i just wanted to show my appreciation.

More praise for Obama, this time on slightly different grounds. Specifically:

So, two things. One, I hope this is a humanizing moment (i.e., one where even his opponents can acknowledge that he did something pretty cool). It’s like when he killed the fly, or when President Bush ducked those Iraqi shoes.

Two, since I’ve laid into President Obama pretty hard on foreign policy and civil liberties on many occasions, even suggesting that liberals might want to look elsewhere, here’s nominal conservative Andrew Sullivan to make the opposite case — that President Obama is actually awesome.

deep defense cuts: more brains, less muscle

After criticizing President Obama sharply here and here for being far more warlike than the liberal candidate I thought I was voting for, I’d like to (tentatively) express praise for some actions he’s taking to reduce the defense budget, with the caveats that (a) his hand was forced by Congress, (b) this spending should be, but won’t be, replaced by infrastructure and other job-creating and investment-multiplying spending, and (c) this different strategy won’t solve our country’s addiction to war, and could in fact make it harder for Congress to hold the executive branch to heel.

First, the praise. Faced with across-the-board cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act (passed last year as part of the compromise to raise the debt ceiling), President Obama on Thursday unveiled a new national security plan that, in the words of Wired‘s Spencer Ackerman, focuses on “drones, spec ops and cyber war.” Also, Asia.

In a rare visit to the Pentagon, President Obama declared that the U.S. will be “strengthening our presence in the Asia-Pacific,” while “turning the page on a decade of war.” In practice, that means cutting the Army and Marine Corps and unspecified “outdated Cold War systems,” part of a broad effort to cut what the Pentagon now calculates as $487 billion over 10 years from its budget.

But it also means that the U.S. is going to lean hard on other military specialties between now and 2020. Obama identified those as “intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, counterterrorism, countering weapons of mass destruction, and the ability to operate in environments where adversaries try to deny us access.”

Translated from the defense wonk: lots of spy tools including drones; lethal special operations forces; offensive cyber weapons; jammers; and a presence to deter and confront Iran — and maybe China, which seeks to keep the Navy and Air Force off its shores.

I think this is, broadly, the right approach. The U.S. has an enormous technical advantage over the rest of the world, and it should leverage that advantage to head off conflicts before they start. That means better (not necessarily more) intelligence collection and the ability to act quickly and decisively, catching potential enemies flat-footed. And this is a far, far smarter plan for counterterrorism than invading random Middle Eastern nations where Al-Qaida isn’t. Last year, you may remember, President Obama, the intelligence community, and Seal Team Six pulled a Munich on Osama bin Laden, assassinating him nearly a decade after the 9/11 attacks. Whatever the principled arguments against celebrating his death (or that of any man), tactically and morally this kind of targeted hit against our actual enemies is light-years ahead of invading and remaining in Afghanistan and Iraq for a decade.

And as for expanding our cyber-warfare capabilities: this cuts both ways, of course — more effective cyber-warfare gives the government vastly increased power to conduct (deniable) malicious attacks against dissenters at home and unfriendly voices abroad. It’s impossible to believe Anonymous and Wikileaks and other whistle-blowers and critics of the U.S. government won’t face covert retaliation once the CIA has its hands on efficient cyber-attack technology. But given that everybody else is doing it, we’re going to have to stay current on these tools as a purely defensive matter. Whether our offensive use of such technology ends up creating horrific blowback remains to be seen.

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Okay, so, now for the caveats. First, the President is making cuts and realigning our strategy, not out of principle, but because he’s being forced to by congressional deficit hawks. (That won’t keep those same hawks from slamming him for the cuts when it’s politically expedient, of course; Buck McKeon (R, Ca.), who voted for the Budget Control Act, declared the new strategy a “retreat from the world.”) That means this money won’t be re-invested where it could still do some good. There’s some argument over whether serious cuts to the defense budget will hamper our country’s ability to conduct advanced research and development at a time when private companies no longer engage in ambitious projects like Bell Labs. Ezra Klein points out that

[F]unding military R&D is probably an inefficient way to fund nonmilitary innovations. If what we want is R&D focused on innovations with broad applications, we should fund that R&D directly rather than hoping that some of the military’s innovations turn out to also be of use to consumers.

Perhaps the best argument for funding military R&D is that it’s economically inefficient but politically efficient. It would be better to fund R&D directly, but the only politically sustainable form of innovation funding is military spending. That is depressing, but it might be true.

I think that about sums up the problem, and it points to a larger problem in general. If we’re so (erroneously) committed to deficit hawkery that we’re cutting defense spending (i.e., if we’re actually trying to cut the deficit instead of using it as a political football), then there’s no chance in hell that this spending will be made up for with spending on infrastructure or non-military R&D or any other kind of spending that would create new jobs and act as a force-multiplier for our economy. So what this means is that thousands of people in the defense industry will lose their jobs — becoming, at least temporarily, a drag on the economy — and we will not have used that unpleasant situation to our advantage to try to create more jobs and growth overall. This is just government downsizing during a period of severe unemployment, with no upside. I don’t blame the President for this, but it’s a stupid thing to do, nonetheless.

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Finally, these changes in both the size of the military and its strategic role may limit the number of large, costly land wars we get into in the near future (“The attitude is no more Iraqs,” says one commentator), but they also refocus our defense strategy toward tools that require more secrecy and ensure less oversight by Congress and the people.

