preferred method of communication from SCPS to the adjunct fcaulty communisty [oops - I'll leave that as is since it has been raised in the comments-Ed.] will be via your NYU email account. This account can be accessed through the NYU home Web site (http://home.nyu.edu). This will allow us to be much more efficient in providing you with information quickly...we request that you activate your NYU home email account as soon as possible.

So they can only send email within the NYU domain?

P.S., if you were wondering, I have been suffering a pinched nerve in my back, which has obviously interfered with all computer use and made me especially cranky.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Privacy isn't necessarily shame, but even if it is...

Oh, of course it was a mistake, and almost as obnoxious as I thought Edwards was (see also this added comment to that post).

The Cheneys chose not to make an issue of their daughter's orientation. Whether that is for fear of alienating any ugly part of the electoral base, or even because they are uptight, private or conflicted about it themselves, it was their decision, and it remains between the Cheneys.

Andrew Sullivan somehow chooses to both make fun of the Cheneys for not bringing Mary up on stage at the convention and then interpret Edwards' and Kerry's opportunistic highlighting as praise.

Mickey Kaus, for his part, cannot see any reason for Kerry to mention Mary except as some Machiavellian scheme to pander to bigots. Again: huh? Couldn't it just be that Kerry thinks of gay people as human beings like straight people - and mentioning their lives is not something we should shrink from?

Oh bullshit. Plenty of perfectly normal things are private - masturbation immediately comes to mind. But sticking to the topic at hand (er...), how often do you discuss other people's sexual orientation on highly formal occasions in front of millions of people? Even in In a hypothetical perfect world where nobody stigmatized homosexuality, Mary Cheney's orientation is her own business to discuss or not. The more public the forum, the more a polite person 'shrinks from' bringing up private, intimate or awkward matters. It's bad enough that the pundits and 527s are all over this sort of stuff. The candidates themselves have plenty of situational examples to choose from without raiding each others' families in a debate.

I have nothing against accidentally revealing wardrobe choices (and neither does most of the public, when they aren't watching TV...). Like sexual orientation, however, it's a bit intimate and might be embarassing to a more private individual. Would you bring it up in that context? If Bob Schieffer asked a question about Janet Jackson, for instance?

Anybody can have a wardrobe accident when they are in the public eye, why my opponent's daughter...

I'm with Kaus. Creepy, and aimed at a constituency to which they cannot pander directly. Not that either party has a monopoly on that technique.

I don't think this is a reason to vote one way or the other. I just think it's another step down for an event where decorum counts.

UPDATE: Some commenters note Cheney's status as a "Public Lesbian", whatever that is. Well, Chris Rock must be a "Public Black", and I'm sure every white guy reading this is ready to try his hand at performing a segment of Rock's most famous stand-up routine? I don't think so.

Funnier stuff here.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Got to Get Back to the Garden

The NY Times is pulling out the big guns before the election.

So profound is Frank Rich's 60s and 70s nostalgia that he finds his crystal ball predicts another Watergate:

But if our current presidency is now showing symptoms of a precancerous Watergate syndrome - as it is, daily - we have not yet reached that denouement immortalized by Hollywood, in which our scrappy heroes finally bring Nixon to heel in his second term. No, we're back instead in the earlier reels of his first term, before the criminality of the Watergate break-in, when no one had heard of Woodward and Bernstein.

Rich might well find a scandal at least as large as Watergate if he stopped looking for lost keys under the street lamp of his Bush hatred.

And in the Magazine , Ron Suskind pens a lengthy polemic about how the President has forsworn facts for faith, and supports his case with a few disgruntled administration alumni, Democratic Senators and a religious leader who has apparently had a falling-out with Bush. He even claims to have found an unnamed administration aide who accuses Suskind of being part of the 'reality-based community':

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality, judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors....and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

If I had more confidence that Suskind approached this article objectively, it would be quite troubling to me. As it is, the timing of the article (I question...) and the preponderance of subjectivity, condescension to the very idea of 'faith' and hearsay in its pages waves red flags (not to mention the way Suskind enabled Paul O'Neill's self-aggrandizement). This is thin gruel indeed.

This is not the first administration to have an aggressive media policy and produce its own objectively unjustifiable displays of certainty. The hyperbolic claims of Rich and Suskind remind me of Jeanine Garofalo and Sam Seder's armchair diagnoses of Korsakoff Syndrome, and have the same effect on readers like me who approach the Times with a certain...cynicism. But who can blame the Times for tailoring its tone to its core audience?

UPDATE: Some wonder "what would I believe", as if this were some sort of news story reciting facts that I willfully disregard.

If there's one thing that's driven me 'right' over these last four years (since I disagree with many parts of the party platform) it's these kinds of subjective broadsides that that give cover to the non-thinking. They can reference articles like this and describe Bush's supposed religious fantasy life as if it were some sort of unquestionable fact - instead of third party speculation as to his motivation. When I have to argue with someone taking this line, I simply make up some barely plausible explanation for why they feel the way they do and see how they react. Sometimes they get it.

There is a very high bar to story lines of the "inside Reagan's brain" variety. Arguments to motivation or nature are a staple of polemics, not news. Once you have made the leap of getting inside private meetings or into someone's head, you can suggest any possible thought process. In our company, all kinds of strange narratives circulate about how decisions are made. As a decision-maker, I know that 95% of these narratives are crap, made up by people with some kind of agenda. Describing a decision-making process of which the reporter has no first-hand experience says more about the the reporter than the subject. The Times is used as a fact sheet of received wisdom by many, so it bothers me to see a thin polemic like this in its pages. I expect it in The Nation or National Review or Air America.

The ominous nods to faith also heighten suspicion. Behavioral finance points out many irrational decision-making tendencies that have nothing to do with religion. Blaming every decision that isn't revisited on 'faith' is just a way to raise Bush's religion as a scary bogey-man for those who would see it that way.

What I don't believe are stories that pretend to know things that they can't possibly know and offer one insidious explanation for phenomena that have many more benign explanations.

Clinton could have made this war, and made many of the same mistakes. People like Rich and Suskind would have a completely different, more flattering (and possibly also fictional) narrative for stumbling into it. The whole 'admit a mistake so we can hang you with it' business is a canard. Remember all those confessionals about bombing targets in Sudan and ill-supported military missions in Eastern Africa? Of course not.

Note that David Sanger, on the same day, speculates on how the administration would clean house after the election. Will that also be read as faith-driven inadmission of mistakes as well?

DOUBLE UPDATE: Things I do believe? How about Langeweische's excellent article about the Green Zone in the Atlantic. That's reporting, and it describes lots of mistakes made in the course of the American occupation.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Vote Fraud = BAD

One would have thought it would go without saying, but apparently not, to judge from my email. So here goes: those bozos in Nevada and Oregon who thought it would be oh-so-cute to tell people they were registering them to vote, and then throw away the registrations of people who registered for the other party, should be horsewhipped, hanged from the nearest tree, drawn and quartered, and forced to watch the entire series run of Full House. Hanging's too good for them.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Technical question

I've switched to Thunderbird for my email, and I love it, except for one leeetle problem, which is that it seems to periodically decide to delete all my messages. Anyone else had this problem, and if so, do you know how to fix it?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A pox on both the houses

You know, you'd think that there would be very few tax reduction bills I don't like, but Congress has managed to find one.

