Hollywood Ad Hominem
Over at the Huffington Post, enviro activist Laurie David complains today that the media is willing to give some ink to my colleague, Prof. Pat Michaels, on the issue of global warming. One of her main complaints is that Pat is nobody (scientifically speaking) and the fact that he has “(finally) gotten a paper published” does not qualify him as an expert.
And Laurie has published peer reviewed papers … where? Anyway, Prof. Laurie has nothing substantive to say about the arguments in the Michaels paper that sent her around the bend.
It’s truly a wondrous thing when Hollywood celebs with no scientific training feel free to attack the credentials of academics with Ph.Ds in their (momentary) field of interest. She did a similar smear-job on MIT Prof. Richard Lindzen. More such attacks are likely to come.
Regardless, Laurie’s ad hominem attack is bogus. Pat is in fact one of the most widely published climate change experts in the peer-reviewed literature. If she had ever bothered to actually read the U.N.’s “state of the science” IPCC reports she claims to have digested, she would have seen multiple references therein to his work.
But for the record, Pat’s peer-reviewed papers and presentations since 2000 follow:
With Enzi Bill, GOP Abandons Federalism, Free Trade
The U.S. Senate steps through the looking glass this week, with a debate on a health care bill that would shift power from the states to the federal government. Republicans, who typically argue against such things, support the bill. Democrats, who never miss a chance to expand federal power, oppose it.
The bill, sponsored by Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), deals with health insurance regulation. That has traditionally been the province of the states, with one large exception: In 1974, the feds allowed large employers to avoid state regulation by opting for federal regulation. That gave multi-state employers the benefit of only having to contend with one set of health insurance regulations (rather than 50). Federal regulation has also traditionally been less burdensome than state regulation.
In fact, the states have been regulating health insurance like mad. Many states require consumers to purchase unwanted or even offensive coverage. (Thirty states require Catholics to purchase coverage for contraception; 14 states require them to purchase in-vitro fertilization coverage.) States have passed some 1,800 of these “mandated benefit” laws. The states also regulate insurance prices, which actually increases the number of uninsured.
States get away with over-regulation because they prohibit consumers and employers from buying health insurance from out-of-state. If you lived in some regulatory hell-hole — let’s say, New Jersey — you could obtain much cheaper coverage by dealing with a carrier regulated by another state.
If Bruce Springsteen can purchase voice insurance from Lloyd’s of London, surely his neighbors should be able to buy health insurance from Pennsylvania.
Who’s More Myopic?
Here’s a partial view of the range of issues that needs to be scaled in order to constrain the future size of the federal government. In what follows, A = widely appreciated by the public, N = not widely appreciated, and A-N = appreciated by a few.
- Waiting to reform will mean that the median voter will be older — and tend to vote for tax hikes rather than benefit cuts as a solution to entitlement shortfalls (A).
- Waiting to reform entitlements makes the cost of fixing them increase as a percentage of GDP — and last year, we decided to postpone Social Security reform until who knows when. Just for Social Security, each year brings an additional $600 billion in cost (official Social Security Administration estimate). Note, the economy adds only about $450 billion in additional output each year (N).
- When analyzing the merits and demerits of reforms, we do not consider their full cost because we make policies based on short-horizon fiscal measurements — the 10-year cost of prescription drugs, for example (A-N).
- Recently emerged needs for countering terrorism and international nuclear blackmail means the peace dividend has evaporated and cutting other government spending is less viable as a means of releasing resources for entitlement outlay needs (A-N).
- Private saving has declined and remains low (zero percent on personal saving) precisely because of the types of entitlements we have adopted (my finding from past research on why national saving declined in the U.S.). We’re lucky to be able for borrow capital from abroad today, but all such borrowing will have to be repaid with interest — perhaps just when we need to distribute more for retiree support (A-N).
- We just enacted a massive new and irreversible entitlement — Medicare prescription drugs — the constituency for which will grow more solid by the year (A).