In a friendly argument with me this past week about the degree to which liberals should embrace Ron Paul as a credible anti-war candidate, Eric VanNewkirk pointed out that

The problem there, actually, is that the Constitution is fundamentally broken…. Giving Congress the power to declare war and the President the power to fight war is an excellent principle in theory and on paper; in practice, it means that Presidents are practically forced by exigency to use ridiculous euphemisms like “police action” while Congress either abrogates their authority by letting the President fight undeclared wars (until its politically expedient to complain) or exceed their authority by passing legislation that effectively trods on the President’s Commander-In-Chief boots. I don’t have a good answer, frankly.

Neither do I, but somebody needs to do something, because the direction we’re headed is having a monstrously powerful executive in control of top-secret, practically oversight-free organs of intelligence-gathering and covert violence (including, as mentioned above, the kind of utterly deniable economic violence made possible by cyber-warfare) while the People’s representatives become a mere rubber-stamp on its activities rather than calling it to account.

One possible solution would be to push Congress or the Supreme Court to clarify the constitutionality and force of the War Powers Resolution, about which statute I’ve written more here and here in the context of our action in Libya.

The language of the statute is a good first pass at clarifying the relationship between Congress and the President (it attempts to give the President flexibility to act in “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces” while still requiring Congressional authorization within 60 days), but it’s not a slam-dunk. Akhil Reed Amar notes here that the WPR “obscures as much as it clarifies” and some of its terminology, like “troops introduced into hostilities,” is “hardly self-defining.” And there’s the question of whether it’s constitutional.

I don’t have a lot of good answers, though it might be time for another constitutional convention to straighten all this out. Or, failing that, Congress could clarify the language and someone could take the WPR to the Supreme Court for some enlightenment on its constitutionality. This latter would have the benefit of forcing the Court to enlighten us on the division of power between Congress and the President more generally. But it would also likely have the downside of making the Court play referee in a zero-sum game between the other two branches, which seems to violate the spirit, somewhat, of a scheme of independent and co-equal branches of government.

a final thought on Ron Paul

Two thoughts, really.

First, the combative tone of my last post was probably counterproductive. The substance of what I was getting at was right, but I was so overwhelmingly irritated by Kevin Drum’s approach that I think I buried that substance. Maybe I even buried it all the way down in the comments.

Second, via Ta-Nehisi Coates (again), here’s Robert Wright on a possible real and lasting contribution of Paul’s rhetoric on American discussions of foreign policy: an emphasis on seeing things through non-American eyes:

It doesn’t lie in the substance of his foreign policy views (which I’m largely but not wholly in sympathy with) but in the way he explains them. Paul routinely performs a simple thought experiment: He tries to imagine how the world looks to people other than Americans.

This is such a radical departure from the prevailing American mindset that some of Paul’s critics see it as more evidence of his weirdness. A video montage meant to discredit him shows him taking the perspective of Iran. After observing that Israel and America and China have nukes, he asks about Iranians, “Why wouldn’t it be natural that they’d want a weapon? Internationally they’d be given more respect.”

Can somebody explain to me why this is such a crazy conjecture about Iranian motivation? Wouldn’t it be reasonable for Iranian leaders, having seen what happened to nukeless Saddam Hussein and nukeless Muammar Qaddafi, to conclude that maybe having a nuclear weapon would get them more respectful treatment?

…I’ve long thought that the biggest single problem in the world is the failure of “moral imagination”–the inability or unwillingness of people to see things from the perspective of people in circumstances different from their own. Especially incendiary is the failure to extend moral imagination across national, religious, or ethnic borders.

If a lack of moral imagination is indeed the core problem with America’s foreign policy, and Ron Paul is unique among presidential candidates in trying to fight it, I think you have to say he’s doing something great, notwithstanding the many non-great and opposite-of-great things about him (and notwithstanding the fact that he has in the past failed to extend moral imagination across all possible borders).

I think that’s right. Obviously, I would be better off extending some moral imagination to Kevin Drum. And I think even if we ended up making the same policy decisions, our country would be vastly better off engaging in the acts of moral imagination Wright is talking about.

more liberal frothing about Ron Paul

Fred Clark, normally extremely perspicacious, has jumped on the anti-Paul bandwagon with both feet, giving space to some pretty dreadful stuff from Kevin Drum, who calls Paul “the dictionary definition of a crank” and practically gets the vapors considering such radical Ron Paul ideas as legalizing all drugs and challenging the apparently inviolable orthodoxy that America’s involvement in World War II was The Best Thing The Ever Happened:

Now… you have the fact that Paul opposes the War on Drugs and supports a non-interventionist foreign policy. But guess what? Even there, he’s a crank. Even if you’re a hard-core non-interventionist yourself, you probably think World War II was a war worth fighting. But not Ron Paul. He thinks we should have just minded our own damn business.

Look, right here and right now, can we please add a corollary to Godwin’s Law that says that the first person to bring up the righteousness of World War II in any discussion of war loses, automatically? Like bringing up Nazis/Hitler, it’s a complete conversation-ender. And that’s exactly how people like Drum and Clark use it, too. “If you support/defend/are mildly interested in Ron Paul, YOU’RE SAYING WE SHOULD HAVE LET HITLER TAKE OVER!!!”

Fuuuuuck you.