It's not that I disagree with the original intent of the bill, which was to reduce taxes on froeign income in order to compensate businesses for the loss of the export tax subsidy that the WTO overruled recently. Our country's unmatched mania for taxing the overseas income of its citizens and corporations deserves a quick death. But the tax bill (predictibly) is larded with so many giveaways to every industry group with a lobbyist and a dream that the overall effect is awful. And those tax subsidies aren't even efficiency-enhancing marginal rate decreases; they're efficiency-destroying deductions.

Of course, if we eliminated the corporate income tax, hopefully as part of the Jane Galt tax plan, we wouldn't have this disgusting shower of pork. . . .

. . . well, a girl can dream, can't she?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Nobel news

Anyone who wants to know more about the work for which this year's nobel prize was awarded should head to the magnificent Marginal Revolution for an explanation. I'd love to give you my explanation, but I'm afraid Real Business Cycle Theory is too complex for my poor little head.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Open thread

So here's the debate: if we shouldn't listen too much to what candidates say, what should we look at? Their advisors? Their previous record? The interest groups they depend on? Economic developments coming up? And in each case, what do you think the effects will be? Please discuss.*

*Without profanity

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Watch what I say, not what I do . . .

Andrew Sullivan writes about John Kerry today:

The major objection . . . is that Kerry simply cannot be trusted. He won't simply change tactics in the war; he'll change direction. His long record of appeasing America's enemies certainly suggests as much. And I don't blame anyone who thinks that's enough evidence and votes for Bush as a result. But it behooves fair-minded people also to listen to what Kerry has actually said in this campaign: that he won't relent against terrorism. He isn't Howard Dean. And 9/11 has changed things - even within the Democratic party. Moreover, the war on terror, if we are going to succeed in the long run, has to be a bipartisan affair. By far the most worrying legacy of the Bush years is the sense that this is a Republican war: that one party owns it and that our partisan battles will define it. Simply put: that's bad for the country and bad for the war. Electing Kerry would force the Democrats to take responsibility for a war that is theirs' as well. It would deny the Deaniac-Mooreish wing a perpetual chance to whine and pretend that we are not threatened, or to entertain such excrescences as the notion that president Bush is as big a threat as al Qaeda or Saddam. It would call their bluff and force the Democrats to get serious again about defending this country. Maybe I'm naive in hoping this could happen. But it is not an inappropriate hope. And it is offered in the broader belief that we can win this war - united rather than divided.

I have no particular opinion right now as to whether Kerry would be better or worse on The War on Terror: that's one of the things I'm struggling to decide, in the runup to the election. But I think that it is pretty much completely useless to listen to what the candidates have to say about the matter.

One of the reasons for this, of course, is that candidates usually get Overtaken By Events: Bush's foriegn policy now looks nothing like what he said it would in 2000, even though I think he probably sincerely believed what he said at the time.

But the other reason is that when the stakes are high, as they certainly are on this issue, candidates will, umm, creatively enhance their true positions. I've heard a number of Democrats get emotional on this issue, including in print: "Bush says Kerry will submit our actions to UN veto. This is a lie, because Kerry has explicitly said that he wouldn't!" It doesn't seem to have occurred to any of them that one can honestly simultaneously believe that

a) Kerry said he wouldn't
b) Kerry will anyway

because one might think that Kerry isn't telling the truth. For those who have emotional trouble admitting that their candidate might say things that aren't true, practice on an easier one: Bush has promised to halve the deficit in five years. Does this make anyone who claims differently a "liar"? Ah, a light dawns. Now apply that same logic to the Democratic candidate's equally implausible claim that he will balance the budget deficit in five years. (Note: it is possible that either candidate will actually see the deficit cut in five years, through some combination of congressional restraint or unexpectedly surging tax revenues. But neither candidate can claim that the platform upon which they are campaigning will produce this highly desireable result.)

While I certainly think it's useful to read candidates' policy platforms, I think the larger the claim, the less likely it is to have any basis in fact. Thus when John Kerry says he wants to give a $4K tax credit for college tuition, that's probably a good guide to what he will actually try to do. When he outlines his health care plan, that's probably close-ish to what he will attempt (although not, probably to what he will get trhough congress), but the cost-benefit analysis is likely to be more fiction than fact. And when he makes grandiose claims about his foreign policy, well, hold onto your wallet. Far better to deduce his future foriegn policy from his voting record in the Senate, than from the grand plans he's making with his imaginary friends in France and Germany.

That goes double for George Bush. The fact that George Bush talks about building alliances does not mean that he is actually going to do so. His alleged committment to cutting spending is a cruel joke. And his energy policy cannot be redeemed by extravagent claims about our future security.

But too, ignoring their speeches can redound to the candidates' benefit. Better to look at Kerry's pro-trade votes than his outsourcing rhetoric (though to be fair, I've heard it argued that he will be too dependant on anti-trade forces for his electoral health to betray them). Better to look at George Bush's supply-side achievement in equalising Capital Gains and Dividend tax treatment, than his Laffer-curve rhetoric. But positive or negative, we'll all have a much better discussion if we stop throwing the candidates' talking points at eachother.

Update Great minds think alike: Arnold Kling wrote something very similar today.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Holy ouch! batman

I just saw the most recent SwiftVets ad. They're now entirely off the dubious claims about his Vietnam service, and now documenting John Kerry: The VVAW Years. These ads aren't going to be as damaging as the first ones, but I would think they'd be pretty hurtful: there's a lovely quote from Mr Kerry comparing the US military to Genghis Khan.

Of course, I have no idea why this matters, given that Mr Bush, by all account, was staggering around in a daze at the time. ANd I really have no idea why they're running on my cable system, where one imagines large swathes of the audience seeing the Genghis Khan quote and nodding "damn straight!" But it's the first time I've actually seen a Swiftvet ad, so I thought it was worth noting.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Debate liveblogging

Bush is doing a hell of a lot better this time. He's stopped sounding exasperated, which was killing him in the last debate, and earlier in this one.

He is lying through his teeth about drug reimportation, God bless him. Why should Kerry be the only one who gets to promote never-never plans?

He's on fire talking about the Medicare prescription drug benefit. Personally, I hate the Medicare prescription drug benefit with a passion seldom found in one so young. But Bush sounds engaging. I think maybe domestic issues may turn out to be his strong point.

Now Kerry is calling him a liar. Could be effective, but I don't think so. Al Gore didn't win demagoguing the drug companies, and I just don't think it's a strong issue.

Ooooh, that hurt. Where was Kerry on Medicare, Bush asks.

Kerry's wounded but not down. Did so work on Medicare! says Kerry. (Where's his name on the bill, then?) And balanced the budget at the same time! WHich you don't know how to do! This would be more effective if John Kerry weren't in exactly the same place in the Senate as he was in 1997. So how come he can't balance the budget now?

