Krugman on Hayek

I'm catching up on Paul Krugman's blog (a.k.a. my Bible) and this post from Dec 5 caught my eye:

Via Mark Thoma, David Warsh finally says what someone needed to say: Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.

These days, you constantly see articles that make it seem as if there was a great debate in the 1930s between Keynes and Hayek, and that this debate has continued through the generations. As Warsh says, nothing like this happened. Hayek essentially made a fool of himself early in the Great Depression, and his ideas vanished from the professional discussion.

So why is his name invoked so much now? Because The Road to Serfdom struck a political chord with the American right, which adopted Hayek as a sort of mascot — and retroactively inflated his role as an economic thinker.

There's a famous incident where Margaret Thatcher, freshly elected as leader of the Opposition, in a shadow cabinet meeting put a copy of The Road to Serfdom down on the table and said, "This is what we believe."

I've been arguing for a while that a lot of the problems with our economic system can't be laid at the feet of economists - mainstream economics pretty much understands the problem and understands what to do about it. Where there is debate is among politicians, who by and large, I think, don't appreciate (or indeed understand) the economics.

Buddhism and society

I've just finished reading The Heart of Buddha's Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh. I think this book may have changed my life (in the short term at least), but I'll need to learn some more about Buddhism before I can say. In the meantime, I thought I would share a passage from the end of the book:

There is so much violence in our schools. Parents, teachers and students need to work together to transform the violence. Schools are not just places for transmitting technical know-how. They must also be places where children can learn to be happy, loving, and understanding, where teachers nourish their students with their won insights and happiness. We also need places in hospitals where family members, health are workers, patients, and others can sit, breathe and calm themselves. We need City Halls where responsible people can look deeply into local problems. We need Congress to be a place where our real problems are truly addressed. If you are an educator, a parent, a teacher, an architect, a health care worker, a politician, or a writer, please help us create the kind of institutions we need for our collective awakening.

Our legislators need to know how to calm themselves and communicate well. They need to know how to listen and look deeply and to use loving speech. If we elect unhappy people who don't have the capacity to make their own families happy, how can we expect them to make our city or our nation happy? Don't vote for someone just because he or she is handsome or has a lovely voice. We are entrusting the fate of our city, our nation, and our lives to such people. We have to act responsibly. We need to create communities of deep looking, deep sharing, and real harmony. We need to be able to make the best kinds of decisions together. We need peace, within and without.

 The book has given me some very tentative thoughts about the role of spiritual awakening in bringing about social change. Basically, what I'm getting from this book is a set of concrete values that I strongly agree with, and a series of practices that can be used very effectively to bring about change in your lifestyle and behavior very quickly. Me being me, the political implications of that (some of which Hanh gets into in those passages) get me pretty excited.

My thoughts are initial and rambling. For that reason, they're behind the cut.

Why Gingrich Won the Debate

David Weigel has a good analysis in Slate of why Gingrich won the debate last night. Bottom line: he's the best debater.

Gingrich never allowed himself to get stuck [...]. His rivals, cursed in their own ways with weaker debating skills, kept letting him out. Ron Paul, never a comfortable attacker, chided Gingrich for consulting for Freddie Mac in the run-up to the financial crisis. "As you say, normally, in your own speeches, the housing bubble came from the Fed inflating the housing supply," said Gingrich. A one-two punch: He called Paul a phony and called himself innocent. "I was in the private sector," he explained, "and I was doing things in the private sector." He charged for his insights. "You're allowed to charge money for them. That's called free enterprise."

This was pure distraction. "Free enterprise," as conservatives like to think about it, has nothing to do with the health of the government. Gingrich was referring to a period when he used his clout and connections to charge a government agency as a consultant. But he slipped so quickly in and out of the explanation that no one nabbed him for it.

 Sounds about right to me - Gingrich is a smart guy, no question about it. As Weigel puts it:

When he talks to Republicans, especially to Republican voters who may not be inclined to back him, Newt Gingrich wins them over with a promise. He will outsmart Barack Obama. He will challenge him to "seven Lincoln-Douglas-style debates," as he said last week at the Republican Jewish Coalition's confab. The president can even "use a teleprompter," jokes Gingrich. It's one of the tightest punchlines in conservative politics.