Most of these issues ARE known to policymakers and federal budget practitioners within the beltway. In fact, they have been known since the early 1990s. Despite recognizing these problems, Congress has repeatedly settled into postponing action on entitlement reforms.
What does that tell you?
Those who believe that the government should come to the aid of “myopic” individuals who don’t save enough for the future, think again.
Kerr on the NSA Database
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr has an informative first cut at the legal issues surrounding the NSA’s newly revealed phone-call-record database. Bottom line: Whether you think the program is unlawful is likely going to depend on whether you think Article II allows the president to bypass statutes that infringe on tactics he wants to pursue in the war on terror.
Please, Talk to Iran
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s letter to President Bush [.pdf] was remarkable, in that it was the first time the leader of Iran has sought to engage the leader of the United States since the Iranian revolution.
Unfortunately, the letter was tainted by the fact that it was sort of loopy, to put it charitably. The Wall Street Journal editorial page compared it – fairly — to the Unabomber’s manifesto. And Mr. Ahmadinejad has a particularly nasty habit of sprinkling Holocaust revisionism and bombastic rhetoric about Israel into every speech he makes.
Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration dismissed the letter, pointing out that it does little to get at the range of substantive issues that divides our two countries. Still, there were some observers who thought that the fact that Ahmadinejad took the step — let alone the fact that he has jetted to Malaysia to declare that Iran “is ready to engage in dialogue with anybody [except Israel]” and that “there are no limits to our dialogue” — represented an opening. But the bizarre tone and lack of substance in the letter sowed grave doubts for some about the prospects for defusing the crisis.
Fortunately, the Iranians appear to have cribbed their strategy from Nikita Khrushchev, sending a second, non-nutty letter to Time magazine for dissemination in the West. In that letter, Hassan Rohani, a representative of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, makes a serious proposal that holds a much better prospect as a starting point for negotiations — and for standing back from the brink of war.
The deal Rohani offers is not very close to the Bush administration’s current demands, but in the course of trying to get to the negotiating table, the opening salvos don’t often resemble the final deals.
We should definitely reply to Mr. Rohani’s letter. Hawks are right to point out that we don’t want to get rope-a-doped here: We don’t want to enter into endless negotiations with the Iranians that go nowhere and just allow them to play for time. That’s why, if we want to find out what their intentions are, we should offer them a serious deal, and see how they respond.
If the Iranians are at all willing to give up their drive toward nuclear weapons in return for normalizing our relationship (including our promising not to attempt “regime change”), it is definitely, absolutely worth making a serious effort to get that deal.
The Red Menace
China’s plan to build 48 new airports over the next five years is freaking out environmentalists, who worry abou the impact of Chinese air travel on ozone depletion. Apparently, the poor, unwashed masses of China should stick to their bikes while the rest of us jet around to U.N. conferences where we can worry about global warming and the oncoming environmental Armageddon in peace.
I’ll put “Chinese air travel” on my list of things to worry about tonight.
You Put Your Left Foot in
Look, I’m all for blaming government when blame is due, but conservatives have got to stop suggesting that high gasoline prices would disappear tomorrow if the government would repeal the ethanol mandate, build new refineries, open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or do the hokey pokey [.pdf].
Doing all of the above (save the hokey pokey) might reduce prices somewhat (and do more so over time), but 85 percent of the variation in gasoline prices is explained by variation in global crude oil prices. Crude oil prices are established by global supply and demand patterns, and there’s not much Congress can do about either.
Arguing that there are simple legislative fixes encourages the mistaken belief that there’s no problem Congress can’t solve. Too many people believe that already.
Bloody Madness
God bless Sarah Lyall. Not only does the New York Times correspondent pen a steady stream of stories about the wackiness of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. She also drops references to Austin Powers and The Simpsons.
Her latest is a May 7 article on dentistry in Britain titled, “In a Dentist Shortage, British (Ouch) Do It Themselves.” Lyall introduces us to Britons who yank out their own teeth rather than rely on a “state-financed dental service [that is] stretched beyond its limit, no longer serves everyone, and no longer even pretends to try.”