Goodness, the Ramblinator is back. What was that about the 65% copay? My Eyes Glaze Over. The phrase "I have a plan . . . " is getting as grating as Bush chirping "Wrong war, wrong place, wrong time!"

Bush is sooooooooooooo much better than he was during the foreign policy debate. Kerry's getting exasperated now. My rule: Exasperated Man loses. But it was a minor slip -- I expect he'll pull it together. And Bush really needs to stop getting out of his chair before the moderator calls on him.

Bush tries to land the "Trial lawyer" body blow. Does the American public care? I have a hard time imagining it does. But he's landing some solid punches on John Kerry's thoroughly uninspiring Senate record and missed votes.

Finally! Someone's slamming Bush on spending. Bush aptly dodges by pushing the defense button.

Kerry's saying the government won't be taking over our health care under his plan. So how come the government's going to be spending so much money on it?

Bush is not just doing a much better job of keeping his face under control than the last debate; I actually think he's doing a marginally better job than John Kerry, who has a most unattractive supercilious smirk.

Kerry's landing some blows on job losses. But I don't think it's as compelling as it could be; Bush is connecting the job losses to the bubble pop and 9/11, which has the added advantage of actually being true.

More never-never promises on the deficit! Bush promises magical spending cuts! Kerry promises that Bob Rubin will spread his fairy dust over the budget and make it balance!

Kerry just said something that's actually untrue: "the president's budget deficit keeps getting bigger and bigger". Actually, it peaked quite a while ago, and it's projected to steadily shrink.

Kerry's flailing on the budget math. Even by his numbers, he can't possibly claim that he's going to reduce the budget deficit: he claims (using static-line models) that he'll raise $800 billion from the tax cut repeals; he estimates (using over $300 billion of hastily jerry-rigged "administrative cost savings") that his health care plan will cost $653. On top of that you have to add all the other spending he's proposed. (His corporate tax change, which he's just mentioned, is revenue neutral).

KErry: I was there when the budget was balanced! Me: I was there when the World Trade Center site was cleaned up! I claim full credit!

Bush: The air is cleaner since I've been president. Wow! The air is cleaner since I started blogging! I claim full credit!

Kerry is trying to pound Bush, but he's getting lost in eighty billion details. Mr Ramblinovitch, I'm ready for my close-up. Dumbest line of the debate so far: "I'm going to be a president who believes in science."

Ouch! Bush brought Kyoto back to allegations that Kerry's trying to win some European beauty contest. Kerry's trying to save, but I don't think very effectively.

Kerry's on his tax credit for manufacturing jobs/outsourcing tax changes. I think it's sounding good, but the Ramble Beast stalks his every word.

I would pay cash money to see someone stand up and ask Kerry why he won't release his wife's tax records, if he's so righteous about tax cuts for the rich? (The rumour is that Teresa pays about 15% effective average rate, thanks to aggressive tax planning.)

I should have mentioned earlier: was I the only one who was shocked when Kerry seemed to imply that he was going to bring back the draft?

MBA Patrol: Bush is talking about Subchapter-S Corps! Bestill my beating heart! Is Kerry's detail mania contagious?

(On a serious note, I think Kerry just got spanked trying to imply that Bush was funneling tax breaks to himself through small businesses.)

Shorter Kerry: I voted for the patriot act before I was against it.

Religious Right Lady is asking why it's not better to just use adult stem cells. John Kerry is not at his most compelling. The upshot: my rich celebrity friends want me to kill babies in order to extend their lives. What's one miserly little fetus compared to Christopher Reeves? Close it up and move on, Mr Kerry. You're not on friendly ground.

Now Kerry's trying to rebut by accusing of waffling. Bush comes back and points out that he allowed research on cell lines coming from embryos that had already been destroyed, but would not promote the destruction of new embryos. This round to George Bush on point.

George Bush has been asked who he'd appoint to the supreme court. His constitutional interpretation is, to say the least, bizarre, but points for forcing the pledge into the debate, which I bet $10 is about to force Kerry to concur that "Under God" belongs in the pledge.

Kerry is trying to turn the debate by pointing out hte shocking fact that George Bush is going to appoint conservative judges! Not me, says Kerry! I'm just going to appoint good judges!

Memo to Mr Kerry: There is no one in the country stupid enough to actually believe this.

Another REligious Right Lady! What do you tell a pro-life person who doesn't want their tax dollars spent on abortions?

ANswer: I will stall for time while swearing my ultimate fealty to NARAL! Special Democratic bonus points: equates not spending tax dollars on something with "legislating morality". Special double Democratic bonus points: federally funded abortion is a constitutional right, but that's not "pro-abortion".

Memo to Mr Kerry: Pro-life voters don't want you to respect them--they want you to not spend their tax dollars on abortions!

Bush is now painting himself as a moderate on abortion. Strangely, I think this is working. Kerry is pretty much completely hog-tied by the NARAL machine.

Closing question: name three wrong decisions you've made in your presidency. THis is the debate equivalent of the interviewer who asks "What is your biggest weakness". Bush is a better staller than Kerry. He's blathering, but in a constructive way: the big decisions have been right. But now he's back on IRaq. Not exactly a strong closer.

Memo to Kerry: PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE STOP GIVING LAUNDRY LISTS AND GIVE US THE HIGHLIGHTS! YOU'RE KILLING A STRONG CASE!!!

Ooooooooohhhh noooooooooooooo! Kerry finished up his litany of Bush's wrong's with discussion of equipment, giving Bush an opening to bring up the $87 billion. Kerry tries to pull it out, and gets in a good line with "not giving a slush fund to Halliburton", but then completely *$!%s it up by throwing in the tax cuts as a reason to vote against hte supplemental. Now, I believe that the AMerican people don't want to give a slush fund to Halliburton, but I don't believe that they want to wait until you're satisfied with our tax policy to equip our soldiers.

Quick: which candidate is more annoying? It's a tough call. Bush is more irritating, I think, but on the other hand, he doesn't talk much. One has terrifying visions of hours and hours of Kerry's reminiscences about his VVAW days pre-empting ER.

Bush finally mentions the afghanistan elections in his closing speech. I'm surprised we didn't hear this long ago. (I'm also surprised, incidentally, that Kerry doesn't spend more time on securing Soviet nukes in Eastern Europe, which is a slam dunk rejoinder to WMD.)

The verdict: gosh, I'm too tired to guess. But expectations were so low for Bush, that I almost think not drooling on himself was a win.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why I am desperately, desperately afraid of Kerry's health care plan

Alex Tabarrok tells us what sort of effect price controls are likely to have on pharmaceutical development:

Acemoglu and Linn's paper is formally about a different issue; the effect of market size on innovation. What they find is that a 1 percent increase in the potential market size for a drug leads to an approximately 4 percent increase in the growth rate of new drugs in that category. In other words, if you are sick it is better to be sick with a common disease because the larger the potential market the more pharmaceutical firms will be willing to invest in research and development. Misery loves company.