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Drum and Clark would also like you to believe that Ron Paul is irrelevant to the anti-war sentiment that has welled up in this country recently. Here’s Drum:

I’ll concede up front that it’s not possible to know for sure what impact Ron Paul is having on public views toward non-interventionism. But come on. It’s true that the American public is less enamored of war these days than it used to be, but the obvious reason for this can be summed up in two words: Afghanistan and Iraq. Americans are more skeptical of military adventurism than they were ten years ago because the shock of 9/11 has worn off and we’ve gone through two spectacularly disastrous foreign wars. Ron Paul has played almost no role in this at all.

Horseshit. If Paul weren’t in the race, there would be no mainstream candidate giving a voice to that skepticism about military adventurism — especially among the young, and most especially among members of the military, who are Paul’s largest source of financing and who are four times more likely to donate to his campaign than to Romney’s. Maybe Drum should look at what the people who actually fight these wars are saying with their campaign contributions: Paul is the standard-bearer for people who would like us not to risk the lives of our fighting men and women on the whims of politicians.

Drum encourages anti-war liberals, disingenuously, to shun Paul (because he’s “toxic”) and seek out the “plenty of voices these days not named Ron Paul” that are speaking out against military interventionism. I say “disingenuously” because Drum knows perfectly well that those “voices” are not running for president. Who gives a fuck if you read Noam Chomsky? We’re talking about voting. And, I repeat — Paul is the only candidate within even hailing distance of a major party nomination who is taking a firm anti-war stance. (Obama has every bit the hard-on for foreign wars that Bush did, even if he’s smarter about executing them.)

Drum quickly fluffs his chickenhawk feathers, though, combining a pretty trenchant cynicism with straightforward neocon bloodthirstiness:

We won’t know for sure about this until some kind of serious military action rears its head again, but here’s a guess: if Iran makes even the slightest overt military move to block the Strait of Hormuz, the American public will be every bit as keen for blood as they’ve ever been. And frankly, that’s probably about as true among Ron Paul’s supporters as everyone else. They’ve always cared mostly about his economic crankery and his opposition to social welfare, not his foreign policy views….

I’m not a hardcore non-interventionist like Paul. If Iran seriously tried to mine the Strait of Hormuz, for example, I’d fully expect the U.S. Navy to put a stop to it, even if that meant sinking a few Iranian vessels.

Great. Good for you. Meanwhile, the sailors and soldiers you’d send over there to kill Iranians are sending checks to Ron Paul as fast as they can.

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But the real disappointment here is Clark, a blogger whose work I’d previously always read first when starting up Google Reader. Clark is best known as a voice for liberal evangelicalism — yes, there is such a thing — and he often writes sensitively and wittily about the Christian obligation to give up one’s possessions and serve others. But here, while adding his own twists to Drum’s “DO YOU WANT HITLER TO WIN??” hyperbole (Clark starts with the idea of just war and, sadly, comes out in favor of the air strikes on Libya), he actually reproduces two WWII era cartoons by Dr. Seuss. They’re blatant, bullying, and kind of revolting pro-war propaganda, but maybe Clark figures that Seuss is some kind of sacred, unchallengeable authority for people who grew up in the last few generations.

I guess I’ll just say this: if Fred Clark loves “foreign children” so much, I hope he’s thinking about this, or maybe this, when he pulls the lever for Obama.

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As is often the case, it’s The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates who’s willing to really grapple with the hard questions. Here he confronts, head-on, Glenn Greenwald’s challenge to liberals to admit that a vote for Obama is a calculated vote to protect what remains of abortion rights and the American welfare state, at the explicit cost of the lives of Muslim children in foreign wars. Coates accepts, broadly, Greenwald’s framing, and admits that for him, that trade is worth it. And you know what? He’s probably right. It probably is worth it. Or at least saying that it’s worth it is a defensible position. But liberals should not kid themselves that there is no trade. (Except, I guess, “liberals” like Drum, who can’t wait for the Hormuz shoot-’em-up, and therefore feel no pinch of compromise at all.)

But Coates, a Civil War enthusiast, also brings out a far more damning argument against Paul’s anti-war credibility: namely, that he doesn’t know history, and therefore his anti-war stance is ill-informed. Watch this video of Paul explaining to the late Tim Russert why he thinks Lincoln really fought the Civil War:

“He did this just to, uh, enhance and… get rid of the original intent of the Republic.” Mmm, okay. So Lincoln’s motive was to undermine federalism, and he could easily have ended slavery by buying out the slaveholders, but chose not to. As Coates notes drily,

It’s dismaying to see that we don’t have press corps that might challenge him on facts, as opposed to just looking at him incredulously and repeating the question. Not to speak ill of the dead, but journalists should have at least a passing familiarity with the secession documents and Alexander Stephens “Cornerstone Speech.”

Read Eric Foner’s Lincoln biography. Or at the very least google Lincoln and compensated emancipation.

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Maybe there is no credible anti-war candidate. Or maybe, at the end of the day, Paul has too much other shit going on to attract liberals, even if his anti-war positions are both sincere and credible. But is this really a cause for the kind of righteous smugness Paul critics like Drum and Clark are exuding? Is it really acceptable for major voices in the liberal blogosphere to say, “Sorry this guy’s not good enough, but there are still plenty of ‘voices’ expressing your concerns, so why are you complaining?” I submit that it is not, in a season where the supposedly liberal candidate for president can’t get past his fantasy of himself as the country’s Cowboy-In-Chief.

do i want to vote libertarian this year?

