The Serious Enterprise

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.

A good piece in the New York Times about the state of wages.

A very obvious cause of the malstate of workers share of GDP:

MANY economists say the stubbornly high jobless rate and the declining power of labor unions are also important factors behind the declining wage share, reducing the leverage of workers to demand higher wages. Unions represent just 7 percent of workers in corporate America, one-quarter the level in the 1960s.
“There are very few occupations or industries where unions are strong enough where they can set standards,” says Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute. “There are no standards being set, so companies can push down on wages for all workers, union and nonunion alike.” When the Detroit automakers secure two-tier contracts, that enables them to pay new hires $16 an hour, far less than the $28 an hour earned by longtime workers. This also pushes down labor’s share.

“While it may be difficult to say where, precisely, to draw the line between constitutional and unconstitutional police encounters, such a line exists, and the N.Y.P.D. has systematically crossed it when making trespass stops outside TAP buildings in the Bronx,” Judge Scheindlin ruled.

Story here.

A very interesting look at what went wrong with the Romney campaign.

But Obama’s field organization was too strong. In Florida, 266,000 more Hispanics voted than four years earlier. “They altered the face of the election by driving up the Latino turnout,” Romney political director Rich Beeson said. “They told us they would do it. I didn’t think they would do it, and they did.”

Ohio was the greatest surprise of all. Romney pollster Neil Newhouse calculated that 209,000 more African-Americans voted this year than in 2008 in Ohio, while 329,000 fewer whites had voted.

“I don’t know how that’s possible,” Newhouse said. “If that is what the Obama campaign achieved, hats off to them.’’

Jeff McMahon, professor of philosophy at Rutgers, has a great piece on the The Stone, arguing that we need a ban and not merely ‘control’.

Individuals with handguns are no match for a modern army. It’s also a delusion to suppose that the government in a liberal democracy such as the United States could become so tyrannical that armed insurrection, rather than democratic procedures, would be the best means of constraining it. This is not Syria; nor will it ever be. Shortly after Dickey made his comment, people in Egypt rose against a government that had suppressed their freedom in ways far more serious than requiring them to pay for health care. Although a tiny minority of Egyptians do own guns, the protesters would not have succeeded if those guns had been brought to Tahrir Square. If the assembled citizens had been brandishing Glocks in accordance with the script favored by Second Amendment fantasists, the old regime would almost certainly still be in power and many Egyptians who’re now alive would be dead.

And there’s a broader lesson here. This is no time for a Grand Bargain, because the Republican Party, as now constituted, is just not an entity with which the president can make a serious deal. If we’re going to get a grip on our nation’s problems — of which the budget deficit is a minor part — the power of the G.O.P.’s extremists, and their willingness to hold the economy hostage if they don’t get their way, needs to be broken. And somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen in the next few days.