Politics

Pretty soon we're talking real money

The number being tossed about for post-Katrina reconstruction is $200 billion. That’s a lot of money, even for a cosmologist. If you spent a dollar per month throughout the entire existence of our observable universe, you’d only get up to about $164 billion.

How can we possibly pay for it? Mark Schmitt points to two ideas: a bad one and a good one. The bad one is a project being organized by Glenn Reynolds and N.Z. Bear to point the finger of shame at wasteful pork in the discretionary budget, in hopes that Congress will be moved to slice away this excess fat and free up funds for more important things. The germ of the idea is okay — wasteful pork is bad, why not trim it away — but the idea that they’ll reach $200 billion is fantasy-land. (At the moment they’ve reached about $14 billion, using an expansive definition of “pork” that includes, for example, all federal domestic-violence programs.) That’s because the part of the federal budget that they would even consider trimming is only about $500 billion. Schmitt quotes Stan Collender in the National Journal, who explains that “Social Security, interest on the debt, most other federal mandatory spending, the Pentagon, the costs of activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, homeland security and foreign aid” are off the table. The remaining $500 billion, by the way, includes all spending on science, education, and wasteful stuff like that. Rail against pork all you like, but it doesn’t make up 40% of the discretionary budget.

The good idea comes from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. They point out the obvious thing: the reason the government is having trouble paying its bills is because its revenues, as a fraction of GDP, are lower than they have been in decades. But even better, they home in on two tax cuts scheduled to kick in during 2006, which represent a particularly egregious example of benefiting the rich. One deals with personal exemptions, and the other sets the values of allowed itemized deductions, both applying to couples making over $218,950 or individuals making over $145,950.

who benefits from these tax cuts?

Some interesting features of these tax cuts:

  • President Bush didn’t even ask for them; they were inserted by Congress during the budget reconciliation process.
  • 54% of the money from these cuts will go to households earning over one million dollars per year, the wealthiest 0.2% of households.
  • 97% of the money from these cuts will go to households earning over $200,000 per year, the wealthiest 3.7% of households.
  • The total cost of the cuts, including interest on accrued debt, is $197 billion over ten years.

Hmmm.

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Hurricanes and politics

I’m back from a brief but busy trip to Syracuse, where I hung out with co-blogger Mark and gave a talk or two. No time for any substantive blogging, which is just as well, as the rest of the crew has been discussing the Katrina fiasco better than I could have.

In fact, had I been stuck in front of the computer with nothing to do but blog, I would likely have posted something early on about how this is no time for partisan political sniping — it’s a massive human disaster, you can’t blame the President for the weather, and there will be plenty of time for sorting out responsibility later.

What a mistake that would have been. Sure, you can’t blame Bush for the hurricane, but the tragedy has been needlessly magnified by massive incompetence at all levels, foremost at the very top. The extent to which things have been screwed up is only gradually becoming clear, but we already know that the response strategy included funneling large numbers of poor people into the convention center and locking them in, while refusing help from other countries and cities, and keeping out the Red Cross on the theory that the refugees wouldn’t leave the city if there were food and water and medicine there.

The incompetence is staggering. If nothing else, the one thing that should have been figured out after September 11 is how to coordinate a response to a large-scale disaster. Don’t you think they’ve had time to settle on a plan? Of course they have, but perhaps the decision to gut FEMA rather than strengthen it was a little shortsighted. And perhaps political hack Michael Brown’s job experience as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association — from which he was fired for incompetence — didn’t really prepare him for the realities of being Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Oh yes, and perhaps it would have been good if more of the National Guard were here guarding the nation, rather than somewhere else.

Yes, there will be time for recriminations later. (And for gathering more synonyms for “incompetence,” I’m running low.) But as James Wolcott stresses, later never comes for these people. Right now, when the stupidity and mendacity of the administration is visible in sharp relief, is the best time to hold them responsible for their mistakes. I’m sure there is plenty of blame to go around, and I’m sure a lot of it will deservedly fall on state and local officials, and I’m sure many of them will be Democrats; it doesn’t matter, anyone who failed in their job in this time of crisis deserves to be held accountable. And it starts at the top.

Update: If you’d like to see an actual attempt to use the disaster for a brazenly partisan political advantage, see this. (Via Pandagon.)

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Four-Star blogging

Retired general (and once-and-future Democratic presidential hopeful) Wesley Clark is doing a guest-blogging stint at TPM Cafe. I am cautiously optimistic about Clark, keeping in mind the uncertainty principle that guarantees that a candidate’s viability is in inverse proportion to how much I like them.

His first post concerns our options in Iraq, given the mess in which we are currently mired.

Not only do I disagree with the premise by which this Administration started the war in Iraq, I also disagree with their current strategy of urging American “resolve” and fighting in Iraq in an open-ended manner. Simply “staying the course” is not an option, and neither is cutting and running. Too much is at stake. There is still time succeed, but the President needs to stand up and admit his mistakes and be willing to do the hard work that is needed to build a stable and peaceful Iraq. He needs to implement to exhaustion a three pronged strategy — I outlined it in my op-ed, so I won’t do it again here — and work the regional politics to bring about a sustainable solution before the armed and political opposition to our presence in the region crystallizes, and finally justifies, a demand for the return of our troops.