So Ron Paul’s been getting beat up pretty hard this past week, as he picks up speed in Iowa and the mainstream media suddenly remembers to vet him. There are two major criticisms leveled at Paul right now. First, and most damningly to a lot of liberals, the vile, racist newsletters published under his name in the ’80s tend to show that he’s, at a minimum, a man so cataclysmically inept at management that he didn’t know what was being published under his name; or, more likely, that Paul engaged in race-baiting cynically, as a way to sell more newsletters to the racist (but nominally “libertarian”) right-wing fringe.

I don’t believe Paul is harboring, deep in his heart, devious designs to turn back the clock on race in America. For one thing, as Conor Friedersdorf points out in this excellent post,

[The newsletters'] style and racially bigoted philosophy is so starkly different from anything he has publicly espoused during his long career in public life — and he is so forthright and uncensored in his pronouncements, even when they depart from mainstream or politically correct opinion — that I’d wager substantially against his authorship…. It’s a level of bigotry that would be exceptionally difficult for a longtime public figure to hide.

I think this is about right. Paul is, to all appearances, completely uncensored. Every crazy theory that passes through his head falls out of his mouth. This makes it easy for mainstream liberals to dismiss him as a fringe kook not worthy of serious debate, but it also makes it unlikely that he’s a closet racist. (At least any more than any other 76-year-old coot who grew up in a different world and is mildly cranky about Snoopy Snoopy Poop Dogg.) If you’re looking for serious racism in the Republican party, you should be concentrating on the shallow pricks who encouraged Herman Cain to run on the theory that he’d be some kind of “anti-Obama” who would inoculate them against charges of racism — “I seriously considered voting for a black man!” — but who would never, ever get the nomination on account of being a complete buffoon.

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The real knock against Ron Paul is that he actually is a doctrinaire libertarian, rather than a racist or a homophobe or a sexist running under libertarian colors. Paul genuinely believes that government — especially the federal government — has vastly exceeded its authority and needs to take a few steps back. Preferably to sometime in the early 1900s. In an ideal Ron Paul world, we would eliminate or cripple the Federal Reserve, return to a gold-backed currency, delete five Cabinet departments entirely, effectively end Social Security, shrink aid to the poor, and repeal the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank, and most environmental regulations. And he wants to get rid of the personal income tax, about which more in a moment.

That Paul’s libertarianism leads him to take positions which will have the effect of rolling back civil rights gains seems undeniable, though not without complications. Ron Paul claims not to want to interfere with states’ ability to recognize gay marriage, and he’s famously in favor of letting states decide whether to decriminalize drugs. But by the same token, he wants to let states regulate abortion for themselves, which in states like Oklahoma and South Dakota would be the final nail in the coffin for legal abortion. And he doesn’t believe the federal government should come around telling bigoted business owners they can’t keep black people out of their Woolworth’s.

Recently, my wife and I have been working on a theory we like to call, “Other people are not idiots.” Here’s a silly example: we have gone to Ikea’s showroom many times, and we have always walked briskly past the Poäng chair — I felt it was ugly, and Elana thought it took up a ridiculous amount of floor space. But it’s a perennial bestseller, which has always caused us to view the Ikea buying public with a certain amount of smug contempt. Anyway, yesterday, a day when we did not have much to do, we dawdled in the chair section, and we tried out some different chairs for fun, and eventually I sat in a Poäng. And OMFG YOU GUYS IS IT COMFORTABLE.

Other people are not idiots. They have reasons for doing what they do and standing by the things they stand by.

Ron Paulistas who share his desire to repeal the Civil Rights Act — assuming the market will simply punish any business owner who excludes minorities — are falling into the “other people are idiots” trap. They’re failing to look at history and the simple power dynamics of small cities and towns, especially in the South, where the market did not punish discrimination. They fail, with some degree of willful obstuseness, to understand why it has been so necessary, and such a useful thing, for the government to step in and do what the market could not and would not in rectifying discrimination. Paul and his supporters have failed to sit in the Poäng chair before dismissing it.

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But at the same time, it must be said that there’s a sector of the liberal blogosphere that’s falling into the same trap about Ron Paul. Jeffrey Feldman, for example, calls Paul’s ideas “nonsense” and “puerile hokum.” Feldman grudgingly notes that Paul’s speeches are “laced with seemingly humane calls to end wars,” but he feels that these are canceled out by Paul’s “promises to abandon the sick, poor, and elderly.” Feldman claims to be unable to comprehend “why Ron Paul is still on that stage.”

Really? No clue at all? Can’t begin to imagine why, in the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ron Paul might be an appealing candidate “for the young and disgruntled, for those who dimly perceive that something is wrong in this country, for those who are earnestly appalled by the madness of our criminal justice policy, for those who have watched a steady erosion of our civil liberties, and have seen their concerns met with an appalling silence on the national stage”?

Ron Paul is wrong about the Civil Rights Act. But when he says, for example,

The real problem we face today is the discrimination in our court system, the war on drugs. Just think of how biased that is against the minorities…. They go into prison much way out of proportion to their numbers. They get the death penalty out of proportion with their numbers. And if you look at what minorities suffer in ordinary wars, whether there’s a draft or no draft, they suffer much out of proposition. So those are the kind of discrimination that have to be dealt with….

is there any sensible — or even breathing — liberal who disagrees with him? People who should know better — like MoJo‘s Kevin Drum — are trotting out the old “even a stopped watch is right twice a day” cliche, as though Paul’s utterly self-consistent and principled stands on foreign wars and drug prohibition somehow resembled the occasional lucid-seeming moment in a paranoid’s ramblings. Meanwhile, where the fuck is Obama on ending the racist drug war? Oh, that’s right — he’s too busy getting us into new conflicts (which were not the unqualified success for peace and democracy we were led to believe) and flying his model airplanes (which hobby has also been problematic).