Tonight's debate in Iowa was the first since Republicans agreed that Gingrich was their presidential front-runner. They've started to imagine him facing off against Barack Obama, the president they consider a pure media creation who can't put two words together unless they're in blue type on a screen in front of him.

While in any case "seven Lincoln-Douglas-style debates" will never happen (every election cycle someone yearns after a return to those, and they never happen, because the risks are too high for everyone involved), there's no question that Gingrich would probably be the most fun to watch Obama debate against. The Republican idea that Obama can't hold his own is obviously fantasy, but this is a party that hasn't been overly concerned with reality for some time, so no problem there.

I think Gingrich's biggest problem, fundamentally, is that no one likes him. He had famously bad relationships with just about everyone he worked with in Congress, and I think he'd have a hard time building a solid working relationship with the party mandarins if he won the nomination - especially because the establishment has lined up solidly behind Romney and might view a last-minute Gingrich upset as illegitimate.

In any case, Democrats should not be concerned. Gingrich is a crank, and he's a scary crank - Gary Trudeau in Doonesbury famously drew him as a bomb with the fuse lit. As we've seen since he's become the "front-runner", he might be good at wiggling out of other people's traps but he's so good at sabotaging himself with his scary, crazy ideas (legalize child labor!) that it hardly matters. I've seen several columnists ask, independently, a question along the lines of "is this really the guy we want with his finger on the button?", and I think that will resonante with voters.

I still think Romney will be the nominee because Republicans always nominate whoever's next in line. But if Gingrich were to get the nomination, I think we'd see a general with low turnout as voters unhappy with both choices stayed home, but I think Obama would win comfortably as swing voters would see him as the safer pair of hands.

I want this on a t-shirt

I 

On translation

I've just finished Why Translation Matters, by Edith Grossman, the renowned translator of Latin American and Spanish literature (most famously of Gabriel García Márquez, but latterly also of Cervantes). I remember when the book came out it was criticized for its lack of intellectual rigor, but I think this is a misinterpretation of how Grossman sees her role as a translator. She is a writer, not a critic, and she writes on the basis of her passion for translation. At its best the book is a full-throated screed in defense of translation:

We read translations all the time, but of all the interpretive arts, it is fascinating and puzzling to realize that only translation has to fend off the insidious, damaging question of whether or not it is, can be, or should be possible. It would never occur to anyone to ask whether it is feasible for an actor to perform a dramatic role or a musician to interpret a piece of music. Of course it is feasible, just as it is possible for a translator to rewrite a work of literature in another language.

She notes the unique reluctance of American and British publishing houses to publish translations, which is old news, but she highlights the injustice of this senseless parochialism in a world where translation into English is essential to the success of many new writers. The size of the English-reading market, the fact that English is often used as a conduit language for translations into other languages (she cites Spanish translations of Chinese works that go via the English translation), and the role English translations play in creating film adaptations and even securing the Nobel Prize all mean that

...there seems to be overwhelming evidence to the effect that if you wish to earn a living as a writer, your works must be translated into English regardless of your native language. All these considerations mean that the impact on writers around the world of the current reluctance of English-language publishers to bring out translations can be dire, especially for younger authors. And no matter how patently naïve it may sound, I believe that, regardless of what bloated international conglomerate owns them, publishing houses in the United States and United Kingdom have an ethical and a cultural responsibility to foster literature in translation.

For those of us who would kill for the chance to make a living translating foreign works into English, reading the book was by turns heartening and frustrating - heartening to hear the problem so eloquently posed, frustrating because frankly, now it seems even more hopeless than it did before.

Yesterday was my last Russian class - they don't run over the summer, disappointingly, although I may be able to work out some individual classes for June and July. On Monday we're coming in for an event celebrating Pushkin's birthday, and we're each going to recite a poem. Natalia, my teacher, had originally offered me this one, and then changed her mind as she remembered someone else was doing it. But I still think it's wonderful.