Although they don't mention it, this finding has implications for price controls. In the pharmaceutical market the major costs are all fixed costs (they don't vary much with market size) so profit =P*Q-F. Acemoglu and Linn look at changes in Q but a 1% change in P has exactly the same effects on profits, and thus presumably on R&D, as a 1% change in Q.

We can expect, therefore, that a 1% reduction in price will reduce the growth rate of new drug entries by 4% and a 10% reduction in price will reduce new drug entries by 40%. That is a huge effect. I suspect that the authors have overestimated the effect but even if it were one-half the size would you be willing to trade a 10% reduction in price for a 20% reduction in the growth rate of new drugs? No one who understands what these numbers mean would think that is a good deal.

As someone who is hoping to extend her lifespan, and quality of life, through the miracle of modern pharmaceuticals, this is frankly terrifying. I am currently enjoying unparalleled lung health through a new drug, Singulair, that might well not have been developed if even modest price controls were in place; family members and friends are similarly excited about Advair, the combination bronchiodilator/steroid which is also a new development.

I probably will not vote for either Kerry or Bush. But as I consider whether one might be the lesser of two evils, I am struck by the fact that my disagreements with Bush are basically short term ones, which are unlikely to substantially outlast his administration, the conduct of the war on Iraq being chief among them. (Or they are things on which there is basically no daylight between him and John Kerry).

Oh, his foriegn policy decisions will certainly have lasting repercussions, but I don't think that they will be as long-lasting as the repercussions if John Kerry succeeds in further nationalising health care, or as John Kerry's supreme court appointments are likely to be. Is it worth it to give up future drug advancements in order to punish Bush for screwing up in Iraq? I'm surprised at how few people seem to be seriously considering this question.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Public-minded policy

Question for those of us with mild-asthma: do we or don't we?

I'm talking, of course, about the flu shot.

We're supposed to get them, because flu in someone with compromised lungs is no fun. On the other hand, I've had the flu, and my asthma was bad, but not hospital bad. On the third hand, I almost died once from an unlucky confluence of cigarette smoke and a pitcher of margaritas; you never know what might get you. On the fourth hand, there are a lot of people out there with much higher risk than me.

To hell with it; I've decided not to get the flu shot so that other people who really need it will be sure to have some available. But I'd better not see any of you healthy people sucking up their flu vaccine.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Is Bush bad for Business?

Sigh. Here's the latest thing for Democrats to make much of: 200 business school professors signed a letter saying Bush's economic policies are bad! This proves that Bush is, like, the worst president ever!

C'mon. Look at the list and you'll see that the only top business school with significant representation is Harvard, which is also, unsurprisingly, a huge, and hugely liberal school. There's a smattering of Harvard friends from down the road at MIT, and then one or two professors each from other schools (none at all from my alma mater, perhaps predictibly.) On business school faculties, as with any other group, you can find one or two people to sign just about anything. This is hardly a ringing denunciation: aside from the Harvard profs, whom one assumes decided to do this as a group (and whom one can also assume share fairly similar political beliefs), for every business professor who signed this, there were at least fifty other business professors on their faculty who didn't. (For Wharton and MIT, I concede, the proportion may be as low as 10-to-1.) Does that "prove" that the accusations in these letters are a load of [expletive deleted]?

A better guess is that what it proves is that the temptation, for economists, to fudge ones facts to lend the imprimatur of economics to largely non-economic value judgements is bound to be irresistable to some. Take the first paragraph of their letter:

As professors of economics and business, we are concerned that U.S. economic policy has taken a dangerous turn under your stewardship. Nearly every major economic indicator has deteriorated since you took office in January 2001. Real GDP growth during your term is the lowest of any presidential term in recent memory. Total non-farm employment has contracted and the unemployment rate has increased. Bankruptcies are up sharply, as is our dependence on foreign capital to finance an exploding current account deficit. All three major stock indexes are lower now than at the time of your inauguration. The percentage of Americans in poverty has increased, real median income has declined, and income inequality has grown.

These professors are connecting legitimate concerns about the budget and current account deficits to low GDP growth, bankruptcies, income declines, and so on. But any causal link between budget deficits and growth (and many argue that there is none) is much weaker than the causal link between all of the things they cite, and the recession of 2001, which they somehow neglect to mention. Now, one may argue that the tax cuts were not structured ideally. But no one who is entitled to an opinion on the matter that I have spoken with believes that differently structured tax cuts would have raised the pace of growth by more than a tenth of a percent, optimistically.

Citing poverty and unemployment is particularly odd, considering that the amazing story of this recession has been how little poverty increased and employment decreased, relative to earlier recessions. One of the exciting developments is that low-wage employment stayed relatively steady. This was not exciting for me, when I was a laid-off management consultant, but it meant that the most marginal members of our economy were able to keep putting food on the table, while I moved back home with mom and dad.

In general, the things they cite are true, but blaming Bush, by implication, for these woes is in most cases unsupportable. He certainly isn't responsible for the bubble popping (are these professors trying to argue that the Dow should be at 12,000, or the Nasdaq at 6,000? Would they dare to say as much to their students or colleagues?) A quick look at the Census Bureau's income page will reveal that the Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, has been rising steadily for thirty years, through Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Bankruptcies and declines in real median income are, like unemployment and higher poverty, what we'd expect in a recession: real national income declined too. What is salutary is how little these shifts have been, compared to what we'd expect after the Clinton administration oversaw a speculative bubble of a magnitude unseen since the 1920's. (For the record, I don't think that bubble was Clinton's or congress's fault, any more than I think the resulting recession was Bush's fault. What was Clinton supposed to do: lock the nation in its room until it stopped gambling on Webvan?)

The letter goes on to excoriate Bush for the deficit:

he fiscal reversal that has taken place under your leadership is so extreme that it would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. The federal budget surplus of over $200 billion that we enjoyed in the year 2000 has disappeared, and we are now facing a massive annual deficit of over $400 billion. In fact, if transfers from the Social Security trust fund are excluded, the federal deficit is even worse – well in excess of a half a trillion dollars this year alone. Although some members of your administration have suggested that the mountain of new debt accumulated on your watch is mainly the consequence of 9-11 and the war on terror, budget experts know that this is simply false. Your economic policies have played a significant role in driving this fiscal collapse. And the economic proposals you have suggested for a potential second term – from diverting Social Security contributions into private accounts to making the recent tax cuts permanent – only promise to exacerbate the crisis by further narrowing the federal revenue base.

Now, I too hate the deficit. But I don't hate it for economic reasons; I hate it because I don't think that we should commit our children to pay for our spending, except in an emergency, which we aren't in. (Yes, conservatives, I know: The War on Terror. But we don't need to run a deficit to pay for it; it's well within the range of a modest tax increase. Which is what we should do, if we think the War on Terror is worth spending the money for. World War II, on the other hand, really couldn't be financed any other way except deficit spending: at its height, it was consuming more than half of GDP.)

Bush is undoubtedly responsble for a large portion of the deficit; nearly half of it is the result of either his tax cuts, or his spending increases. (The other half is due to recession and "technical change", i.e. it turns out that the late-1990's spike in tax revenues was due to bubble gains, not real improvements in tax collection.) But even if Bush had changed not one thing from the Clinton years, there would still be a large budget deficit, on the order of $200 billion. If you remove social security income from the picture, it becomes clear that even the Clinton administration never ran a surplus on an accounting basis, since all that revenue was accruing liabilities from the moment it came in.