But to return to Feldman’s assertion that Paul intends to “abandon the sick, poor, and elderly” — isn’t it painfully clear that we have abandoned the poor and the sick already, and that the elderly are next? Again, I ask — where is Obama on all this? The Affordable Care Act was a fine start, twenty years too late, and its best shot at creating meaningful change is essentially to make health insurance an unprofitable business. And I haven’t heard a peep out of the White House about fixing Medicare or the awful prescription drug bill or creating meaningful programs to employ people and lift the 1 in 2 Americans who live in poverty out of the cycle of insolvency they’re trapped in.

(And now I suppose I will hear from some of my fellow liberals about President Obama’s staff’s highly-nuanced white paper which is available sixteen pages into MyBarackObama.com. Guys, if you’re hiding your light under a bushel for long enough, about enough things, after a while I begin to suspect you don’t actually want anyone to use it as a lamp.)

The truth is, our vision of America — the liberal/progressive/socialist vision — has utterly failed the poor, the sick, and the elderly. And you know why? Because we didn’t try. Democrats never really try to implement things like a national health service or real maternity leave or better public works projects, in part because for so long they’ve felt vulnerable and unlikeable on topics like gay rights and drug policy and prayer in schools. Democrats get a bad rap for running and hiding when they hear the word “socialism,” but the truth is that they run and hide about everything.

Well, imagine a Ron Paul candidacy. Imagine if the Democrats were running, not against a Christian conservative gay-panic alarmist like Michelle “my husband is definitely not gay” Bachmann, but against a libertarian who says, “I don’t care if people use heroin or have gay sex. That’s an expression of their personal freedom.” What would that even look like? What would it mean to have a presidential debate that focused on the best method for America to create prosperity, freed from a lot of the typical cant and bullshit that gets in the way? Could Obama make a straight-up progressive/socialist argument for the ideas of the left? If he couldn’t — if that brilliant Chicago Law professor couldn’t explain why Paul’s 19th-century economic policies would hurt the poor the most — then maybe our ideas deserve to lose.

And at the very least, maybe Paul’s candor about the drug war and the other wars and TSA security theater and all the rest of it would give Obama the courage to take actual liberal positions on those issues, too. And if he still refused to do so… well, I guess we’d be left in no doubt about what he really thinks, wouldn’t we?

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Here’s my refutation of Feldman’s unstated assumption that somehow our country is doing right by the poor and the dispossessed, and it’s Ron Paul’s wacky economic ideas that would screw all that up. It comes from the comments section of this article about Paul’s views on sexual harassment. I’m going to reprint almost the entire comment by someone calling himself ConstructionDude, because I think if anyone can explain the appeal to the young and disenfranchised of Ron Paul’s “leave me the fuck alone” philosophy, it’s this dude. Here he is — be patient with his odd syntax and punctuation, because this is really worth it:

I’ve had the most abusive employers verbally and physically that you can imagine. I’ve never collected an unemployment check in my life because I’ve always been called an independent contractor so they didn’t have to pay any of the extras like the 7.5% social security tax, unemployment, workmans comp, or insurance. I work like a dog in bitter 5 degree to scorching 105 degree temperatures 30 foot up walking on pulins where my feet might never step on anything wider than 3.5 inches all day an it’s not the impact when you fall that is going to do you it is the stakes sticking up that you will impale yourself on and all the stuff than will fall on you and beat you into the ground. The joke is that if you fall you are fired before you hit the ground for violating the safety rules. I’ve never had insurance in my life and anything less than a 4″ gash I fix with super glue and duct tape. Osha don’t come round here . . .

When the housing market crashed I found my self with a 3 day notice in January 2008 and guess who doesn’t get unemployment? The independent contractor who was really an employee by any department of labor standards but they don’t care and the unemployment office doesn’t care. I can’t work for a corporation because I have that misdemeanor weed conviction from 12 years ago (Ron Paul wants to end that lifelong discrimination for the all too common indiscretion of youth). My application when I am competing for the rare opening against the other thousands of unemployed construction workers in the same boat will not make it past the receptionist because I have to put that I am a weed criminal in that little box.

So I go months without work and finally get 6 weeks of work with a totally insane guy tiling and when that ends I go another 3-4 months and that is how was for 2 years. I have $15,000 worth of various tools from when I did have work so I got myself licensed and get some work by word of mouth and on craigslist having to do it on the cheap because there is not a lot out there and a lot of people who spent decades learning the trades and can’t just change some other occupation over night which are scarce anyway. If you get a little behind on your child support the States answer is to take your drivers license even if you have a great relationship with your sons mom and she is doing well financially and calls them and asks them not to . . . they don’t care, they are the all powerful state and their one size solution will fit all. They put every obstacle in the way that they can for you just to feed yourself and live indoors and have heat and and be a dad to your noncustodial 13 year old son.