К ***

Я помню чудное мгновенье,
Передо мной явилась ты,
Как мимолётное виденье,
Как гений чистый красоты.

В томленьях грусти безнадежной,
В тревогах шумной суеты,
Звучал мне долго голос нежный
И снились милые черты.

Шли годы. Бурь порыв мятежный
Рассеял прежние мечты,
И я забыл твои голос нежный,
Твои небесные черты.

В глуши, во мраке заточенья
Тянулись тихо дни мои
Без божества, без вдохновенья,
Без слёз, без жизни, без любви.

Душе настало пробужденье:
И вот опять явилась ты,
Как мимолётное виденье,
Как гений чистой красоты.

И сердце бьётся в упоение,
И для него воскресли вновь
И божество, и вдохновенье,
И жизнь, и слёзы, и любовь.

And in English, translation into unrhymed tetrameter by Dmitri Smirnov:

To ***

I keep in mind that magic moment:
When you appeared before my eyes
Like ghost, like fleeting apparition,
Like genius of the purest grace.

In torturous hopeless melancholy,
In vanity and noisy fuss
I’ve always heard your tender voice
I saw your features in my dreams.

Years passed away, and blasts of tempests
Have scattered all my previous dreams,
And I forgot your tender voice,
And holy features of your face.

In wilderness, in gloomy capture
My lonely days were slowly drawn:
I had not faith, no inspiration,
No tears, no life, no tender love.

But time has come, my soul awakened,
And you again appeared to me
Like ghost, like fleeting apparition,
Like genius of the purest grace.

My heart again pulsates in rapture,
And everything arouse again:
My former faith, and inspiration,
And tears, and life, and tender love.

Moralistic claptrap

As so often, Cat and Girl speaks my mind.

Crimean Sonnets

Thanks to the magic of Google Books I've finally managed to track down a complete copy of the Barbara Underwood translations of Mickiewicz's Crimean Sonnets - Mickiewicz is famously untranslatable, but I've always been a fan of Underwood's (rather loose) renderings of these poems. This one, which I had not read before, struck me particularly. The eponymous Tchatir Dagh is a tall mountain in the south of Crimea, which is the subject of a number of the sonnets.

TCHATIR DAGH

(The Pilgrim)

Below me half a world I see outspread;
     Above, blue heaven; around, peaks of snow;
And yet the happy pulse of life is slow,
     I dream of distant places, pleasures dead.
The woods of Lithuania I would tread
     Where happy-throated birds sing songs I know;
Above the trembling marshland I would go
     Where chill-winged curlews dip and call o'er head.

A tragic, lonely terror grips my heart,
     A longing for some peaceful, gentle place,
And memories of youthful love I trace.
     Unto my childhood home I long to start,
And yet if all the leaves my name could cry
     She would not pause nor heed as she passed by.

And in the original Polish:

U stóp moich kraina dostatków i krasy,
Nad głową niebo jasne, obok piękne lice;
Dlaczegoż stąd ucieka serce w okolice
Dalekie, i - niestety! jeszcze dalsze czasy?

Litwo! piały mi wdzięczniej twe szumiące lasy
Niż słowiki Bajdaru, Salhiry dziewice;
I weselszy deptałem twoje trzęsawice
Niż rubinowe morwy, złote ananasy.

Tak daleki! tak różna wabi mię ponęta!
Dlaczegoż roztargniony wzdycham bez ustanku
Do tej, którą kochałem w dni moich poranku?

Ona w lubej dziedzinie, która mi odjęta,
Gdzie jej wszystko o wiernym powiada kochanku;
Depcąc świeże me ślady czyż o mnie pamięta?

The comparison with the Polish original is interesting. It's quite different. Mickiewicz's writing is often histrionic and a little shouty - Underwood has a more staid, understated style.

