Category Archives: Politics

May 19 2013
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Politics

Much ado about nothing

A long quote from a piece in the NY Times:

During the summer of 2010, the dozen or so accountants and tax agents of Group 7822 of the Internal Revenue Service office in Cincinnati got a directive from their manager. A growing number of organizations identifying themselves as part of the Tea Party had begun applying for tax exemptions, the manager said, advising the workers to be on the lookout for them and other groups planning to get involved in elections.

The specialists, hunched over laptops on the office’s fourth floor, rarely discussed politics, one former supervisor said. Low-level employees in what many in the I.R.S. consider a backwater, they processed thousands of applications a year, mostly from charities like private schools or hospitals.

For months, the Tea Party cases sat on the desk of a lone specialist, who used “political sounding” criteria — words like “patriots,” “we the people” — as a way to search efficiently through the flood of applications for groups that might not qualify for exemptions, according to the I.R.S. inspector general. “Triage,” the agency’s acting chief described it.

So, we can stop talking about this, right? I won’t hold my breath.

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May 15 2013
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Politics

Budget deficit? Where did you go?

The big scary deficit is quickly, very quickly, shrinking.

Why are we still talking as if the deficit really matters right now?

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May 15 2013
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Politics

Holder defends seizure of AP phone records

Holder defended the Justice Department’s seizure of phone records by claiming that the story the AP broke about a foiled terrorist plot was the result of an important leak, endangering those involved in the foil.

But, clearly, Holder is talking out of his ass. A quote from the president of the AP:

“We held that story until the government assured us that the national security concerns had passed,” he said. “Indeed, the White House was preparing to publicly announce that the bomb plot had been foiled.” Mr. Pruitt said the article was important in part because it refuted White House claims that there had been no Qaeda plots around the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.

The story here.

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May 08 2013
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Ethics, Politics

Affirmative action vs. actual action

A very interesting piece in the NY Times today about California’s push for diversity in universities without the use of affirmative action. This is an example of what they are up to:

For three years, people who work for the nearby University of California, Irvine, have met regularly with him — on Saturdays, after school and over the summers — to help him choose courses, complete classwork, prepare for the SAT, visit college campuses, fill out applications and apply for scholarships.

I have been a supporter of affirmative action for a long time, but this strategy is very appealing to me. Indeed, I think it is preferable for two reasons: 1) it works; the article points out that the Hispanic undergraduate population is now at 25%; and 2) a program that does things with students like those listed in the above quotes is actually preparing students for college, rather than merely letting them in.

The downside is that programs like this are expensive. But who (in their right mind) ever thought that fostering a diverse population of quality citizens was going to be cheap?

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Apr 29 2013
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Ethics, Politics

Reflecting on the nature of bastards

Krugman takes this opportunity to review how and why we got here.

He also diagnoses the problems with the people responsible:

Is the story really that simple, and would it really be that easy to end the scourge of unemployment? Yes — but powerful people don’t want to believe it. Some of them have a visceral sense that suffering is good, that we must pay a price for past sins (even if the sinners then and the sufferers now are very different groups of people). Some of them see the crisis as an opportunity to dismantle the social safety net. And just about everyone in the policy elite takes cues from a wealthy minority that isn’t actually feeling much pain.

That last is, I think, the closest to the truth of why people who were elected to know better completely failed in their task. It is, in general, not a sound strategy to rely on the ability of individuals with a personal interest in the matter at hand coming out a certain way to endorse policies that are for the benefit of others. Sane economic policies would have had the wealthy minority taking up a larger share of the burden, but you won’t hear that if they are the only people to whom you care to listen.

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Apr 15 2013
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Politics

Euro doubts

Krugman is not optimistic about the euro:

What could Europe be doing differently? From early on in the crisis, critics like me urged a three-part response. First, ECB intervention to stabilize borrowing costs. Second, aggressive monetary and fiscal expansion in the core, to ease the process of internal adjustment. Third, a softening of austerity demands on the periphery — not zero austerity, but less, so that the human costs would be less. We eventually got part 1, more or less — but nothing on parts 2 and 3.

And European officials remain in deep denial about the fundamentals of the situation. They continue to define the problem as one of fiscal profligacy, which is only part of the story even for Greece, and none of the story elsewhere. They keep declaring success for austerity and internal devaluation, using any excuse at hand: a spurious surge in measured Irish productivity becomes evidence that internal devaluation is working, the decline in bond yields following ECB intervention is proclaimed as a vindication of austerity.

The state of the euro and its chances of long-term survival are, admittedly, depressing. The European Union and its currency are symbols for cosmopolitan hopes.

There is perhaps a useful moral to be gleaned from the disappointment, however. We should hold onto our cosmopolitan hopes, but we should be prepared to dispense with the idea that the most fruitful tools for realizing those hopes are the tools of economics and monetary policy.

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Apr 14 2013
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Ethics, Politics, Tech

Hacktivism and injustice

Philosopher Peter Ludlow has a good opinion piece on hacktivism and the serious attack it is facing from the American legal system.

An excerpt:

In a world in which nearly everyone is technically a felon, we rely on the good judgment of prosecutors to decide who should be targets and how hard the law should come down on them. We have thus entered a legal reality not so different from that faced by Socrates when the Thirty Tyrants ruled Athens, and it is a dangerous one. When everyone is guilty of something, those most harshly prosecuted tend to be the ones that are challenging the established order, poking fun at the authorities, speaking truth to power — in other words, the gadflies of our society.

Apr 14 2013
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Politics

Politicians are despicable

Just read this:

Liberal groups and some union activists are threatening to recruit candidates to challenge these Democrats in their primaries. At the same time, the head of the House Republicans’ campaign committee gleefully signaled last week that he would use Mr. Obama’s “shocking attack on seniors” against Democrats in general-election races — though Republican Congressional leaders demanded the concessions from Mr. Obama. And while party leaders rebuked the campaign committee chief, Representative Greg Walden of Oregon, individual Republican candidates and “super PACs” would be free to wage their own attacks.

The quote comes from a piece in today’s New York Times on Obama’s inclusion of entitlement benefits in budget negotiations. That is an unfortunate move on Obama’s part, but what I find so infuriating is the duplicitous comment from the Republican campaign committee. These people refused to cooperate unless they get to take a hatchet to entitlements, but then, when they get their chance, they use the fact that they were given a chance as a mark against their opponents.

This is, perhaps, old hat in Washington, but it highlights what I think is by now indisputable: our political culture selects the worst people to lead, rather than the best.

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Mar 10 2013
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Politics

The fight for Medicaid expansion in Arizona

In the New York Times, the GOP is pushed to expand Medicaid.

In the battle to get the Medicaid expansion being championed by Gov. Jan Brewer approved by the state’s legislators, her closest advisers are hanging their hopes on the number eight. That is how many of the 17 Republicans in the State Senate they believe they can get on their side.

The headline is, of course, misleading, as Brewer is a well-known and vocal Republican governor. No harm no foul perhaps, but it perpetuates the false belief that only Democrats and the left can say anything reasonable about Medicaid.

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Feb 06 2013
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Politics

Don’t panic…

Paul Krugman:

The big driver here is CBO’s assumption that interest costs on federal debt will rise sharply. And that’s not mainly because of rising debt; it’s because of an assumed rise in interest rates.

Why is this important? Well, one of the lines used by people determined to panic about the deficit is to say that relatively optimistic projections are based on the assumption that the economy will recover smoothly, and that there won’t be any setbacks. What people saying this fail to realize is that if recovery falters, it’s also more or less certain that interest rates will stay low, offsetting much of the deficit impact.

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