The only thing that gets me by is I live in a house I purchased in the ghetto for $12,000 on contract over 5 years and I can get wifi from the Martin Luther King Center a half a block away. My neighborhood is littered with abandoned homes because no one wants to live near the public housing projects. No body ever suggests that the people that bought a house that they could afford should get bailed out of the ghetto while they like to suggest that people that bought nice houses on the hill that they can’t afford should get bailed out. Most of the people that rant about Ron Paul being a racist wouldn’t dream of walking down my street where I am the only white guy but they think of themselves as really progressive on race. I like my neighbors and except for a few real criminals that the system can’t make room for because they spend all their money locking up petty drug offenders we do all right.

You know what all the white construction workers and all my black neighbors have in common? They hate the government with a passion. They can go on and on about how the wonderful government puts the screws to them constantly. They don’t trust the government and they don’t call the cops. Somebody will make an anonymous call if they guy with the knife in him don’t look like he can get up and that’s about it. No body is going to testify because courts are just another place that victimizes them and if you are a victim the police will try to turn it on you somehow. The police treat everyone as if a white person in my neighborhood must be buying drugs and if you are black you must be selling drugs. The police run in wolf packs and we all are their prey. I wouldn’t say that the people are racist here, I would say that the drug war is racist and as the police are troops of the drug war the ghetto gets to feel it.

We don’t want anything from the government! We want them to go away! You can go on and on about getting the government to help us but we don’t want it. Every thing they sell as a way to help us just makes us victims at their hands! You want Obama’s health care plan? Just a fine they are going to stick me with for not having insurance. I don’t want to fill out a form that says that I am poor! I want to be left alone. I don’t care if my life is struggle I do not trust that they are ever capable of ever administrating justice or of doing anything but come up with another way to screw us! If we give them money they will give it to wall street billionaires to party on and build their monopolies and crush the little guy! They will give it to Walmart so they can build a big store where nobody makes a living wage 3 miles away so that all the mom and pops in the ghetto close and now we all have to get 3 miles to Walmart and all the money leaves our community!

Ron Paul wants to end the taxing of the little guy so some social engineers can give it to their cronie billionaire buddies. All power corrupts and if they have the ability to redistribute wealth they will distribute it to the wealthy. I would much rather have to quit a job because of the conditions than to give the federal government any power at all. At least with local jurisdiction in the matter you stand a chance of somebody having a heart and caring because they actually see the people on the ground. The small community organiztions are the only ones that even pretend to listen. I can go to city hall and speak but congress does’t want to hear me. Leave us alone with your federalism! Why don’t you minimize the federal government and then try to socialize your community if that is what you want so that you can have the system where the people are and it actually can help them with what they really need and not some one size fits all keeps you down check but what you really might need is a one time $2000 for a car so you can work and pay your own way.

I live in Illinois 6 blocks from the bridge across the Mississippi River from Iowa and I am am going to be at a caucus precinct Tuesday (the rules allow it) with a camera to make sure that every one of Ron Paul’s votes get counted and the party insiders don’t try to misrepresent what really happened and steal this from him. Ron Paul is the republican no corporate money outsider that is going to give the republican party the enema that they need.

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Now, I should say, I think this guy is wrong. I think he’s wrong when he says that Ron Paul wants to end the taxing of the little guy and giving the money to big corporations. Paul’s tax plan, which proposes to eliminate the personal income tax and replace it with excise taxes, would almost certainly result in a shifting of tax burdens from high-income to low-income people, since those with lower incomes spend a greater percentage of their income on the goods that would be taxed. Excise taxes are also a peculiar choice for a supposed libertarian, since they tend to focus narrowly on particular products, in essence penalizing the use of some products and incentivizing the use of others — exactly the kind of tax-code activism libertarians frequently decry in the current tax code.

But I do think ConstructionDude’s sense that government is utterly corrupt and doesn’t work for him, but for Wal-Mart and Halliburton, and his perception of the police as a thuggish “wolf pack,” would mesh perfectly with the views of most of the Occupy movement, for example. ConstructionDude and Ron Paul are utterly pessimistic that the reins of government can ever be taken back from the great corporate powers, and so they want to minimize government altogether. I disagree with their solution, but can anyone on the left really argue with their diagnosis? Wouldn’t you rather debate someone like Paul, who at least sees the problem, than someone like Gingrich or Perry, both of whom manifestly personify the problem??

Some of my relatives (and Eric over at SOTSOGM, whose political instincts I usually trust) have expressed shock and dismay that some liberals find much to admire in Paul’s philosophy. Well, I understand that. But when the guy in whom I placed a whole lot of HOPE in ’08 is either M.I.A. on the important issues or actually hostile to the policies I’d like to see enacted, and the wacky Republican with the gold currency fixation is the one saying sensible things about civil liberties and war… what the fuck am I supposed to do?

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(PS — if I do decide to vote libertarian this year, it’ll probably be for Gary Johnson. He doesn’t have the history with icky, racist newsletters that Paul does, and he was a successful two-term governor. But right now it’s Ron Paul who’s talking about the things Obama’s all wrong on, and so it’s Paul and his supporters I’m defending here.)

but one more before I start class….

Just a quick observation from Eric:

If one is to make the utterly retarded comparison between families and government, one can’t help but notice that the first thing families usually do before they start tightening their budgets is have daddy and mommy go to their bosses at work and ask for a raise…. Or, depending on what kind of job you have, ask for overtime…. You know, to increase revenue. Because some things just can’t be cut.