They are both products of their time, I suppose - the Crimean Sonnets were published in around 1830, Underwood's translations are from 1917. Mickiewicz's verse is looser, the lines jerk all over the place - questions and exclamations proliferate. Underwood's verse is taught, almost Victorian - it's remarkable to me that she insisted on an Italian rhyme scheme for her sonnets, rather than a Shakespearean one generally better-suited to English, but this kind of clean, crisp and highly regulated verse is typical of late-19th/early-20th century poets.

I appreciate Underwood's more meditative approach, however - it chimes nicely with the classical Chinese poetry I've been reading lately, which is nearly always quietly ruminative. Might this be the Quaker in me reflected in my taste in poetry? One wonders.

Stories from Afghanistan

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the outstanding online literary journal Words Without Borders, every month they publish English translations of world literature, usually a different country each month, although they are occasionally arranged thematically. This month's issue covers contemporary writing from Afghanistan, and I'm in the process of making my way through it. There's some wonderful, magical stuff in there.

In "The Idol's Dust" by Zalmay Babakohi, the Talibs in charge of demolishing the colossal Buddhas at Bamiyan find that each pebble of the destroyed statues is itself a small sculpture of the Buddha... before realizing that they themselves are being transformed into stone statues.

"Dasht-e-Laili" is an intense piece about the massacre of Taliban troops in the Dasht-e-Laili desert during the American invasion in 2001, where hundreds or thousands of Taliban prisoners were loaded into shipping containers and suffocated to death before being buried in mass graves. The subject matter and storytelling style are strongly reminiscent of Polish holocaust writing like The Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. The story is in some ways more shocking, though, as it's an event that has not been widely reported in the American press.

My favorite so far, though, has been "To Arrive" by Asef Soltanzadeh, about the arrival of an old Afghan man in Copenhagen airport, where he has come to join his son in in Denmark.  The first paragraph gives you a clue of the languorous, winding style of the story:

When you get off the airplane, it will not be like Kabul airport, or like other cities of Afghanistan for that matter, where they drive stairs up and attach them to the door and then take down the passengers one by one. These days, there have been improvements everywhere, old man. But we, we are lagging behind, and war has taken us further and further back. The only thing we think of is devastation, and not creation . . . they will drive the bridge up and attach it to the airplane door, and when you have passed through, you will arrive in the airport’s waiting room.

As it dawns on the old man that his son is not at the airport waiting for him, he sets off to find his way, not knowing where he is going or knowing any Danish other than the words "yes", "no", and "WC". The slow pace of the action belies a gripping suspense, as his confusion and disorientation are interlaced with memories of his life back in Afghanistan, where his wife's recent death left him with no one to take care of him and prompted him to move to Denmark, where his son sought asylum after deserting from the army during the Soviet invasion. "To Arrive" is what short stories are all about - it's note-perfect. Anders Widmark, the issue's editor and translator of many of the stories, says of Soltanzadeh that he "will become the next great storyteller of Afghanistan." If so, I hope I will have the pleasure of reading more of his writing in the future.

Scottish superlatives

The Guardian is calling an SNP majority in Holyrood - a result that under the STV+ system is supposed to be basically impossible. Iain Macwherter writes that "seasoned political hacks were lost for superlatives in their efforts to encapsulate the scale of the Liberal Democrat defeat. Their vote didn't just collapse, it was vaporised." Areas with centuries-long histories of Liberalism have gone a lighter shade of yellow. Labour has been obliterated as well - and the Tories in Scotland have been nothing more than a rump for some time. The wonder of the whole thing is summed up best for my wonkish brain with this: "In the north-east, another Liberal hunting ground, the SNP won all 10 constituency seats, and then went on to win yet another seat on the top-up regional list vote, which is also supposed to be impossible with the d'Hondt method of calculating the top-up list." (emphasis mine)

Macwherter notes, correctly, that the crushing SNP victory doesn't indicate widespread support for independence in Scotland, which has stood at around 30% for some time. But this is a very exciting development for lefties like me. Scotland is in many respects Labour's base, and the SNP is challenging them from the left. There are serious problems with the SNP (they're big fans of spending money they don't have, for one), but this should put some of the fear of God into Labour. Ed Miliband has already said that Labour needs to "reasses" its policies and position in Scotland - and, frankly, there's nowhere for them to go but Left.

