… because they should. Shown below are actual and projeted numbers for the annual federal budget deficit. Eventually, we’re going to reach the point where we can no longer raise the money.
Annual Federal Budget Deficit
The New York Times details further fallout from the now defunct Pentagon public relations program that enlisted retired flag officers serving as analysts for major network as “message force multipliers”:
In a highly unusual reversal, the Defense Department’s inspector general’s office has withdrawn a report it issued in January exonerating a Pentagon public relations program that made extensive use of retired officers who worked as military analysts for television and radio networks.
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The inspector general’s office began investigating the public relations program last year, in response to articles in The New York Times that exposed an extensive and largely hidden Pentagon campaign to transform network military analysts into “surrogates” and “message force multipliers” for the Bush administration. The articles also showed how military analysts with ties to defense contractors sometimes used their special access to seek advantage in the competition for contracts related to Iraq and Afghanistan.
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The review found that the former senior Pentagon officials who devised and managed the program refused to speak with the inspector general’s investigators.
At the end of the day, who better to explain military culture, doctrine, and strategy to the public than a retired flag officer? A journalist with a couple weeks in the field as an embed? A “military strategist” from some college whose experience is drawn from the books he’s read? And yet, here is another formerly non-partisan part of government politicised and tarnished by the Bush administration. We’ll forever be suspicious of any retired flag on the major networks, and as a price for that suspicion we’ll know less about what’s going on.
Of course, in all of this, I do think the flag corps bears some blame. When you put stars on your uniform, you have to be cognizant of the fact that especially in today’s highly political climate everyone wants you as their puppet or prop.
Given the opportunity to ask important policy questions of Dr. Steven Chu, the Nobel laureate who’s our new Energy Secretary, Rep. Joe Barton instead decided to ask some “tricky” questions in what appears to be an attempt to make a point about global warming. Dr. Chu gave a fairly reasonable response, which apparently contained too many elementary science principles for Rep. Barton to understand resulting in Rep. Barton claiming to have “stumped” the Energy Secretary.
Rep. Barton, apparently lacking any staffers competent enough to recognize the representative’s mistake, then posted a video of the affair on his YouTube page under the headline “Energy Secretary puzzled by simple question.” Here’s the video so that you can be the judge of who was puzzled:
Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey write in today’s Wall Street Journal:
The limits of the Army Field Manual are entirely appropriate for young soldiers, for the conditions in which they operate, for the detainees they routinely question, and for the kinds of tactically relevant information they pursue. Those limits are not appropriate, however, for more experienced people in controlled circumstances with high-value detainees. Indeed, the Army Field Manual was created with awareness that there was an alternative protocol for high-value detainees.
What people don’t seem to understand is that we should wantthe Army and the CIA to have different interrogation rules. The Army’s rules should be highly restrictive in recognition of the fact that its core competency is warfighting, not intelligence gathering. Indeed, soldiers often rotate in and out of assignments, in my many cases leaving them with insufficient time to learn how to become a skilled interrogator. The CIA, on the other hand, is the prime agency for gathering human intelligence. It should have a cadre of experienced career interrogators and a set of rules that conform to national and international law but that are closer to the limit of what’s legal than the Army’s rules.
The idea of subjecting the CIA to the Army Field Manual makes even less sense when you realize that the Army can revise the manual whenever it sees fit. It would be like the FAA, instead of promulgating safety regulations, stating “All airlines shall follow whatever safety regulations United Airlines puts in place.” That’s hardly the way to codify solid regulation. In fact, the Army could easily modify the Field Manual to say “CIA interrogators may use whatever techniques they see fit.”
Finally, it’s worth noting that it’s called the Army Field Manual on Interrogation. As the name implies, it’s a field manual designed for usage by troops in the field, not practiced interrogators operating in controlled environments.
The debate over the economic stimulus package has come and gone. I remain on the fence, but this recent article reminded me of how long it takes for your average “shovel ready” project to begin. Here’s the steps:
In other words, about six months after the president signs the law the first check from the federal government gets mailed out (actually, payment is distributed via EFT). This, of course, is for the most shovel ready projects. Projects where the work scope isn’t entirely defined, where there are technical or political issues to be worked out, or that require an environmental impact survey, will all take much longer. Your average recession from 1854-2001 lasted 17 months.
From the headline story on the New York Times website:
Questions about why Timothy F. Geithner did not know sooner about the A.I.G. bonuses and act to stop them could overwhelm his achievements and undermine the president’s overall economic agenda.
Really? This largely media-made scandal about how some minuscule fraction of our taxpayer donation to AIG is being spent could derail the President’s overall economic agenda? Because what? It’s consumed the past 24 hours of the news cycle, and you’re trying to stretch it out for another day or so?
When organizations that are insured against any challenge to their supremacy grow to a certain size, they start to care primarily about retaining their own power. An excellent example of this is the teachers’ union, which is primarily concerned with insuring its own grip on teachers and on the education system. While we should be having a national discussion on how to reward good teachers (this is actually isn’t all that easy to do and will require lots of discussion), the teachers union has us discussing whether or not performance should even be a factor in teacher compensation.
The union is also excellent at weeding out initiatives that could reduce its stranglehold on the workforce. As David Brooks explains in the NY Times:
Democrats in Congress just killed an experiment that gives 1,700 poor Washington kids school vouchers. They even refused to grandfather in the kids already in the program, so those children will be ripped away from their mentors and friends. The idea was to cause maximum suffering, and 58 Senators voted for it.
