Morning Fog

Painfree Politics

This morning on ABC's "This Week," recently announced Presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty insisted that failure to raise our debt limit might not have any deleterious effects on our economy at all, because, according to him, there are some experts who question the premise that it might.  Besides, he said, we can avoid a crisis for quite some time by using our cash reserves and passing a law that requires the Treasury to honor foreign debt payments first.  (Evidently this would mean - beyond abandoning good accounting practices - we just wouldn't pay social security recipients, veterans, or spend money on worthless programs that only benefit U.S. citizens.)

Yet he also argued that, "if" Republicans vote to increase the debt limit, they had better "get something" for it, such as (for example) a balanced budget amendment or other goodies the current crop of conservatives tends to slaver over.  So an issue of national interest is again turned into a partisan political one.

Pawlenty's lack of concern about exceeding the debt ceiling can have only two explanations:  (a) he is just playing the political brinksmanship game du jour, or (b) he's an idiot.   Either way, he's playing political roulette with the nation's future.  The reasoning behind choice (a) is obvious.  Regarding (b), let's just say that maybe Pawlenty doesn't understand the extent to which the U.S. standard of living depends on our heavy borrowing from abroad.  Foreign creditors may not panic immediately (though they might) but in the long term, our credit rating will suffer, and our ability to coast on foreign loans will be lessened.  In the long run, that outcome would very likely be a good thing; in the short term, there's a high likelihood it will spark reactions we can't be sure of, can't control, and can't put back in the bottle.  

So why would we want to tempt fate by taking a step that could (notwithstanding the predictions of a handful of tea-drinking economists) lead right to another Republican depression?  There's no clear answer, but we've seen the same thinking in the GOP approach to climate change -- the same possible dire consequences; the same denials based on the opinions of a small minority of "experts," the same lack of concern, and the same counterargument, i.e., when obviously a disaster might be in the making, even if 10% of experts have some doubts about it, why not do what we can to avert it, or attenuate its effects?   I haven't seen any GOP politician offer an answer for this. 

The party's current mode of thought seems to be boundless but baseless optimism.    That's the message I take from a recent argument made by John Boehner, that the budget cuts sought by the Republican party won't be painful because their effects will immediately buoy the economy to new heights!  Businesses, those selfless guardians of the public interest, once free of the shackles of onerous taxes and regulations, will start spending wildly, creating jobs left and right, snapping the economy out of its doldrums.   Never mind that it has never happened before in our history, or that it was the same process that took us in the opposite direction, back in 2002-08.

If anyone were thinking Pawlenty might turn out to be the voice of reason who can really address our problems, I think they'd better keep looking.  His fifteen-minute interview suggests that he is far too wedded to Republican dogmatic orthodoxy to be the man who could lead us out of the wilderness.  Further, neither he nor Boehner is ready (and to be fair, neither are any leading Democrats at this juncture) to admit the truth that we probably will have to make some sacrifices to improve our long-term outlook.

U.S. Israel Policy

I don't understand all the flap and complaint over Obama's recent statements about Israel.   Well, actually I do understand it, but I deny its legitimacy.

U.S. policy on Israel must be exactly that - formulated by the U.S., to reflect and further our own interests, rather than just parroting the line of Israel's government.  If our goal is to put an end to the constant conflict and bring peace to the region, it seems pretty clear that now was the time to shake the tree just a bit to reflect a very proper impatience with what's not happening.

The two countries are allies, but we cannot be in lockstep.  If the U.S. doesn't have an independent voice, we really have no voice at all, in which case, we may as well not be in the game.  It's certainly an option for us to back out and to aver that the parties in the region must solve their own differences.  George W. Bush tried that.  But on balance, it's clear the Israelis prefer us to be involved, rather than not.

Of course there's a lot of political nervousness on any issue involving Israel.  American politicians seem to fear that the tiniest step outside the policy shadow of the government of Israel will turn away American Jewish voters, so they clamor in full left-right chorus to criticize any such steps.  I think - and hope - that's a misreading of how "the Jewish voter" sees the problem.  I believe - and hope, again - that they and the rest of us are more realistic than that. 