I hardly need point out that the spectacle of business school professors advocating that the government should continue operating what is, in effect, an unfunded pension plan, rather than switching over to a property-based system, because running the government books on an accounting basis rather than a cash basis would reveal that the organisation is insolvent is . . . well . . . a tad surprising.

Moreover, any business school professor should surely agree that the proper question in such a document is not whether the candidate meets some platonic ideal, but "compared to what". Mr Kerry's fiscal plans are, at this point, more deficit-ridden than Mr Bush's by a small margin. (A large margin, if you look at non-campaign cost estimates for his health plan.)

If you read down, you'll see that indeed, non-economic value judgements seem to be driving the letter:

We also urge you to consider the distributional consequences of your policies. Under your administration, the income gap between the most affluent Americans and everyone else has widened. Although the latest data reveal that real household incomes have dropped across the board since you took office, low and middle income households have experienced steeper declines than upper income households. To be sure, the general phenomenon of mounting inequality preceded your administration, but it has continued (and, by some accounts, intensified) over the past three and a half years.

Some degree of inequality is inherent in any free market economy, creating positive incentives for economic and technological advancement. But when inequality becomes extreme, it can be socially corrosive and economically dysfunctional. Problems of this sort are visible throughout much of the developing world. At the moment, the most commonly accepted measure of inequality – the so-called Gini coefficient – is far higher in the United States than in any other developed country and is continuing to move upward. We don’t know where the breakpoint is for the U.S., but we would rather not find out. With all due respect, we believe your tax policy has exacerbated the problem of inequality in the United States, which has worrisome implications for the economy as a whole. We very much hope you will take this threat to our nation into account as you consider new fiscal approaches to address the nation’s most pressing economic problems.

It is perfectly legitimate to rail against income inequality, and seek political outcomes to fix it. But that's not a business or economic judgement; it's a value judgement, about the tradeoff between things like property rights and economic freedom, and things like economic security and equality. Their judgement as business school professors is no better nor worse about such things than the judgement of the rest of the country.

The bottom line: these professors seem to be Democrats. They thus prefer Democratic policies, and Democratic politicians. They are perfectly entitled to their opinions. But they ought to make it clear to their audience that these judgements are personal, not professional.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the sort of intellectual honesty we can expect from many people on either side of the debate.

Update But what about the current account deficit? My readers cry. The current account deficit is, to my mind, a very bad thing. But it has a lot of causes, only a few of which are related to George Bush's policies. I think that the current account deficit has the potential to be a very destabilising force for our economy. But John Kerry's tax cut repeal, for example, would have only a trivial impact on the current account deficit, even if he weren't planning to immediately spend any extra revenue on new programmes.

Update II Why am I talking about John Kerry? My (liberal) readers cry. The letter was about George Bush. My children, this is going to come as quite a shock to you, but when letter like this are released close to the election, the intent is not to engender a Come-to-Jesus moment in the administration, but (brace yourselves) to get people to vote for whoever they did not write the letter to.

Update III William Sjostrom has

I've had a number of people write and blog about this piece I wrote a while back on smart growth, and why I think there are problems with it.

Let me start by saying that I'm firmly behind many of the aims of smart growth, such as mixed-use zoning. I think the attempt to ensure that poor people can't come within 100 miles of you by restricting zoning to one-acre lot single-family homes is one of the more repulsive uses of the state. This is saying something, from someone who basically thinks that most uses of the state are pretty repulsive.

Where I depart from the smart-growth/new-urbanist is in rejecting the belief, which I think is hopelessly naive, that If You Zone it They Will Come. While I agree that there is more of a market for denser, old-style suburban living than is currently being satisfied, I do not believe that those consumers are a majority of home buyers. The fact that people like to vacation on Nantucket does not mean that they like to live there.

And I strongly disagree with the Smart Growthers that you can have meaningful mass transit at population densities much lower than New York City's. (The whole city, not just Manhattan; most of New York is row houses and low-rises, not skyscrapers.) One critic wrote on his blog

This is a tiny quibble (with Galt) but this bizarre statement [about secretaries commuting 2 hours from Yonkers, a small city a few miles from the Bronx] struck home: Yonkers is an 18 minute train ride from Grand Central Station. The only way it's 2 hours from anywhere in NYC is if you drive at rush hour, and I just don't imagine a lot of secretaries paying $1000/month to park their cars when they could simply take the train.

I might add that Yonkers is, in fact, old school smart growth. I grew up in a "suburb" outside Yonkers, where I could walk to school and bike to the store, where my father biked to the train station to get to his job in the City. This is exactly the model that smart growth advocates.

The fundamental disconnect is that Galt somehow equates New York City with New Urbanism and smart growth. Almost every one of her comments is coming from a Manhattan viewpoint, even though Manhattan is THE unique city in America. Not even SF is such a caricature of urbanism as Manhattan, yet Galt somehow acts as if Seaside is more like Manhattan than it is like Middle America.

As it happens, my would-be interlocutor is factually incorrect -- the fastest train from Yonkers is 25 minutes, and runs only at 6am; the other commuter trains average 30-45 minutes. Since few people live or work in train stations, one has to factor in getting to and waiting for the train, which frequently involves a subway ride in New York, making an hour an extremely conservative one-way estimate for the average commute from Yonkers. But that's quibbling: the main point is one that was made several times--SMART GROWTH IS NOT CITY LIVING.

Well, no, its proponents say it's not, but as it happens, New York City is the only city in the US where mass transit accounts for the majority of commutes. (And even that includes people like my co-blogger, who drive a long way through New Jersey to take the ferry). From what I know of DC, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston, "walkability" is limited to the same affluent people, with enough money to sand the rough edges off city life. And the parts where those people live are almost as dense as the parts where the rich people in New York live. The less dense parts are poorer, and worse served by public transportation, because the densities won't support it. I'm not as familiar with San Francisco, but my understanding is that the Bay Area is pretty much dominated by the automobile. No, if you want a place where public transportation is really dominant, Manhattan is the only game in town. That should tell proponents of mass transit something about what kind of densities are really necessary to make public transportation work. My affiliation of the smart growth cause with city living is thus not ignorant accident; it's a deliberate rejection of the idea that you can have walkability without high density.

(But what about old line, walkable suburbs? My critics will ask. Need I state the obvious? Pre-WWII suburbs were built around two things -- plentiful domestic servants, and stay-at-home mothers -- that are no longer prevalent. They were also built during times when inability to store food made daily marketing a necessity. Daily marketing is also, as anyone living in a city with children knows, is also a necessity if you or the grocery boy has to carry all of your groceries home. But it is not something that anyone but a freshness zealot would voluntarily choose to sandwich between a ~1 hr commute and getting dinner on. This is why most people I know who live in old line suburbs do their shopping in cars, and why people vacation in Nantucket, rather than living there.)