School vouchers allow students to go to charter and non-public schools, most of which aren’t unionized. The only argument against allowing school vouchers is that it reduces the critical mass necessary to have a functioning education system. There’s merit to that argument, but not enough merit to justify yanking 1700 students away from their friends and classmates.
Via Andrew Sullivan comes an article by Rich Moran that provides an elegant, brutal critique on the direction of the conservative movement:
Classic conservative principles are timeless; immutable tenets that have inspired great changes in government over the last 400 years and spoken passionately and plainly to the needs and hopes of ordinary people. Since the end of World War II, those classical principles have informed a devastating critique of the welfare state, presenting a reasoned and logical alternative to statism and dependency. Conservatism has stood for human liberty based on the fundamental idea of natural law; that from his first breath, man is born free.
But conservatism has gone off the rails, becoming in some respects a parody of itself. A philosophy that is all about honoring and conserving tradition while allowing for change that buttresses and supports important aspects of the past, has been hijacked by ideologues who brook no deviation from a dogma that limits rather than expands human freedom. Conservatism has become loud, obnoxious, closed-minded, and puerile, while its classical tradition of tolerance and hard-headed rationalism has been abandoned in favor of emotional jags and a vicious parochialism that eschews debate for “litmus tests” on ideological purity.
He concludes by saying:
Until conservatives can practice some painful introspection, looking with a self-critical eye at the reasons for the debacles of 2006 and 2008, most in the movement will continue to delude themselves that simply reaffirming conservative love of small government, low taxes, and less regulation will be enough to convince a majority of Americans that they recognize their shortcomings and have changed their tune. There must be a reckoning with those who violate the very nature of conservatism by obstinately adhering to exclusionary, anti-intellectual precepts that have thrown classical conservatism over in favor of ranting, ideological tantrums.
The anti-elite, anti-intellectualism displayed by broad swaths of the conservative movement during this last election worry me the most. The idea that the majority of this country’s major problems can be solved by the application of a little common sense may play well on talk radio, but it is blatantly false and needs to be exposed as such. Health care reform is hard. Fixing our economy is hard. Properly designing a program that will lead to true energy independence while not tanking our economy is hard.
Republicans pull together to recover their party.
All of these problems cry for the attention of experts, individuals who are smarter than you or I and who can properly design the innovative solutions these problems require. Foreign relations similarly demands the attention of experts who can properly understand the countries we are dealing with so as to conduct negotiations in a manner that is to our advantage. Basic government services — from putting criminals in jail to cleaning up after natural disasters — require competence much more than the application of a particular ideology.
These individuals are, or at least should be, elite. They should be the best of the best. For the conservative movement to turn its back on the people with ideas, to actively work to alienate such individuals and throw scorn upon those who devote hard work to solving hard problems, is rightly at the core of recent electoral failures.
Paul Krugman joins the chorus of, well, pretty everyone who claimed to know something about economics before this colossal mess came about:
What Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman — and a staunch defender of free markets — actually said was, “It may be necessary to temporarily nationalize some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring.” I agree.
The case for nationalization rests on three observations.
First, some major banks are dangerously close to the edge — in fact, they would have failed already if investors didn’t expect the government to rescue them if necessary.
Second, banks must be rescued. The collapse of Lehman Brothers almost destroyed the world financial system, and we can’t risk letting much bigger institutions like Citigroup or Bank of America implode.
Third, while banks must be rescued, the U.S. government can’t afford, fiscally or politically, to bestow huge gifts on bank shareholders.
But here’s the thing: the funds needed to bring these banks fully back to life would greatly exceed what they’re currently worth. Citi and BofA have a combined market value of less than $30 billion… And if it’s basically putting up all the money, the government should get ownership in return.
Still, isn’t nationalization un-American? No, it’s as American as apple pie.
Lately the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has been seizing banks it deems insolvent at the rate of about two a week. When the F.D.I.C. seizes a bank, it takes over the bank’s bad assets, pays off some of its debt, and resells the cleaned-up institution to private investors. And that’s exactly what advocates of temporary nationalization want to see happen, not just to the small banks the F.D.I.C. has been seizing, but to major banks that are similarly insolvent.
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Why not just go ahead and nationalize? Remember, the longer we live with zombie banks, the harder it will be to end the economic crisis.
The thing with finance is that there are experts. The trouble is that once something like this becomes major news, everyone and their mother develops an opinion. As the din rises ever louder it becomes difficult to differentiate between those worth listening to and those simply seeking further their own pre-crash political agenda.
Xin Lu, over at Wisebread, does a good job explaning why the “Buy American” clause in the stimulus bill is such a poor idea:
So the logic is that if the stimulus spent as much as possible on American products then it would narrow the trade deficit and keep more jobs in America. However, considering that the public works portion of the stimulus bill is only about $73 billion, I doubt it would make a dent in the trade deficit. Instead, it is fueling a lot of anger in many trade partners for little gain.
The only people who think this is a good idea are the labor unions, who are working overtime to exact their pound of flesh in exchange for helping the Democrats get elected. The CEO of Caterpillar, which as an American manufacturing firm is one of the potential benficiaries of this clause, came out against the Buy American provision in an Op-Ed piece published in the Chicago Tribune:
Caterpillar would like to sell U.S.-made products for infrastructure projects at home and abroad. But if the U.S. sends the message that regardless of value, countries should only buy locally produced products, Cat’s exports, as well as the U.S. jobs they support, will be hurt. In some of our Illinois factories, as much as 70 percent of what we make is sold overseas.