Planet Utah

Heart? Left in San Francisco. Brain? Left in Arizona.

Apparently realizing that it had been a few months since she'd made an ass of herself on the national stage, Janet Napolitano showed up over the weekend to reassure Americans that "the system worked" in responding to alleged Christmas Day wiener-bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

What system is that? Apparently, it's the system that's been built to respond when a terrorist attack is attempted but fails.

How about that other system, though? You know, the one that's been built to keep guys off of U.S.-bound planes when: (a) they are known to federal officials to have ties to terrorist groups;     (b) they buy a one-way ticket; and (c) they have explosives in their pants?

No reassuring comments from J-No on that.

Footnote: It's a bit of a mystery to me why American politics doesn't give birth to more demagogues. I think someone could light a serious prairie fire in this country if he or she mounted a campaign for national office on the basis of three or four issues: (1) pulling the U.S. out of the U.N. and out of Copenhagen-style meetings, in which we are treated as the world's pinata; (2) shutting the southern border immediately, dramatically reducing future immigration levels, and being much more selective (in terms of education levels, mainly) about who gets in; (3) scaling back the amount of money we spend on the poor; and (4) deporting (or denying entrance to) Muslims who give even the faintest hint of having been radicalized...with "the faintest hint" being defined as having one of those hard-to-say Arab names.

I'm not saying that I support any of this--except for #1, which I've advocated for five or six years. What I am saying, though, is that I'll bet a very large chunk of America would support it, particularly if equipped with a handful of juicy, inflammatory anecdotes.

Public opinion data suggest--to me, anyway--that Americans are willing to embrace isolationism, indulge in xenophobia and racial/ethnic stereotyping, and restrict civil liberties when issues are presented to them in a particular way.  I mean, just think about #4. In the wake of the wiener-bomber attack and the incident at Ft. Hood, you don't think 25 or 30 percent of Americans are ripe for an anti-Muslim appeal? 

In other countries, politicians are much more entrepreneurial about this sort of thing. In Europe, for example, far-right parties are booming.

It may be that countries with multi-party systems create a space for demagoguery that the U.S. doesn't have. Still, I'm guessing that a third-party presidential candidate who adopted the issues I described above could, under the right circumstances (continuing high unemployment, for example), get some kind of boomlet going.

Health care...argh!

Now it looks like the health care bill is a done deal...it's just a question of timing and details.

Yeah, I know there's still a House/Senate conference in the offing--unless the House surprises everyone, passes the Senate's version of the bill, declares victory, and goes home for Christmas--but I can't imagine the Dems walking away with nothing at this point.

So, what happens now?

Well, I expect the Democrats will take a beating in 2010. I expected that anyway, but now I expect it to be more pronounced.

Don't the Democrats expect that too? And if they expect it, why would they go ahead with this bill?

Byron York wrote a piece on this very issue not too long ago. Here's the short answer: President Obama cares less about 2010 than 2012. Democrats in Congress figured they were already in trouble anyway, so they might as well get a health care bill out of the deal. Sure, it might cost them some additional seats, but anybody who loses an election on this one issue was probably not a very strong candidate anyway. Plus, you'd almost certainly get a "yes" if you put the following question to Democratic leaders in the House (which is the chamber more at risk of a backlash): "Would you be willing to trade your majority to get universal health care?"

What about the longer-term politics? I can very easily imagine the new health care law becoming a key issue in the 2012 presidential race--with Republicans promising a repeal or radical overhaul, and Democrats, led by Obama, vowing to fight to the death to save the program (while acknowledging that it has shortcomings that need to be fixed...a new version of "mend it, don't end it.")

This dynamic should work in Republicans' favor. Most of the advantages/benefits from the program are deferred until 2013, while some of the disadvantages/costs will begin to be felt prior to the 2012 election. In other words, there will be a lot for Republicans to criticize, but there won't be much for Democrats to brag about.

Be that as it may, an out-and-out repeal will probably be impossible without a 60-vote majority in the Senate (because Dems will filibuster). And how likely is that? I have no clue. The best shot Republicans have, though, is if they make big gains in 2010 but don't win majorities in either chamber. Then you'll have Democrats still holding the entire bag in 2012...no shared responsibility of the sort that you had in 1996, no rightward tack by a Democratic president facing Republican congressional majorities.

So, the politics will turn out however the politics turn out. The far greater concern for me has to do with policy. I can express that concern in one sentence: I'm worried that this bill will exacerbate all of the cost issues, both public and private (i.e., state/federal spending, premiums, out-of-pocket costs, etc.) that it was supposed to fix.

Footnote: Historians tend to admire presidents who usher in big, sweeping, lasting changes--in politics, in domestic policy, in the powers of the presidency, in foreign policy or foreign policy doctrine, etc. Perversely, they're more concerned about whether or not a president is a serious "change agent" than about the nature of the change the president brings about. Because of this, Barack Obama will always earn respect and admiration for getting universal health care done, no matter the long-term implications for the public fisc, employer and family finances, and the quality of medicine in the U.S.