A more serious social democracy than the SNP is offering is exactly where I would like Labour to go - one less focused on throwing money at problems and huge government handouts, and more focused on creative, dynamic, market-inclusive (but not market-based) solutions for increasing social mobility and addressing poverty, deprivation and unemployment.

But this is a very exciting time for Scottish politics. Brian Taylor, BBC Scotland's political editor, wraps up an excellent blog post with these prescient words:

People were voting for a government. A government whose record they found acceptable.
They were not voting directly for independence. Mr Salmond openly acknowledges that.
But a referendum there will be.
I can just hear Alex Salmond now.
They told us, he will say, there would never be a Scottish Parliament.
Then never an SNP Government.
Then never an SNP majority.
Now they will tell us, he will add, that Scots will never vote for independence.

Perhaps, perhaps. That referendum campaign has yet to be called, let alone decided.

But right now Mr Salmond is entitled - fully entitled - to bask in the delight of a simply stunning victory.

The annals of backlash

The Republicans start to come to their senses on Medicare:

After House Republican leaders pushed through a budget that contained a politically charged plan to overhaul Medicare, the chairman of the House tax-writing committee suggested Thursday that he did not intend to draft legislation turning the proposal into law any time soon.
The comments by Representative Dave Camp, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, coupled with remarks by other top Republicans, suggested that the party’s Medicare proposal was firmly on hold even though lawmakers had taken a risky vote to support it in the House.
At a health policy forum at the National Press Club, Mr. Camp noted that Democrats had resisted the Republican approach and said he was “not interested in talking about whether the House is going to pass a bill that the Senate shows no interest in.”
“I’m not interested in laying down more markers,” Mr. Camp said.
His statement followed similar comments by other Republicans, including Representatives Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader, and Paul Ryan, the budget chairman who developed the Medicare plan. They both said Republicans recognized that they were unlikely to win approval of their sweeping Medicare proposal in the debt-reduction talks that began at Blair House on Thursday.

If you fight them they will back down.

Who is Osama bin Laden?

A more-than-slightly unsettling post from Jamelle Bouie over at The American Prospect:

These kids are mostly teenagers, most of whom were very young when 9/11 happened. But still - in ten years since the most historical event of the '00s, have their parents really never talked to them about 9/11 or Osama bin Laden? Did they just space out during that conversation? I just find this so difficult to believe. Bouie makes an even more unsettling point - more unsettling because it is certainly true:

[F]or each generation, America is a very different place, and the America we lost on 9/11 -- the America that didn't profile citizens, torture people, or monitor their phone calls -- isn't even a distan[t] memory for the children and teenagers of today's America.

Scary, isn't it?

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...

Morality and Libya

Andrew Sullivan's response to Obama's address on Libya last night was, oddly, almost identical to my own:

Obama the Niebuhrian put the moral in realism. Yes, we could not do this everywhere all the time; but we could do this when we did; and that was good enough. There was some sleight of hand here. Citing the UN Resolution as an external reason for war - when the US lobbied hard for it - was a touch too neat. But essentially Obama was challenging those of us who opposed this decision to ask ourselves: well, what would you do? If the US had insisted on looking away, America would have seemed morally callous, even compared with the French. The mass graves of Benghazi would take their place alongside the horrors of Srebrenica. [...]

Was I persuaded? Not completely. The major objection - what happens now? - was not answered affirmatively by the president. It was answered negatively: there would be no military effort at regime change, as in Iraq; NATO, not the US, would soon be leading the mission; and, er, it may last a while. It is way too soon to celebrate a new model of international cooperation; but it seems striking to me that the rationale Obama invoked was very much GHW Bush in Kuwait rather than GW Bush in Iraq. That left Saddam in power for more than a decade. And yet Obama spoke as if Qaddafi's days were obviously numbered. I sure hope they are.

But at the same time I suspect they're not. I'm very worried. Very, very worried. But (troublingly for a Quaker) I'm not sure I would have done it any differently.