And piggybacking off that, if you were living in a household where Uncle Phil, who already has quite a lot of money, asked the family if he could not pay into the rent for six months, because he was going to use that money to buy some new interview clothes and get a better job so that he could actually increase the family’s overall income, and Dad was doubtful but said, okay, Phil, I guess we can trust you, because we’re all in this together, and let Phil “keep more of his money” for six months, at the end of which time it was discovered that Phil had blown the money on hookers and cocaine and also driven his car into the side of the house, so he needs to keep not paying rent for a while, and Dad’s like, goddammit, Phil, how am I supposed to fix the wall? and Dad sighs and pulls out the credit card, which they’ve already been using to cover Phil’s part of the rent….

I think you see where I’m going here.

future of our economy, this blog uncertain

As you of course know, a deal was made at the last minute to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for a complicated scheme intended to reduce spending. CNN has an excellent article explaining some of the details:

The agreement revolves around a two-stage process.

The first stage includes $917 billion in savings, including a roughly $420 billion reduction in the national security budget. The cuts would be accompanied by a $900 billion increase in the debt ceiling.

Because of the pending Tuesday deadline, Obama would have immediate authority to raise the debt ceiling by $400 billion, which will last through September, according to the White House.

The other $500 billion increase in the debt limit would be subject to a congressional vote of disapproval that can be vetoed by Obama.

In the second stage, a special joint committee of Congress would recommend further deficit reduction steps totaling $1.5 trillion or more, with Congress obligated to vote on the panel’s proposals by the end of the year….

If the committee’s recommendations are enacted, Obama would be authorized to increase the debt ceiling by up to $1.5 trillion. If the recommendations are not enacted, Obama can still raise the debt ceiling by $1.2 trillion. At that point, however, a budget “trigger” would kick in, imposing mandatory across-the-board spending cuts matching the size of the debt ceiling increase.

Got that? I’m still not sure I follow it.

Krugman sees dark clouds on the horizon:

For two years, officials at the Federal Reserve, international organizations and, sad to say, within the Obama administration have insisted that the economy was on the mend. Every setback was attributed to temporary factors — It’s the Greeks! It’s the tsunami! — that would soon fade away. And the focus of policy turned from jobs and growth to the supposedly urgent issue of deficit reduction….

Consider one crucial measure, the ratio of employment to population. In June 2007, around 63 percent of adults were employed. In June 2009, the official end of the recession, that number was down to 59.4. As of June 2011, two years into the alleged recovery, the number was: 58.2….

And why should we be surprised at this catastrophe? Where was growth supposed to come from? Consumers, still burdened by the debt that they ran up during the housing bubble, aren’t ready to spend. Businesses see no reason to expand given the lack of consumer demand. And thanks to that deficit obsession, government, which could and should be supporting the economy in its time of need, has been pulling back….

Those plunging interest rates and stock prices say that the markets aren’t worried about either U.S. solvency or inflation. They’re worried about U.S. lack of growth. And they’re right, even if on Wednesday the White House press secretary chose, inexplicably, to declare that there’s no threat of a double-dip recession.

The real danger in this round of negotiations was never that the Republicans would ultimately refuse to raise the debt ceiling. It was always that they would play chicken with President Obama, and he would lose and give away the farm on spending cuts while we’re still fighting our way out of an unemployment hole. He has now done exactly that.

Here’s Mitch McConnell very openly explaining what the Republicans have learned from this:

I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting…. Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming.

On the other hand… I don’t really want to live through the consequences, but if you’re a fan of irony, there has been something very dramatically satisfying about watching the deficit hawks seize control of government at the exact moment that their prescription has the potential to drive the country into the ground. It feels like some kind of sober-minded TV show or novel.

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Meanwhile, in real life, I am starting law school on Wednesday. That means a lot less time for writing. I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do with this space. I had an idea that I might post case briefs here, which would be dull as dishwater for normal people (“joint and several or several liability for independent tortfeasors,” anyone?) but might be a nice service for future law students looking for resources online. Or I might just ruminate on what I’ve learned about the law once a week or so. Or I might just let this space lie fallow for a while, as I have done before.

We’ll see, but in the meantime I’d like to thank everyone who’s read and commented, both here and on Facebook, even (or especially) people I disagreed with. This has been a good time and a great learning experience, and I’m glad to have had the opportunity to talk to you all.

the “half of all Americans pay no taxes” myth debunked

Basically stealing my post today from Fred Clark, who links to two excellent posts by Kevin Drum dismantling the oft-repeated lie, most recently trumpeted by supposed pastor Rick Warren, that “half of all Americans pay no taxes.”

Drum first points out that it’s simply not true. All Americans pay taxes — though some don’t pay federal income tax, a tax that falls disproportionately on the wealthy, as it was designed to do. Drum has a nifty graph showing the distribution of total taxes by income quintile:

From the Tax Foundation, an organization that even conservatives ought to be willing to credit, here’s a report from a few years ago showing the total tax burden on various income groups in America:

…The blue bars don’t cherry pick just the federal income tax to make a dumb partisan talking point; they show how much each group actually pays in total taxes. Bottom line: Poor people pay less in taxes than rich people, as they should, but it’s very far from zero.

But more importantly for people like Warren, whose putative mandate is to serve the least of these brothers and sisters of Christ, we should ask why nearly half of Americans pay no federal income tax. Is it because they’re a bunch of devious bastards who’ve somehow engineered massive, pointless tax cuts for themselves and shifted the bill to the rest of us? (Hint: No.)