Tiger Woods...ick

So, Tiger Woods apparently had sex with six women (and counting), most of them repeatedly, most of them over a protracted period.

And what does that mean? For one thing, it means that he did not have "an affair," at least not in the sense of an emotionally intimate extra-marital relationship. While that would be immoral, it would at least be understandable (because monogamy is difficult).

For another, it means that he did not engage in a one-night stand in a moment of weakness, or even a few one-night stands with a few different women in a few moments of weakness. While that would be immoral, it would again be understandable (and again, because monogamy is difficult).

No, what he appears to have done is to conduct himself like a rutting pig, arranging sexual encounters with multiple women on multiple occasions in multiple locations, for no other reasons than that: (1) he wanted to; and (2) he could.

Assuming that he and Elin don't have a "deal" of the sort that Charles and Maureen Barkley appear to, Tiger's behavior is despicable. He deserves every bit of the anguish and regret he's feeling today, and all the rest that will come with each additional revelation.

In praise of confession

Back when I was a serious Catholic, I used to go to confession regularly. Watching Tiger Woods' world unravel reminded me of a virtue of confession that I had forgotten: If you have to tell someone about your transgressions, they become much harder to defend.

All of us have sinned in secret at one time or other. Maybe we've committed the same sin repeatedly. It's easy enough to rationalize this behavior when you only have to defend it to yourself. In some cases, you might even persuade yourself that what other people define as "sin" is not, in fact, sinful when you do it.

You get a wake-up call, though, when you tell someone else (or they find out on their own). Think about it: Tiger Woods' behavior is no more or less immoral than it was before his car crash. But now there's a world full of people--people who don't know Tiger, but who probably are predisposed to like him--saying, "What a dirtbag." If it hadn't been for the accident, one wonders how much longer he would have carried on without admitting to himself that he was acting like a dirtbag.

So, you know, maybe the Catholics are on to something after all...

The biological imperative

So, now that women are coming out of the woodwork to say that they've had sex with Tiger Woods, I know some of you are thinking something along these lines: "What the hell was Tiger thinking? His wife is GORGEOUS."

Indeed she is. Here's a picture of her in all her bikini-clad majesty. 

So, what...does Tiger think he can do better?

No. But it isn't about better. It's about different.

That's where 200,000 years of evolutionary psychology come in. Like a dominant elephant seal or the alpha male in a pack of hyenas, we men learned during our hunter-gatherer days that the best way of passing along our DNA was to impregnate as many young, healthy, reproductively fit females as possible.

That didn't work out so well for the females, though, who had to fend for themselves and their children without any help from the guy(s) who got them pregnant. So, they worked out a deal with any guy that wanted to have sex with them: "Sure, we can have sex, and yes, I'll have your children. But then you have to stick around and help raise the kids. You can't just move on to the next girl. If that's what you have in mind, you're not going to have sex with me, and I'm not going to bear your children. Now come look at this wall painting I did..."

So, that was the compromise that men and women worked out in order to produce offspring.  But we men, way down deep, at the microscopic level of our male DNA, still haven't unlearned the animal lessons of evolution. We still want to spread our seed wide and far, and unconscious primal stirrings tell us that the best way to do that is to have sex with a lot of different women. And that's true no matter how gorgeous our current partner might be.

Bait and switch?

A lot of people think it will be impossible for President Obama to keep his promise not to raise taxes on families making more than $250k/year. I'm not one of those people. I just don't think the promise is very meaningful.

To see what I mean, take a look at the Senate version of the health care bill. It includes a tax on insurance companies that offer high-cost, high-value insurance plans.

In response to that tax, insurers will have three options: (1) stop offering such plans altogether;   (2) continue to offer them (as long as they make money), but pass the costs on to their customers; and (3) continue to offer them (as long as they make money), and just eat the added costs.

Of course, no one knows for sure what choice insurance companies will make. Undoubtedly, different companies will respond differently. But if you had to guess, a smart guess would be that ALL companies would seek to jointly maximize: (a) their profits; and (b) the amount of the tax costs they can pass on to customers. In other words, they'll keep passing along the tax costs until doing so begins to eat into their profits.

Employers, as the country's biggest purchaser of insurance policies, will bear the immediate brunt of the cost pass-through. But they--just like the insurance companies--have a bottom line to watch and owners/shareholders to take care of, so they'll seek some insulation from the cost increases, too. There are lots of ways they can do this: restrict other benefits, limit wage growth, hire fewer people, fire more people, reduce hours, require employees to pay more for their health care, downgrade to a less expensive medical plan, etc.

