Anti-abortion, anti-contraception

 Gail Collins, writing about the Congressional Republican assault on Planned Parenthood, gets at the dirty little secret at the heart of the anti-abortion movement:

For eons now, people have been wondering why the two sides can’t just join hands and agree to work together to reduce the number of abortions by expanding the availability of family-planning services and contraception.
The answer is that a large part of the anti-abortion community is also anti-contraception.
“The fact is that 95 percent of the contraceptives on the market kill the baby in the womb,” said Jim Sedlak of the American Life League.
“Fertility and babies are not diseases,” said Jeanne Monahan of the Family Research Council’s Center for Human Dignity, which has been fighting against requiring insurance plans to cover contraceptives under the new health care law.
Many anti-abortion activists believe that human life and, therefore, pregnancy begin when the human egg is fertilized and that standard birth control pills cause abortions by keeping the fertilized egg from implanting in the womb. This isn’t the general theory on either count. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists defines pregnancy as beginning with the fertilized egg’s implantation. Dr. Vanessa Cullins of Planned Parenthood says that the pills inhibit the production of eggs or stop the sperm before they reach their destination. “There is absolutely no direct evidence that there is interference with implantation,” she said.
Beyond the science, there’s the fact that many social conservatives are simply opposed to giving women the ability to have sex without the possibility of procreation.
“Contraception helps reduce one’s sexual partner to just a sexual object since it renders sexual intercourse to be without any real commitments,” says Janet Smith, the author of “Contraception: Why Not.”

 Needless to say, they can't say this too loudly because it has zero popular appeal. But that's what this is really about - not about human dignity or protecting unborn children, but controlling women's sexuality. Surprise surprise.

Old New Labour

Excellent column from Seamus Milne in The Guardian today on the future of Labour under Ed Milliband. The threat comes from within Labour itself:

A powerful grouping among Labour MPs and the shadow cabinet remains convinced, like Blair himself, that the party lost last year's election because Gordon Brown moved away from New Labour – rather than because of the relentless squeeze on Labour's core supporters, Brown's unpopularity and the greatest economic crisis for 70 years.
Their failure to recognise that Labour lost 4 million mostly working-class votes between 1997 and 2005 and that the 2008 crash has changed the rules of the game is at the heart of their "continuity Labour" resistance to the changes needed to carve out a new political economy and electoral coalition.

I supported Ed Milliband in the leadership election because I thought that he was the only person with the vision to get beyond the Old Labour-New Labour fight - who really understood that the game had changed and was serious about doing the hard work of finding a new niche for a center-Left party in a post-Socialist world. The fact that the old New Labourites are fighting him so hard only reassures me that he is doing the job well.

Welcome to Late Capitalism. Please check your morality and sanity at the door.

A must-read from Robert Fishman on the New York Times op-ed page (paywall) on the bailout of Portugal. The lesson: Portugal was a stable economy with a responsible government, good levels of growth and low unemployment. So what went wrong?

Market contagion and rating downgrades, starting when the magnitude of Greece’s difficulties surfaced in early 2010, have become a self-fulfilling prophecy: by raising Portugal’s borrowing costs to unsustainable levels, the rating agencies forced it to seek a bailout. The bailout has empowered those “rescuing” Portugal to push for unpopular austerity policies affecting recipients of student loans, retirement pensions, poverty relief and public salaries of all kinds.

And why would they want to do that?

One [possible explanation] is ideological skepticism of Portugal’s mixed-economy model, with its publicly supported loans to small businesses, alongside a few big state-owned companies and a robust welfare state. Market fundamentalists detest the Keynesian-style interventions in areas from Portugal’s housing policy — which averted a bubble and preserved the availability of low-cost urban rentals — to its income assistance for the poor.

And the rest of the world just stood by:

Could Europe have averted this bailout? The European Central Bank could have bought Portuguese bonds aggressively and headed off the latest panic. Regulation by the European Union and the United States of the process used by credit rating agencies to assess the creditworthiness of a country’s debt is also essential. By distorting market perceptions of Portugal’s stability, the rating agencies — whose role in fostering the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States has been amply documented — have undermined both its economic recovery and its political freedom.
In Portugal’s fate there lies a clear warning for other countries, the United States included. Portugal’s 1974 revolution inaugurated a wave of democratization that swept the globe. It is quite possible that 2011 will mark the start of a wave of encroachment on democracy by unregulated markets, with Spain, Italy or Belgium as the next potential victims.

We have handed over tremendous amounts of power to credit rating agencies - which, let us not forget, are for-profit companies in the business of selling high credit ratings.  The danger, as Fishman correctly points out, is that we have unleashed market forces so powerful that they can hold a gun to a country's head - any country's head - and dictate terms. Anyone else scared?

Fiscal sanity, ctd.

And the New York Times (paywall) jumps on the Slate bandwagon! David Leonhardt, writing under the headline "Do-Nothing Congress as a Cure", lays out the case that the single most important thing that Congress could do would be to let the Bush tax cuts expire in 2012. He makes a good point that others have made before:

In reality, finding a way to raise taxes may well be the central political problem facing the United States.
As countries become richer, their citizens tend to want more public services, be it a strong military or a decent safety net in retirement. This country is no exception. Yet our political culture is an exception. It has made most tax increases, even to pay for benefits people want, unthinkable.