Then another fun fellow decided to "fisk" me, proving decisively that the verb is no longer limited to the right wing. Fun with fisking--can I play? I've taken the liberty of cleaning up his text, which is rendering for me with question marks where the quotations should be, and blockquoting it for easier readibility. Mr Lewyn, if you're reading this . . . the blockquote tag is your friend.

Here's what he wrote, minus an introduction that didn't add anything.

Smart growth is great if you are an upscale professional, preferably without children, who can score a relatively large apartment fairly close to work. It's a lot less fun for the majority trying to cram your family into four or five rooms. Smart growth is great if you are savvy enough to manipulate an urban school system into keeping your children away from the poor kids; it is not so nice for the majority who must make do.

My response: I guess Galt's ideal of smart growth is not mine. To me, "smart growth" means more people can get to more places in more than one way (i.e. not just by driving). My ideal is that you should be able to get the schools you want WITHOUT having to move a zillion miles out to an automobile-dependent suburb; this was the norm in America for the first half of the 20th century, and I don't know why it cannot be that way again.

See above. But let me also point out that in 1960, only 40% of the population had a high school diploma; the search for a decent school was not the obsession it has become in the pre-WWII years. Moreover, the old suburbs he's talking about were manifestly the province of a very small, affluent percentage of the population who were, that's right, fleeing the poor people in the cities. While I, too, think that old line suburbs are a lovely compromise between density and sprawl, they were not within the means of ordinary Americans when they were built.

But I appreciate Galt's candor in stating that a family's ultimate goal must be "keeping your children away from the poor kids".

Galt wants to have it both ways on class warfare, by claiming to defend suburbanites against both the rich and the poor: on the one hand, she contrasts the salt of the earth suburbanites (in her words, "the majority who must make do?) against the imaginary urban elite. On the other, she claims to defend the middle class's interest in avoiding the poor.

Oh, snore. Is there anyone left in my old movement who recognizes irony when it hits them in the head?

Smart growth is great if you can afford to have everything you buy delivered, or are in excellent physical condition with a physically undemanding job; it is not so great if you have to come home from your shift at the nursing home to lug groceries a quarter-mile down the street, and then up three flights of stairs.

My response: Since when is the only alternative to sprawl lugging ?up three flights of stairs?? Were there no one-story houses in pre-sprawl America? Were there no elevators?

Um, no, there were very few elevators in residential apartment buildings before WWII. There were one-story houses, but that's not very "smart"; if you build them on a small lot, you're crammed into inadequate housing, and if you build them on bigger lots, you're sprawling. If Mr Lewyn will take the time to visit areas currently serviced by mass transit, he will find that most of the housing in the service areas consist of 3-6 story buildings without elevators. Moreover, if he will try carrying his groceries home 1/4 mile, he will find that it is hard enough even without a stair climb at the end, if he wants to carry more than 1 day's worth of food.

And what about the victims of sprawl- the people too young, too old, too poor, or too disabled to drive? They don?t get any sympathy from the so-called libertarians; best to ignore them.

The libertarians are not passing laws preventing the old, young, or disabled from living in walkable areas (I am unfamiliar with the notion that someone can be "too poor to drive", and statistics on poor households indeed show that most of them have at least one car). They just aren't agitating for laws forcing everyone else to live in neighbourhoods most hospitable to the old, young, and disabled. We stand shoulder to shoulder with the smart-growth crowd on disabling the pernicious zoning practices that keep denser housing from being built--but they get in a snit because we won't help them pass laws keeping anything else from being erected.

Smart growth is great if you can afford to eat in the plethora of restaurants; it is not so enjoyable if you have to scrape up an extra 20% for the ingredients in tuna casserole. Smart growth is great if you have a nanny to take the kids to the park during the day; it is not so terrific if you have to choose between wasting several precious hours standing around the playground, or letting your kids languish inside. Smart growth is great if you can afford taxis when you need them; it is not so good if you are forced to take three busses to get somewhere you really need to be.

Response: Ideally, Smart growth means that fewer people have to take three buses. Under sprawl, everything is so far apart that virtually any non-downtown commute takes three buses. Smart growth should mean more public transit which means more people can get where they need to be with one or two buses, or with no buses at all (i.e. on foot). (Though, of course, there is often a gap between ideal and reality, and lots of things that are called "smart growth" don't necessarily change the status quo that much).

Ideally, we would all be thinner, richer, and have a full, luxurious head of hair. But that doesn't mean we should pass laws banning soup kitchens, toupees, or jeans above a size eight.

The idea of walking to work is very nice, but until telecommuting becomes widespread, it's not exactly practical. Going to sell your house every time you change jobs, or limit your job search to the number of firms that can fit within a half-mile radius of your house? (Keep in mind that you need other houses there, as well as a school, some churches, and all those stores you aren't driving too.)

Many of the smart-growth complaints I've fielded have this same plaintive sound. When you point out the problems for the non-affluent of living densely, they say "but that's not what I mean by smart growth", and retreat to some pleasing vision in which there are no tradeoffs between walkability and convenience. It reminds me of an exchange in Robert Heinlein's Starman Jones.

"How do you know you need cities to have civilisation?" Ellie asked. "I can imagine a perfectly beautiful civilisation which just sits around in trees and thinks lovely thoughts."

Max scratched his head. "Would you want to live in such a civilisation?"

"No", said Ellie frankly. "It would bore me to death. But I can think about it, can't I?"

The fact that you can construct, in your imagination, some lovely world in which trains do not need minimum population densities to support their cost-and-fuel-efficient use does not convincingly mandate a need for the rest of us to enact your vision.

And again, note the weepy, hypocritical class warfare rhetoric- hypocritical because one driving factor for sprawl is exclusion - as GALT HERSELF NOTES AT THE BEGINNING OF HER ESSAY (talking about keeping your children away from the "poor kids").

Why is it that the irony deficient are rarely content with their initial error, but insist upon broadcasting it to their wincing audience again and again?

Smart growth is great if your family members are all affluent enough to take care of themselves; it is not so fulfilling when you have to shove your ailing mother into the kids room when her resources fail.

Response: I really don't see what this has to do with smart growth, except that your ailing mother is a lot more helpless if you can't reach her, or she you, without a car - especially once she's so ailing that she can't drive.

Our irony-deficient interlocutor now reveals that he also became an avid supporter of smart growth without, somehow, realising that it would entail putting more people in less space.

Smart growth, in other words, is wonderful for those with the werewithal to smooth over its little rough spots. But ask the priced out secretaries commuting 2 hours a day from Yonkers how "liveable" New York is.

Response: What about the priced out secretaries driving an hour to work in Atlanta and Los Angeles? After all, high housing prices aren't limited to New York. But maybe Galt thinks a two hour commute is the American Dream as long as its by car.

And furthermore, without realising that most workforce growth is taking place in suburbs, rather than cities. As Tierney points out in the article that was originally cited, the average rail commute is something like twice the length of the average car commute.

Personally, I think LA is pretty close to my idea of hell on earth. But the commutes there are no worse than the average commute in New York City, AFAIK; my coworkers commute an average of 45 minutes on the train from Brooklyn, plus walking time.