A sensible strategy, obviously with serious questions about how realistic it really is. At least Clark seems to be welcoming criticism and commentary, which by itself would be a refreshing change from the status quo.

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Worst-case scenarios

One of the countless mistakes made in the planning and execution of the Iraq war was the baffling Pollyannaism of the planners. It’s one thing to put an optimistic face forward, but an entirely different thing to be legitimately surprised when things don’t work out in the way you intended. I would have thought that planning for worst-case scenarios is standard operating procedure for military operations, but Rumsfeld and his underlings seemed to be simply stuck when things went wrong.

Deep into the mess, it’s still worth asking what is the worst-case scenario for Iraq, and I don’t see many people making the effort. I’m certainly no expert, but even I can see a clear path to much worse outcomes than most people seem to be contemplating. Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy has laid out a useful categorization of the possibilities, on which Ted Barlow at Crooked Timber offers useful commentary:

  1. The U.S. beats back the insurgency and democracy flowers in Iraq (call this the “optimistic stay” scenario),
  2. The U.S. digs in its heels, spends years fighting the insurgency, loses lots of troops, and years later withdraws, leading to a bloody and disastrous civil war (the “pessimistic stay” scenario);
  3. The U.S. decides that it’s no longer worth it to stay in Iraq, pulls out relatively soon, and things in Iraq are about as best as you could hope for, perhaps leading to a decent amount of democracy (optimistic leave), and
  4. The U.S. decides that it’s no longer worth it to stay in Iraq, pulls out soon, and plunges Iraq into a bloody and disastrous civil war with the bad guys assuming control eventually (pessimistic leave).

I can be more pessimistic than that! The hints are right there in the attempts by some Shia clerics to carve out some autonomy for Shiites in the oil-rich southern provinces of the country. The proposal, which would have isolated the Sunni minority in the relatively poor central regions between Kurdish and Shia territories, seems to have been defeated as far as the Iraqi constitution is concerned. But things are far from settled, and it raises the possibility that the civil war will ultimately result in partition of the country.

Iraq was one of those ethnically heterogeneous nations that were awkwardly pieced together in the process of colonialization and its aftermath. It’s very common for such states to dissolve when the bonds are loosened.

Iraq, forged by the British from the war-torn scrap of the collapsed Ottoman empire, survived as a single state only because of the iron fists of monarchs and, in more recent decades, former dictator Saddam Hussein.

Despite that, there is a fear that its disintegration could trigger unpredictable consequences for all of its uneasy neighbours — Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. Some critics now say that the policy pledge of trying to keep Iraq whole was always doomed. “Iraq is the last, multiethnic state, left over from the First World War,” said Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador with experience in both the Balkans and Iraq.

“Democracy killed the Soviet Union, it killed Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and it will kill Iraq,” he said in an interview from Baghdad.

“A managed breakup is not easy, but it will be less violent than a forced and unhappy union,” said Mr. Galbraith, now a senior diplomatic fellow at the Washington-based Center for Arms Control.

Maybe it will be less violent; but the opposite is certainly conceivable. Imagine that the Kurds and the Shiites really carve out separate countries for themselves. The Shia region will naturally ally with Iran, as has already been happening. The existence of a sovereign Kurdish state will be unacceptable to leaders in Turkey, who worry that their own Kurdish minority will push to secede. Meanwhile the small Sunni minority will be left without significant oil wealth, but with a memory of ruling the country for decades.

It’s not hard to imagine disaster: a conflict between one or the other of these remnant states spreading to their natural allies in the region. Iran and the former Iraq have a long history of bloody warfare; it’s not hard to envision a conflict between the Shiites and Sunnis, with Iran jumping in on the Shiite side. The Sunnis have allies throughout the Arab world, any one of which might come to their aid — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria. Turkey could easily see the chaos as a good excuse to subdue the Kurds, opening up a regional conflagration. Saddam already established the precedent of lobbying missiles at Israel when things look grim; various of the states involved could get a similar idea. Unlike the first Gulf War, in which the U.S. was trying to hold together a fragile coalition of regional allies, the Israelis would have little motivation for sitting quietly without retaliating (nor should they). It would be, to put it mildly, a mess.

To be clear, I don’t think such a scenario is at all likely; but I don’t think it’s inconceivable, either. And it should be our job to contemplate the worst possible outcomes of unstable situations like we find ourselves in right now. This is why, although I’ve always been anti-war, and certainly against the establishment of permanent U.S. bases (one of the many unspoken agendas of the war), I’ve never been in favor of setting a timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops, an idea that seems to be gaining currency among Democrats. I’m of the Colin Powell “you break it, you bought it” school, and we have certainly broken it. Right now, how long we stay in Iraq should largely be up to the judgement of the Iraqis themselves, acting as a sovereign nation; so long as our troops are serving a useful purpose in helping the country stay together and move towards peace, it’s our obligation to stick it out.