The local private dentists are pricey, but some Britons are cutting those bills in half by visiting dentists in Hungary. Competition is funny that way.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go floss.
Repeat After Me: “We Are All Individuals”
Back when Steve Martin was doing stand-up comedy (yes, I’m OLD), he had a wonderful bit in which he would get the audience to repeat a series of statements in unison, the last of which was “we are all individuals.”
I’m sure that this bit of irony would have been lost on the editors of the Washington Post. In a May 9 feature, they asked three authors to discuss the battle between traditionalist and progressive pedagogical methods. The fatal conceit of this feature, to which all the contributors succumbed, was to ignore the most sensible approach of all: let families decide for themselves.
If parents were free to choose the schools best suited to each of their children, and schools were forced to compete for the privilege of serving them, the most effective methods would flourish and the rest would be marginalized. We’d also likely find that certain methods work well with some children but not others.
The sooner we overcome the Stalinesque notion that educational excellence can be pursued through more or better central planning, the better off our kids will be.
Uncle Sam: Lord of the Flies
The Fish & Wildlife Service announced yesterday that it will move with great dispatch and determination to save 12 species of rare Hawaiian flies from the brink of extinction. Thank God for the Endangered Species Act. Who knows what sort of dark ecological night might descend upon us without it?
Of course, the ESA is like an operating room in which patients check in but they don’t check out. Its success as saving and reviving patients is akin to Jack Kevorkian’s. So don’t throw a party for those flies yet.
McCain-Feingold Bites
So a court confirms that, under the McCain-Feingold law, it’s illegal to run ads urging a senator to vote for a bill in Congress if the bill is coming to the floor within 30 days of a primary election in which the senator is running unopposed. Because letting a grassroots group contact voters on a proposed constitutional amendment would compromise “the integrity of the electoral process.”
John McCain often takes the lead on economic freedom, and Russell Feingold was the only senator to vote against the PATRIOT Act, but they should both be sorely ashamed that they have so effectively blocked the voters from the sacred “electoral process.”
NSA Database II
The disclosure by USA Today that the NSA has another domestic surveillance database is no shocker. Yet the newly uncovered database includes only calling and receiving phone numbers, not the content of the conversations.
More ominous, when asked by Congress whether the NSA was monitoring the content of wholly domestic calls, Gonzales refused to rule out such surveillance. Indeed, from a policy rather than legal perspective, if it’s necessary and effective to monitor calls from, say, DC to Naples, Italy, then why not DC to Naples, Florida? If the NSA can disregard legal barriers because a communication might include information of foreign intelligence value, then monitoring domestic-to-domestic calls would seem no less justified than monitoring domestic-to-foreign calls.
When communications from and to a US person in the US are monitored, that’s domestic surveillance, no matter whether the party on the other end is inside or outside of the US. Since Bush believes that warrantless domestic surveillance is permissible regardless of FISA’s contrary provisions, we shouldn’t be surprised if the NSA has much more data (including content) than USA Today has uncovered.
Missing the Point on Gen. Hayden
The final paragraph from Dana Priest’s fine analysis of the story behind Gen. Michael Hayden’s appointment to head the CIA in Tuesday’s Washington Post caught my attention:
The CIA, with the help of its foreign partners, has been responsible for capturing or killing nearly all the key al-Qaeda figures since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
One can dwell on intelligence failures in recent years, starting of course with the failure to predict the 9/11 attacks, and extending to the mistaken belief that Iraq possessed WMDs. But to the extent that so much of our intelligence work now falls under the Department of Defense, it is particularly short-sighted to single out the CIA for blame.
Meanwhile, we have to give the Agency its due: Al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11, and the CIA has had Al Qaeda in its gunsights ever since. While we can all look forward to the day when Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri and Mullah Mohammed Omar are out of circulation, the killing and capture of other senior Al Qaeda operatives (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, described by the 9/11 Commission as the “mastermind” behind the 9/11 attrocities; and Ramzi Binalshibh, another key 9/11 figure) must be counted as an intelligence success. Score one for the spooks.