People who work for these employers (or who might have worked for them had not the employers' costs just gone up), and individuals who purchase insurance on their own are at the bottom of the proverbial hill down which all of this shit flows. They are the ones who will end up bearing most of the costs in terms of restricted benefits, limited wage growth, job loss, reduced hours, greater out-of-pocket costs, reduced plan quality, etc. In other words, they are the ones who, at the end of the day, will have effectively financed the tax on insurers. But because the tax was just that--a tax on insurers rather than families and individuals--the Obama administration will be able to say that it kept its $250k promise.

Now you see why the important issue is not whether the administration keeps its promise, but whether the promise actually ends up meaning anything.

Footnote: By the way, this isn't only applicable to health care. The administration can raise an essentially unlimited amount of revenue by taxing entities that ultimately will pass those tax increases onto individuals and families. That's how a value-added tax would work, how the permits under cap-and-trade would work, and so on. The government treats business as its piggy bank, and business treats you the same way. When you get angry, the government says, "Don't look at us. We didn't raise the cost of your new TV or that bag of groceries. That was mean old Big Business." But business was just responding rationally to what government did do.

No do-overs!

During a state of the union address, Bill Clinton once said--quite famously, in fact--"The era of big government is over."

Isn't there some way we can hold today's Democrats to that?

Stimulus: How do we know if it's working?

By now, everyone has probably seen or heard about the Obama transition team's chart indicating that in the absence of an economic stimulus package, unemployment would rise to 9 percent. Well, we did a stimulus package, and unemployment is currently at 10.2 percent. So, critics say, "Your stimulus didn't work. In fact, it made matters worse." The Obama people say, "No, we just underestimated how bad things really were. If it weren't for the stimulus, things would be worse still."

Now, admittedly, I'm not an economist, but I can't see much basis in economic theory for believing that the stimulus money worsened the unemployment picture (not in the short run, anyway). What's more likely is that the Obama administration: (1) did, in fact, underestimate how bad things were; and (2) indulged a stupid, politically motivated instinct to provide a point estimate of the projected employment impact of their proposed stimulus package.

On the latter point, fiscal policy doesn't operate in a laboratory setting. You can't hold everything else constant, spend more money, and then watch what happens to the employment picture. That means that you can't say, "If we do the stimulus, unemployment will be X. If we don't do the stimulus, unemployment will be X + 1." That, however, is what the Obama administration did.

The truth of the matter is that we don't know whether, or to what extent, the stimulus package is succeeding in creating growth and jobs. What's more, we probably won't know that for years to come, if ever.

Think about that for a moment. Your government is spending nearly $800 billion (more than $1 trillion, when you consider the interest on the borrowed funds) on a policy whose impact is impossible to judge in the short run, and whose impact will almost certainly be subject to intense debate for years to come.

All I can say is, shout-out to the tea partiers...

Useful analogy: Palin and Gore

Over the weekend, somewhere on the Internet, I read speculation that perhaps what Sarah Palin wants is to be Al Gore.  In other words, maybe she doesn't have any intention of running for president. Maybe she wants to make a lot of money, espouse pet causes, and be a political celebrity.

Let's hope so. I think that would be good for her and acceptable to the rest of us.

I fear, though, that Palin wants to be president of "the real America," and will claim as a virtue her utter ordinariness. "Ordinariness" in terms of being a regular mom, being connected to real people, having small town values, understanding middle class life, whatever, is great. But ordinariness in terms of experience, knowledge, achievements, and wisdom is not what I want in a president.

Had Palin served two terms as Alaska governor, or even one highly successful term, I might have given her the benefit of the doubt. Now, though, in my mind anyway, she gets very little benefit from her service. If she wants to prove her readiness, she'll have to blow me away with her smarts, her knowledge, her ideas, and her understanding of politics and policy. I'd be very, very surprised if she were able to do that.

Footnote: Here's the most famous thing that Nebraska Senator Roman Hruska ever said (speaking of Supreme Court nominee Harold Carswell): "Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters, and Cardozos."

I really, truly hope that Sarah Palin is not embarking on a campaign in which she says, in effect, "I should be president not despite the fact that I'm mediocre, but because I'm mediocre."

Uh...what?

I'm not sure what the hell is going on with Tim Pawlenty.

First, he can't bring himself to say that he's happy to have Olympia Snowe in the GOP. (With Republican members of Congress less popular than bone spurs, Pawlenty should be thankful for any national officeholder who's willing to admit he or she is a Republican.)

Next, he takes partial credit for Chris Christie's victory in New Jersey, saying he's "thrilled our historic team effort paid off." (This is like the kid who played triangle for the Patridge Family demanding an equal share of the royalties.)

Most recently, at a speech to a gathering of Iowa Republicans, he refers to his wife Mary as "red hot, smoking." (You want to know how that went over? Imagine taking a date to a Manhattan cocktail party and saying, "This is my fiancee, Mary. She was George W. Bush's liaison to the pro-life community.")

I used to like Pawlenty because he seemed like a straight shooter. But a straight shooter who's politically tone deaf is just an embarrassment.