[Then Galt quotes the NY Times piece; most of which I have beaten up on elsewhere; some of the statements in the article are flat out false, others are statements of one side of an issue that ignore the arguments on the other side, e.g. the claim that highways are less subsidized than transit because study X says so, ignoring study Y].

The fact is, public transportation is an absolute failure everywhere it has been tried except for cities which grew up around a public transportation network in the pre-automobile era. Public transportation -- and I am second to none in my love for public transportation, and have a fabulous commute besides -- is more expensive, both in money and environmental costs, than automobiles outside of New York, Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Chicago. That's right, I said it's more environmentally costly than giving every person on the train a car, because a train running empty consumes an enormous amount of energy.

My response: I think the last two sentences are empirically iffy; I suspect you can find studies going both ways (see http://www.friendsoftransit.org/myth12_home.asp for one critique of the "buy everyone a car" argument). Ms. Galt certainly has the right to believe that Wendell Cox (the consultant who has made this argument again and again) is infallible; however, other experts (or at least self-proclaimed) disagree. Not being an expert in quantitative methods, I am not going to touch either side of the argument with a ten-foot pole.

But EVEN IF TRUE, the entire argument is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our government and its paymasters in the highway and real estate lobbies build cities where low density and automobile-oriented street design conspire to reduce transit ridership - and then are shocked to learn that thanks to their own deeds, new transit facilities have inefficiently low levels of ridership. Indeed, Galt implicitly admits this point by admitting that transit is more efficient in "pre-automobile cities."

Now we're going in circles. Mr Lewyn, as is common among smart-growthers, is not for old-city-like densities, except when he's railing against everywhere else, at which point the lack of old-city-like densities becomes a vast real-estate conspiracy.

Even in those old cities, I'll point out, automobile usage is the majority everywhere except New York; just tool along the highways in Chicago, if you want to experience sprawl at its finest.

But that's neither here nor there. I haven't disputed that it is theoretically possible to get everyone to live at citylike densities served by public transit. I have only argued that a) most people won't voluntarily do so because b) that sort of density has a lot of drawbacks unless you are wealthy enough to finesse them.

And unless you (or nature) sharply restrict mobility, people won't choose those places anyway; the majority of Americans want a detached house with a yard, and they'll vote with their feet."

My response: First of all, you can have a "detached house with a yard" without having the status quo; just look at anyplace in America (outside NYC) built in the first half of the 20th century- Shaker Heights near Cleveland, Winnetka near Chicago, city neighborhoods outside downtown in most Rust Belt cities. These are places that are, in their own way, smart growth- places with sidewalks and train stations nearby, even though densities and transit ridership are certainly not at Manhattan-type levels. Second, you don't need a "majority of Americans" to reshape a metro area. Most of the preauto cities she names (other than NYC) have transit ridership below 50% and yet even Galt concedes that they are quite different from Houston or Los Angeles.

Mr Lewyn yet again reveals his historical ignorance. First, as I pointed out above, those densities were made possible in large part either by a) poor people living in utter squalor or b) middle class women taking a lot more time to do their household chores than working women have. More importantly, he seems unaware that the primary mode of public transit when those downtowns and suburbs were built was the horsecar, a single-car mode of public transit with about half the carrying capacity of a modern bus. In the pre-WWI era many horsecars were replaced with electric trolleys, which still had much lower carrying capacities than a modern train. The nearest modern analogue to those trolleys is . . . his hated busses.

Now imagine how many people you would voluntarily attract to a new development by telling them it was just a short bus ride to their shopping. I fear I repeat myself, but let me say again: I am not claiming that you can't force people to live in dense housing area. I am claiming that you will have to force them, and that forcing them will be unpleasant for people who can't afford to have things delivered to the maid.

But the aggressive tactics of smart-growthers need a rethink. It seems to me that their attempts to drive Americans out of their cars are likely to succeed only in driving unfortunate members of the middle class into substandard housing and near-penury.

My response: What "aggressive tactics"? On the one hand, Galt says transit doesn't work because everybody drives. On the other, the conspiracy to prevent anyone from driving is so powerful that it is driving the middle class into penury.

Mr Lewyn seems not to have encountered the conditional tense before. Mr Lewyn, if you are reading this, when I say "are likely to", that means that I am describing something that hasn't actually happened yet. I believe that drawing a distinction between things that have happened (people have chosen to live places where they can drive, not walk ) and things that might happen as a result of certain policies (people will be driven into "near-penury"), will resolve your confusion about this matter. When you have quandaries of this sort, I suggest referring your question to a style guide such as the excellent Strunk and White.

As for your questions about "what policies", see "greenbelts", "community zoning", blocking highways that might shorten the commutes of the poor people whose fates you claim I am exploiting, and so on.

Let's not kid ourselves: sprawl and its allies own the country. In most of America, you can't function without a car, and the only people who go without are those too poor, too young, too old, or too disabled to drive. And for anyone to claim that the nondrivers (and those of us who are crazy enough to defend them) are using "aggressive tactics" against the affluent auto-owing majority is just sick.

I may be sick. But at least I don't think poor people can't drive.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

quick domain name capture - and the award goes to..

In declining to defend Edwards' Halliburton charges specificaly, Cheney meant to direct people to factcheck.org last night but mistakenly said 'factcheck.com'. The latter page now refreshes to George Soros' anti-Bush page.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

If it curses, fine it

Jeff Jarvis hails the impending death of terrestrial radio with Howard Stern's move to Sirius.

There, ladies and gentlemen, is the last nail in the coffin of broadcast as the central medium in America. And the FCC hammered it in.

The age of one-size-fits-all media is over but the FCC and Congress don't want to admit it and so they are not allowing TV and radio to compete with the tremendous choice and freedom now available on cable, satellite, and the internet -- and soon via ubiquitous broadband and podcasting and all that. I'll say it again: Just tear down the antennas; we don't need them anymore.

Don't tear them down just yet. Radio has been taxed and regulated, expect more subsidies when it stops moving altogether.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Stranger than True

I watched all but the last 15 minutes of the debates. I did not see them as a drubbing. Immediately after Edwards said "Mr. Vice President, you are still not being straight with the American people" (Transcript), both candidates went for each others' jugulars for the rest of the evening, rarely pausing to defend themselves. Edwards on the attack, mixing broad smiles and broader accusations, is very unpleasant, and the V.P.'s phlegmatic delivery is hardly moving. I think most of the country will conclude they are both unpleasant, but Cheney's more experienced. I don't think it will move the needle.

The strangest few minutes of the evening followed the question on gay marriage. What I heard was the Vice President make a technical argument and then open a bit of daylight between himself and the President:

And the fact is that the president felt that it was important to make it clear that that's the wrong way to go, as far as he's concerned.

Now, he sets the policy for this administration, and I support the president.

He really couldn't have made it clearer he disagrees.

But then Edwards comes on and sticks his thumb in Cheney's wound with a completely insincere discussion of the V.P.'s daughter.

Now, as to this question, let me say first that I think the vice president and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And you can't have anything but respect for the fact that they're willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her. It's a wonderful thing. And there are millions of parents like that who love their children, who want their children to be happy.