Meanwhile, the greatest intelligence blunder since 9/11 was the notion that post-Saddam Iraq would quickly settle into a stable and friendly unitary nation-state, ideally a democratic one. And on this point, the instincts among many at the CIA (as well as the State Department and the Army War College), were generally sound. Justin Logan and I took up this issue in a recent Cato Policy Analysis:
The common theme running through essentially all of the postwar planning was that the project in Iraq was going to be incredibly difficult and require a great deal of resources and sacrifice. Contrast that view with the view of the civilian leadership at the Pentagon at that time. The Pentagon believed that, by and large, resistance would be light and that a new liberal Iraqi leader could be implanted without a great deal of trouble. Accordingly, it appears that the Pentagon brushed aside pessimistic assessments from the Department of State and the War College as unduly negative.
Alas, being right doesn’t always count for very much in Washington. When CIA analysts warned that it would be difficult and costly to bring order to post-Saddam Iraq the assessments were immediately viewed with suspicion. As the Post‘s David Ignatius reported last Sunday:
From late 2003 on, the agency was warning about the rise of the Iraqi insurgency and the failings of the administration’s political strategy. In 2004 the CIA station chief in Baghdad was sending warnings . . . about the deteriorating situation. This candid and largely correct reporting is said to have angered White House officials, who complained that the Baghdad chief was defeatist and not a team player. At the end of his tour, he was punished with a poor assignment.
No wonder the agency has experienced a shocking loss of senior talent in recent years. The announcement that Porter Goss would be replaced by a decidedly non-partisan person, and that Gen. Hayden would be accompanied by a well-respected careerist Stephen R. Kappes, a former head of CIA’s operations branch who resigned in a dispute with Goss, was aimed first and foremost at staunching the losses — and perhaps even reversing them.
We need an intelligence service in this country that is insulated from political pressures to the greatest extent possible. It cannot be hermetically sealed, of course, and there is a natural tendency for an analyst or briefer to want to play to his or her audience. Which is all the more reason why political leaders, beginning with the president and his senior cabinet officers, must do their utmost to seek out dissenting opinions, and to carefully consider whether the various sources of information are objective and knowledgeable in the matter at hand. President Bush hasn’t always done that, and the results have been disastrous.
I don’t mean this as an endorsement of Gen. Hayden. My colleague Gene Healy raises the issue of Hayden’s oversight of the NSA surveillance program, an issue that must be addressed during Hayden’s confirmation hearings. The answers he provides may ultimately warrant a “no” vote from senators.
It is also clear, however, that the CIA suffered greatly during Porter Goss’s brief but troubled tenure. Here’s hoping that a successor, whomever that might be, can turn things around.
Mission Creep
Opponents of Gen. Michael Hayden’s nomination as CIA director object to the fact that he’s an active-duty military officer. I’m not sure that’s the best argument against Hayden, since he wouldn’t be the first such to run the agency. That Hayden happily ran a secret surveillance program that violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ought to be a bigger concern.
But if you want to worry about a military/surveillance nexus — and you probably should — there’s plenty to worry about quite apart from Gen. Hayden and the NSA. There have been a number of unsettling reports in recent months about military intelligence officials developing an unhealthy interest in peaceful protest groups.
The history of domestic surveillance by the military is part tragedy, part farce. I covered a little of that history here:
[T]hroughout the 20th Century, in periods of domestic unrest and foreign conflict, army surveillance ratcheted up again, most notably in the 1960s. During that tumultuous decade, President Johnson repeatedly called on federal troops to quell riots and restore order. To better perform that task, Army intelligence operatives began compiling thousands of dossiers on citizens, many of whom had committed no offense beyond protesting government policy. Reviewing the files, the Senate Judiciary Committee noted that “comments about the financial affairs, sex lives and psychiatric histories of persons unaffiliated with the armed forces appear throughout the various records systems.” Justice William O. Douglas called army surveillance “a cancer in our body politic.”