Drum points us to this post by Bob Williams at the Tax Policy Center for an explanation:

[A]bout half of people who don’t owe income tax are off the rolls not because they take advantage of tax breaks but rather because they have low incomes. For example, a couple with two children earning less than $26,400 will pay no federal income tax this year because their $11,600 standard deduction and four exemptions of $3,700 each reduce their taxable income to zero. The basic structure of the income tax simply exempts subsistence levels of income from tax.

(By the way, this applies to everybody, not just the poor — you and me and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and the Koch Brothers. None of us pays any taxes on the first several thousand dollars.)

What about the rest of the untaxed households, the 23 percent of households who don’t pay income tax because of particular tax breaks? …Three-fourths of those households pay no income tax because of provisions that benefit senior citizens and low-income working families with children. Those provisions include the exclusion of some Social Security benefits from taxable income, the tax credit and extra standard deduction for the elderly, and the child, earned income, and childcare tax credits that primarily help low-income workers with children…. Extending the example offered above, the couple could earn an additional $19,375 without paying income tax because their pre-credit tax liability of $2,056 would be wiped out by a $2,000 child tax credit and $57 of EITC.

That means the people who aren’t paying federal income tax are the desperately poor, old people, and working-class families with kids. We ought, perhaps, to ask why 23% of Americans fall into in the first category, i.e., living at “subsistence levels.” We ought to ask whether there are specific social policies that have led to a quarter of Americans living in real poverty, and if so, what to do about that. (Other than browbeat them for not paying taxes.)

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Here’s another, related fact-check by Fred Clark, this one aimed at the common misconception that Jesus said that “The poor you will always have with you,” as though he were commenting on a fact of nature, like, “The sun will always rise in the east.” In fact, Jesus was probably alluding to Deuteronomy 15:11, which reads:

For the poor will never cease from the land; therefore I command you, saying, ‘You shall open your hand wide to your brother, to your poor and your needy, in your land.’

But, Clark writes, look at the beginning of Deut 15, because it also says

[T]here shall be no poor among you; for the LORD shall greatly bless thee in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it:

Only if thou carefully hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all these commandments which I command thee this day.

In other words, God seems to be saying that if the Israelites obey Him (in the context of this passage, that means debt forgiveness, an idea I haven’t heard a lot of modern preachers clamoring for), there will be no poor among them. But they don’t, so there are.

As a non-believer, I happen to think we can do better than the Deuteronomical standard, which only extends debt forgiveness to the “brethren” of one particular tribe, pointedly excluding “foreigners.” But Clark’s point is that if there’s poverty, that’s not because of an immutable decree of the Lord — it’s because we’ve failed to enact structural solutions like periodic debt forgiveness.

By the way, no mention is made of self-righteously administered charity. Just structural solutions.

Rick Warren, take note.

we have prisoners! take our prisoners!

Sara at Prison Law Blog writes that Louisiana has too many prison cells and not enough prisoners, while West Virginia has the opposite problem. Unfortunately, the West Virginia constitution prohibits transporting prisoners out of state.

Well, I’ve searched for “crime,” “punish,” and “transport” in the California constitution, and I can’t find any reason why we couldn’t relieve some of our illegal and dangerous overcrowding by FedExing prisoners to Louisiana. Surely there’s no possible danger that Louisiana could become a jobless hellhole dependent on the prison industry, and it would be a lot less politically painful than reforming our needlessly punitive sentencing laws!

on zombie economies

Michael Lind writes depressingly in Salon of the coming collapse of protected elite professional sectors and the likely rise of populist nativism. I don’t have a lot to add, and I’m not sure if I buy it or not, but it’s worth a read.

[I]f the crony capitalists of the right succeed in cutting back Social Security and Medicare, American wage-earners will be compelled to pay more of their stagnant incomes to private mutual fund managers and insurance companies. And if the green crony capitalists of the left succeed, working Americans will be forced permanently to pay artificially higher utility bills to subsidize politically-connected “venture capitalists” who will derive a permanent, rigged stream of income from zombie green corporations, whose uneconomical solar and wind energy will be purchased by utility companies under legal mandates written by green lobbyists.

… At some point, a national populist movement in the spirit of Ross Perot, Patrick Buchanan and Lou Dobbs will almost certainly reappear in the United States….

Protectionism and immigration restrictionism have been the typical responses of nations to depressions before, in the 1870s, the 1890s and the 1930s. These policies don’t work well, in the theoretical sense that they do not promote long-term global growth as well as would a combination of liberal trade and immigration policy with coordinated, demand-expanding Keynesian expansionary policies among all nations at the same time.

But protectionism and immigration restriction can succeed in the short run. If you preserve your domestic market for domestic producers, you encourage domestic investment and create domestic jobs, as multinational companies, whether nominally American or foreign, are forced to locate production in the U.S. in order to have access to American consumers. This assumes that many if not all customers will have no choice but to buy necessary goods from the protected national industries. Similarly, if you reduce the flow of immigrant labor, you create domestic jobs, assuming a fixed demand for necessary, labor-intensive services in sectors like healthcare. In the long run, your country and others will be worse off than they would be in an imaginary world without barriers to the free flow of goods, labor and capital. But that is like arguing that we would all be better off in “Star Trek’s” imaginary United Federation of Planets.