A lot of that is the usual corporate interests throwing their weight around, or opportunistic Republicans who aren't interested in policy so much as political cudgels. But, as Leonhard points out, the tax question is tied up fundamentally in the question of the welfare state - you raise taxes to pay for certain entitlement programs. And this hits up against what I think is a fundamental American meanness - meanness in both senses of the word, both a callous cruelty and a cheapness that I think are really at the heart of American culture.

We like to think of American meritocracy as unequivocally a good thing, but the nasty underside of it is that anyone who has not succeeded becomes perceived as not deserving of success. A lot of people I've talked to in this country really, honestly believe that the poor are poor because they don't try hard enough to succeed and aren't making the most of opportunities they have. Americans have really drunk the Kool-Aid on meritocracy and it leads to a "look out for No. 1" mentality, that says that not only pursuit of your own self-interest but also undermining others is the only way to be successful, with "successful" defined rather narrowly as "rich". And if you believe that, why would you ever want to do anything except take as much money as you possibly can for yourself, and make sure that everyone else gets as little as possible?

Fiscal sanity

Slate makes an admirable attempt to bring the debate on the budget back down to Earth with its "Do-Nothing" budget fix. Noting that the CBO's baseline projection predicts that if present trends simply continue, the budget deficit will be gone by 2019, Annie Lowrey explains:

So how does doing nothing actually return the budget to health? The answer is that doing nothing allows all kinds of fiscal changes that politicians generally abhor to take effect automatically. First, doing nothing means the Bush tax cuts would expire, as scheduled, at the end of next year. That would cause a moderately progressive tax hike, and one that hits most families, including the middle class. The top marginal rate would rise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, and some tax benefits for investment income would disappear. Additionally, a patch to keep the alternative minimum tax from hitting 20 million or so families would end. Second, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obama's health care law, would proceed without getting repealed or defunded. The CBO believes that the plan would bend health care's cost curve downward, wrestling the rate of health care inflation back toward the general rate of inflation. Third, doing nothing would mean that Medicare starts paying doctors low, low rates. Congress would not pass anymore of the regular "doc fixes" that keep reimbursements high. Nothing else happens. Almost magically, everything evens out.

She agrees that we don't necessarily want all of these things to happen, and they don't have to, as long as Congress makes sure it pays for whatever changes it makes. But the point is that there is no massive, dramatic plan necessary to fix the deficit - just some tinkering will do.

That is because, by and large, the hard work of fixing the fat part of the budget has already happened—through health care reform. The Social Security crisis you sometimes hear about is essentially a myth. The trust fund will run out in 2037, "at which point tax income would be sufficient to pay about 75 percent of scheduled benefits through 2084." Full Social Security solvency would require only about 0.7 percent of GDP, which you can get to by exposing income above $107,000 to the payroll tax. There is no debt crisis, either, as long as the U.S.'s lenders remain confident in the country. The crisis lies in spiraling health care costs. The Obama health care reform bill might not work, but it does contain programs that could turn the tide over time. The big wheels of deficit reduction are already turning—and it might be better for Congress to step back, stick to pay-as-you-go, and let them turn.

See? There is an alternative.

Stagnation

The IMF has for the third time in a year downgraded the UK's predicted level of growth, now predicting that the UK economy will grow a measly 1.75% in 2011. There's bad news for young job-seekers as well:

Several times in the report the IMF says the likelihood is that the UK and other developed countries will see rising unemployment this year with the potential for social unrest increasing. Developing nations, which have huge numbers of young people, will also be badly affected.
"Unemployment poses grave economic and social challenges, which are being amplified in emerging and developing economies by high food prices," it says.

"The young face particular difficulties. Historically, for Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries the unemployment rate for young people aged 15 to 24 has been about two and a half times the rate for other groups.

"Though youth unemployment typically increases sharply during recessions, the increase this time was greater than in the past: in a set of eight countries for which long time-series of youth unemployment are available, the increase averaged 6.5 percentage points during the great recession, compared with four percentage points in previous recessions," it says.

Unemployment among Britain's 16-to-25-year-olds was 974,000 last month and is expected to exceed the politically sensitive 1 million mark on Wednesday when official figures are published.

 What will it take for George Osborne to change his mind about cuts and start giving the economy the stimulus it needs?

Douthat on social mobility

You know your country's got a problem with social mobility when even Ross Douthat thinks so:

As Republicans refine their proposals [...] they need to focus more on economic mobility than the Ryan budget does. Public policy is going to be made from inside a fiscal straitjacket for the foreseeable future. But within that straitjacket, Washington can favor policies that enhance working-class opportunity, while ruthlessly paring back those that subsidize the affluent. The goal shouldn’t just be small government, but what the economist Edward Glaeser calls “small-government egalitarianism.”
There are elements of this vision woven into the Ryan budget — cuts to farm subsidies, means-testing for Medicare, and promises to go after tax expenditures that primarily benefit the rich. But at least in its initial draft, too much of the budget’s austerity is borne by downscale Americans. The Ryan proposal would repeal the Obama health care plan without replacing it, throwing the uninsured back into a broken insurance marketplace. It would trim Medicaid more enthusiastically than corporate welfare. And its central economic premise — that lowering marginal tax rates guarantees widely shared prosperity — was tested and found wanting during the Bush era.

I think Douthat is an ideological hack, but I'm glad that this discussion is happening on the Right. I honestly never thought I would hear a Republican suggest that trickle-down doesn't work. He still thinks the Ryan budget is a serious proposal, but this is the first glimmer of hope I've seen in a while that there are mainstream, relatively high-profile Republicans who care about governing (as opposed to just winning elections). Now if only he were in Congress...