Check the Church Committee’s report on “Improper Surveillance of United States Citizens by the Military” for more on the history we should be loath to repeat.
A Marshalltown Plan for Immigration
Below, Tom Palmer mentions Cato adjunct scholar Don Boudreaux’s wonderful essay on the ability of today’s United States to absorb immigrants as compared to our storied Ellis Island immigration heyday. I’d like to add a point that many Lou Dobbs fans seem not to fully grasp. Not only can we accommodate more people, we need more people.
I grew up in Marshalltown, Iowa. I’ll tell you, they’re not running out of space in Marshalltown. From the historic courthouse at the center of town, a ten to fifteen minute drive in any direction will put you in a cornfield. Over the past decade or so, Marshalltown has seen an influx of Mexicans — many from a single village, Villachuato — who came to work at the Swift meatpacking plant, or in the fields in the summer. This has caused a bit of friction in a middle-class town with a largely German and Scandinavian heritage — but just a bit. In fact, many small Midwestern towns like Marshalltown have been fighting for decades to hold on to a dwindling population. This is a real problem. Marshalltown businesses, for example, receive less than one application for each new job opening.
In 2001, with typical Iowan civic spirit, then-mayor Floyd Harthun ventured down to Villachuato to see if he could learn something about Marshalltown’s newest workers and taxpayers. Here’s part of an account of that trip, from a 2002 article in Governing Magazine (for state and local governments), which illustrates the symbiotic relationship between Mexican immigrants and towns like Marshalltown:
Economics 101, Republican Style
According to Greenwire (a subcription-based electronic daily on all news environmental), House Speaker Denny Hastert (R-IL) told reporters yesterday that increasing the supply of ethanol available to refineries would have no positive effect of any kind. “I just don’t see an economic plus in it right now” he said. Apparently, it’s just a Democrat myth that increasing the supply of something will have a favorable impact on the price of that something.
Of course, Hastert’s comment was made in the context of a discussion about tariffs the United States currently has in place to discourage ethanol imports from Brazil. Removing those tarrifs would certainly help motorists (whose fuel prices are going up in part because Congress mandated massive increases in ethanol consumption at the pump in the 2005 energy bill), but there would indeed be “no economic plus in it” for U.S. corn farmers, who are thriving on the ethanol shortages that are driving up fuel prices.
Sooner or later, politicians are going to choose between motorists and farmers. Denying economic reality isn’t going to hold off the day of reckoning.
The Battle over Entitlements Isn’t Lost Yet
I thought I would step out from behind Cato Unbound’s editorial curtain and make a comment here about what’s going on over there. In particular, I’d like to offer some words of encouragement to my friends David Frum and Bruce Bartlett, both of whom are downhearted (excessively, in my opinion) about the prospects of checking and reversing the entitlement-driven expansion of government spending.
Both David and Bruce make strong cases for their pessimism. David points to the opportunities blown during the nineties, while Bruce stresses the huge increases in spending that existing commitments under Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will necessitate in coming years.
Good points, but not the whole story. Yes, the nineties offered what in retrospect were optimal conditions for restructuring America’s entitlement commitments and thereby winning huge victories for good policy and limited government. But to adopt the clear-eyed realism that David and Bruce urge, since when did countries ever make major systemic reforms at the optimal time? Over the past generation, we have seen bold moves around the world to unwind overreaching government and install more market-friendly policies. And almost without exception, those moves have occurred, not when favorable conditions permitted sweeping changes with a minimum of short-term pain and dislocation, but when countries had their backs against the wall. Gorbachev’s launch of perestroika and the resulting collapse of communism in the Soviet bloc, India’s dismantling of central planning, the general turn toward macroeconomic stabilization, trade liberalization, and privatization throughout the less developed world, New Zealand’s dramatic policy turnaround — all occurred when countries were in extremis and alternatives to liberal reform had been exhausted.