It was entirely transparent that Edwards was making fun of Cheney for not talking about his daughter and implicitly questioning their love for her. Cheney must have been fuming. I suspect Edwards was hoping he'd blow his cool.

For this and the follow-up question, Edwards was completely incoherent. Cheney tried to put them both out of their misery by yielding back his time with nothing but a perfunctory 'thank you' (what you?) for the 'kind' remarks about his family. Edwards then dug in, but failed to be coherent or persuasive:

But we also believe that gay and lesbians and gay and lesbian couples, those who have been in long-term relationships, deserve to be treated respectfully, they deserve to have benefits.

For example, a gay couple now has a very difficult time, one, visiting the other when they're in the hospital, or, for example, if, heaven forbid, one of them were to pass away, they have trouble even arranging the funeral.

I mean, those are not the kind of things that John Kerry and I believe in. I suspect the vice president himself does not believe in that.

But we don't — we do believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

EDWARDS: And I want to go back, if I can, to the question you just asked, which is this constitutional amendment.

I want to make sure people understand that the president is proposing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage that is completely unnecessary.

Under the law of this country for the last 200 years, no state has been required to recognize another state's marriage.

Let me just be simple about this. My state of North Carolina would not be required to recognize a marriage from Massachusetts, which you just asked about.

There is absolutely no purpose in the law and in reality for this amendment. It's nothing but a political tool. And it's being used in an effort to divide this country on an issue that we should not be dividing America on.

We ought to be talking about issues like health care and jobs and what's happening in Iraq, not using an issue to divide this country in a way that's solely for political purposes. It's wrong.

They were both threading legalistic needles and both so clearly uncomfortable with their own tickets' arguments.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Environmental committments

On this weblog I've maintained (with tiresome regularity) that cutting our carbon emissions means drastically cutting our consumption, reducing our lifestyle to a hardship that most affluent Americans, including environmentalists, literally can't imagine. I just came across an article from the 1998 Atlantic Monthly that argues the same thing, though its author is safely on the opposite end of the political spectrum from yours truly.

The numbers are so daunting that they're almost unimaginable. Say, just for argument's sake, that we decided to cut world fossil-fuel use by 60 percent -- the amount that the UN panel says would stabilize world climate. And then say that we shared the remaining fossil fuel equally. Each human being would get to produce 1.69 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually -- which would allow you to drive an average American car nine miles a day. By the time the population increased to 8.5 billion, in about 2025, you'd be down to six miles a day. If you carpooled, you'd have about three pounds of CO2 left in your daily ration -- enough to run a highly efficient refrigerator. Forget your computer, your TV, your stereo, your stove, your dishwasher, your water heater, your microwave, your water pump, your clock. Forget your light bulbs, compact fluorescent or not.

I should note that he was working with an International Panel on Climate Change report that was much more pessimistic than even the current (somewhat flawed) IPCC estimates, so 60% is probably more than we'd need to cut.

Still. Reducing our carbon footprint would mean giving up, not merely our SUVs, but many of the little things Americans enjoy.

Many or most of the people in the world do not have hot showers, indoor toilets, regular access to medical care, sound teeth, meat on their tables, meals that can be prepared in less than several hours, computers, electric lights, transportation that moves faster than a human can walk, privacy, air-conditioning, central heat, more than one change of clothes, clean drinking water, food security or jobs that involve anything other than six or seven days a weak of backbreaking manual labour. These things all take an enormous amount of energy, almost all of it from fossil fuels.

When most westerners talk about living "sustainably", they certainly aren't thinking about what this would really mean: living with rotten teeth, frostbite in winter and heatstroke in summer, once-a-week baths, the majority of the population working as farmers or manual labourers, washing 10 or 12 dirty diapers every day with water you heat yourself on the stove (hell, washing all your clothes in water you heat yourself on the stove . . . and washing the floor that way . . . and the children . . . ), going for years without eating a meal you didn't cook at least some part of, living within walking distance of where you work (and think, in New York City, of what close quarters this would entail in midtown!) Most people, I think, imagine themselves buying a hybrid car and doing a little gardening. But for carbon to stay in balance, everyone on the planet would be able to consume about, oh, what Americans did in 1900. People can't imagine that, for two reasons. First, because they are not educated; they have no idea how big the gap between their consumption and ours really is. But also, people who are at all educated about the era are generally educated by novels . . . but the novels are almost always written about the upper-middle class, or above. So that even someone with a more-than-passing familiarity with the era has little emotional grasp of how many people had to live in really quite abject poverty in order to support the thin layer of affluent Edwardians they've read about. Also, they tend to overgeneralise from their experience of spending a few weekend hours clearing brush or canning strawberries to what it was actually like to spend your whole life working on a farm. I'm really astonished at how little grasp women seem to have of the fact that what has freed women to work outside the home is not the feminist movement, but General Electric and the processed foods industry.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't make this sacrifice. If global warming is going to devastate the earth, then we should go back to living in 1900, and it's no good sticking your fingers in your ears and saying "la, la, la I can't hear you!" when the scientists point it out. Whether or not global warming will actually be so devastating is, of course, an open question, and I'm certainly not saying we should start buying stock in buggy whip manufacturers tomorrow . . . only that there's foolish ignorance of realities on both sides of this debate.

Overall, the article underscores the fact that the biggest worry for environmentalists right now isn't the US -- it's the fact that China has 1.2 billion people getting richer very fast. They'll surpass the US as the leading emitters of carbon dioxide sometime in the middle of the next decade, and their government lacks even America's cordial disinterest in environmental protection. Not only that -- it looks like it's getting ready to get rid of the one-child policy. Then there's India's 900 billion coming up fast from the outside. It seems quite unlikely that these countries will endorse emissions reduction while they still have people living in dire poverty. There may be literally nothing the West can do about climate change short of invading two nuclear powers. Perhaps the left-wing should start thinking about what environmental problems might justify "pre-emptive" war.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Tarzan confused . . .

Slate's election scorecard shows Bush took a walloping in the national polls after the debates . . . but is doing even better in the states, pushing him to a commanding electoral college victory, if the election were held tomorrow--and only the people who got polled were allowed to vote.

I thought Bush did terribly, but 8-9 point swings seem a little extreme. On the other hand, so did Bush's convention bounce. The Conventional Wisdom that only a few voters are undecided at this point seems to be taking a body blow . . . seems to me that the electorate has turned downright bipolar, if you look at the polls. Time for a stiff dose of lithium in the nation's drinking water? We report, you decide!

Update: The Rasmussen tracking poll shows only slight movement for Kerry.

Posted by Jane Galt at 11:56 AM | Comments (23) | TrackBack

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Today's must-read

Fellow UChicago alum Zimran Ahmed is back from vacation with a fantastic post on cognitive error and the elections.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Oh where, oh where has the dollar gone . . .

Overheard from a colleague: "The last time I was in London, Robert Guest's book was out, and I wanted to buy a copy, but it was onlyl in hardcover. It cost £20, which is like 85 billion of our dollars."