Update: At Obsidian Wings, hilzoy has a discussion of Iraqi militias that won’t make anyone feel more optimistic.

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Wagging fingers

Eugene Volokh has inspired a useful and uplifting blogosphere meme: condemnation of groups of people whom, although nobody is claiming that they are numerous or influential, we can nevertheless agree are worthy of our scorn. (Indeed, the search for actual examples hasn’t been very fruitful.) His own entry in this game was “Westerners who side with the Iraqi resistance.” As he explains (after some prodding),

Fortunately, the group being criticized is not a vast group. So? They’re still worth condemning.

Capital idea. Next to join in was Belle Waring:

I points the fingerbone of scorn at those inhumanly cruel Republicans who drink puppy blood for breakfast. When I consider the sharp, tiny milk-teeth of those puppies, protruding from gums now white with blood loss, I am filled with a righteous and long-abiding anger.

Again, she is quick to note that there are very few Republicans who fit such a description, but they should surely be denounced. (Lindsay Beyerstein, playing the contrarian, denounces Belle’s denunciation, but is clearly just trying to score some intellectual-virtue points.)

Since one can never denounce such heinous activities too fervently, Brad DeLong chimes in:

I for one, would like to also denounce adherents of the Republican Party who pretend to “adopt” kittens from animal shelters, and then kill them and dissect their little kittenish bodies with knives. I acknowledge that rather few Republicans are in this category, but I insist that these people are very bad.

How true that is.

Not to pile on, but I can’t help but offer my own humble contribution to the rare-but-worthy-of-scorn category. To wit, we should condemn Republicans who attempt to justify the capture and long-term detention of prisoners who are denied counsel and not charged with any crime, and then tortured, sometimes to death, in a misguided attempt to extract useful intelligence from them, even though they may be perfectly innocent. Likewise, Republicans who make fun of such practices by selling witty T-shirts. Oh, and those who advocate public torture of criminals in order to satsify the public’s bloodlust — wouldn’t want to forget them.

Of course, nobody would suggest that such people comprise a vast group. So? They are still worth condemning.

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Gore 08?

Certain corners of the liberal blogosphere, suffering from various combinations of amnesia and masochism, have hit upon the perfect Presidential candidate for 2008: Al Gore. See Marshall Wittman, Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Atrios, Scott Lemieux. They like the fact that he was actually against the Iraq war. This seems to have blinded them to another important fact: Al Gore is just an incredibly, embarassingly, unforgivably bad candidate. This is the guy who managed to turn a booming economy and the advantages of incumbency into a defeat by our completely inarticulate current President. This is the guy who would dramatically change his style from debate to debate based on what he saw on Saturday Night Live. This is the guy who moved to distance himself from his boss by demonstrating that he only lusted after his wife, by French-kissing her before his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention. This is another in a long line of Democratic politicians will always come across to most voters as 100% irredeemably phony. I can hear the anguished cries of recrimination in Nov. 2008 all the way from here.

The lonely voice of reason seems to be Julie Saltman. More evidence that men shouldn’t be allowed to make important political decisions.

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A shameful event in American history

Everyone knows that the Bush administration moved up the timing of its Supreme Court nomination to push chatter about Karl Rove off the front pages. No reason we should go along with the plan.

Part of the Republican strategy, of course, has been to shift the focus away from Rove and onto Joseph Wilson and his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame. (The mind absolutely boggles at what these exact same people would be saying if a Democratic political operative had blown the cover of a CIA agent — flogging wouldn’t be good enough for them.) They want to give the impression that Plame wasn’t really undercover, so it was no big deal to give a few reporters her identity in order to settle a political score.

Actual CIA agents disagree, and they’ve written an open letter to Congress to make their stance clear.

We, the undersigned former U.S. intelligence officers are concerned with the tone and substance of the public debate over the ongoing Department of Justice investigation into who leaked the name of Valerie Plame, wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, to syndicated columnist Robert Novak and other members of the media, which exposed her status as an undercover CIA officer. The disclosure of Ms. Plame’s name was a shameful event in American history and, in our professional judgment, may have damaged U.S. national security and poses a threat to the ability of U.S. intelligence gathering using human sources. Any breach of the code of confidentiality and cover weakens the overall fabric of intelligence, and, directly or indirectly, jeopardizes the work and safety of intelligence workers and their sources.

The Republican National Committee has circulated talking points to supporters to use as part of a coordinated strategy to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife. As part of this campaign a common theme is the idea that Ambassador Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame was not undercover and deserved no protection. […] These comments reveal an astonishing ignorance of the intelligence community and the role of cover. The fact is that there are thousands of U.S. intelligence officers who “work at a desk” in the Washington, D.C. area every day who are undercover. Some have official cover, and some have non-official cover. Both classes of cover must and should be protected.

Via Dynamics of Cats and AMERICAblog.

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