So while it’s disappointing, it’s not terribly surprising that we have thus far failed to face up to the fiscal unsustainability of our existing entitlement commitments. We have opted for delay because delay has been the path of least resistance, but it will not remain so indefinitely. At some point, the day of reckoning will arrive, and we will face an unavoidable choice: pay to keep the promises we have made with huge tax increases, or repudiate those promises and restructure the programs that made them. It is entirely possible that, when the time comes, we will end up choosing something much closer to the former than the latter. Certainly that is what David and Bruce seem to assume. But I don’t think it’s inevitable. Indeed, there are sound, non-wishful-thinking reasons for believing that the limited-government side has a fighting chance.
After a steady runup from the 1930s through the 1960s, total government spending as a percentage of GDP has been stable for a generation [.pdf], knocking around the 35 percent range (see Figure VI.1 on page 163). Yet if no changes are made to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, spending under those programs will increase dramatically over the coming decades — according to this CBO report, from 8 percent of GDP today to 21 percent in 2075. Which means a commensurate 13 percentage point increase in overall government spending as a share of GDP, and a mind-bogglingly large tax increase to pay for it all.
Bruce assumes that because past efforts to roll back government spending’s share of GDP have been unsuccessful, further whopping increases in that share are all but inevitable. But how does that follow? Look at things another way: efforts to prevent increases in government spending’s share of GDP have been highly successful for over three decades. Why is it unimaginable that such success can be continued? Isn’t it conceivable that, when faced with a ruinously expensive tax increase, Americans will choose a repudiation of past promises, and a restructuring of future commitments, as the lesser of two evils?
David and Bruce seem to assume that repudiating past promises will be next to impossible. I think that assumption is unwarranted. Countries around the world have repudiated obligations under fiscally unsound public pension programs — and so did we (by increasing the retirement age and subjecting benefits to taxation) in the 1983 Social Security reform. And unsustainable corporate promises to retirees are being repudiated left and right these days, without any strong political backlash.
So there is hope. A battle is looming, and the limited-government side is very much alive. Because we have waited so long, partial repudiation of past promises will inflict pain that could have been avoided. And even with partial repudiation, the price tag of taking care of existing retirees and near-retirees will be hefty. But if we do succeed in restructuring these programs, that transition can be financed, and after digesting the rat the government snake can slim down again.
It won’t be easy. We could lose. But we are not foredoomed.
NSA Database
USA Today reports that the NSA has a massive database of Americans’ phone calls. This is going to keep Bush’s controversial legal theories in the news for the next few weeks — especially since confirmation hearings for CIA director-designate General Michael Hayden are right around the corner. Here’s a pertinent excerpt from our new report on Bush’s constitutional record:
President Bush’s claim that he has the “inherent” power as commander in chief to order the secret surveillance of international e-mail and telephone conversations of persons within the United States raises a host of disturbing questions. For example, if the president can surveil international calls without a warrant, can he (or his successor) issue a secret executive order to intercept purely domestic communications as well? Can the president order secret warrantless searches of American homes whenever he deems it appropriate? Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has indicated that the president can order secret searches of American homes because President Bill Clinton deemed such break-ins “legal,” as if that would bolster the validity of his claim.
Since Bush and his lawyers believe the president can arrest Americans without warrants (see the Department of Justice legal brief in the Padilla case), they presumably believe that domestic eavesdropping without warrants is also legal and appropriate. We’ll see what General Hayden says when he comes before the Senate.
Recent Cato debate on the NSA program here. Even more general background in this Cato report, Watching You.
Bush Appoints Gorsuch To Tenth Circuit
Bush’s latest judicial nominee, Neil Gorsuch, looks pretty good. I can say that because of this. Don’t know much else about his scholarly writings.
Sidewalk Sundae Strawberry Surprise
In Britain, the anti-obesity activists claim another victim — the ice cream man.