"Documentary" Film Of Value - Fair Game

Another film we recently watched in the Morning Fog household was "Fair Game," which tells the story of Valerie Plame, the CIA agent who was publicly outed by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and her husband Ambassador Joe Wilson.

Of course this movie isn't really a "documentary," but a fictional drama based upon real people and occurrences.  Its appeal as a film depends heavily on the drama of the two main protagonists, the seeming unfairness of their treatment, and the coldly impersonal way a bureaucracy destroys at least one career and a couple of lives.  All drama, even if based on reality.

But it's valid to call the film a documentary in one regard.  That's the one that drew my attention and that makes the flick "worthwhile."  It documents the tendency of the CIA to tailor its product -- supposedly the unbiased analysis of a wealth of raw information -- to what it knows its consumer - usually a President and his senior staff - wants to hear.  That, of course, makes the product worthless.  If viewers might be tempted to suppose this case is a rare hiccup in an otherwise smoothly running system, there's plenty of evidence around to demonstrate it's not.

In the Plame case (according to the film), the agency's analysts (some of them) made the proper call:  The now-notorious aluminum tubes were not at all similar to anything that might constitute parts for a nuclear weapon; they should be ignored.  But the false positive (i.e., that the tubes were intended for Saddam's nuclear program) had more political resonance, and there were enough politically motivated bureaucrats in the agency to turn the agency's "intel" 180 degrees.  Black became white. These reports reached the willing ears of White House minions who were totally uneducated regarding intelligence and didn't know the difference between intel (a synthesis of reports from various sources, evaluated for their reliability, credibility, and convergence with other reports) and raw data (meaningless factoids until placed in context).  The rest is history.

Along the way, the whole march down the garden path was abetted by a tendency among our political leadership to accept that the CIA is always right.  This is assumed because of all the money we spend on them (nobody really knows how much) and the neat toys they have like satellite cameras, drones, and listening devices.  But the toys are mostly handy for developing those factoids, and when it comes to analysis, other agencies often seem to get better results.  This truth is faithfully reflected during an interagency meeting in the film, when the representative of the State Department's tiny in-house intelligence operation is the one who tries to bat down the false "assessment."

It's often asserted, in the post-nine-eleven, post-economic-meltdown world, that there are too many intelligence agencies and that we could save money by consolidating.  That might be true if we could find a way to insulate the main agency, the CIA, from the political agendas of policymakers.  The way to do that remains as elusive as the Loch Ness Monster.

Documentary Film Of Value - Inside Job

Years ago I would seldom have thought to watch a documentary film.  Boring!  Not entertaining!   But things have changed (or maybe I led a misguided middle age), because some now get good reviews and even do well at the box office for a week or two.  Lately at our house, we've watched three that were well worth the viewing time.

First among them was "Inside Job," the Oscar winning flick that tells the tale of our latest economic disaster -- its origins, its development, its acceleration toward crash, and even the aftermath (currently).  In each of these phases, there are some interesting points.

First, I know that even by discussing our recent recession/meltdown/whatever-you-call-it, some will suggest that this film is biased.  Yet I think it's a fair representation of what's been happening.   Political conservatives today like to ignore the role of the Bush administration and point to Clinton; liberals like to load the blame on Bush. 

There is plenty of blame to go around, but the real seeds of the disaster lie in the Reagan administration, when the process of dismantling existing safeguards, crippling regulatory agencies, and ignoring conflicts of interest began in earnest.  The film clearly shows how Clinton, in his time, often went along with that theme, perhaps listening to the "wrong crowd," and more eager to develop a robust economy than to safeguard it.  Ultimately, though, it was in the Bush administration that things got far out of hand, that the signs of danger were clear, and that the only actions taken tended to accelerate the impending crisis.

The main lesson is that all politicians have been in thrall to the "experts." Those experts -- including the economic bigwigs of every administration since 1980 -- came right out of the industry they were supposed to oversee, and mostly wound up representing that industry, rather than the greater interests of the nation.

Most of the lessons are sad ones.  The saddest is that we aren't yet cured of the problem.  Some of the few efforts that have been made to trim the power of financial interests (such as revision of the credit card business, or efforts to restrict certain kinds of risky financial instruments) are being fought tooth and nail by the huge money conglomerates.  In fact, the film claims they are spending more money now to influence lawmakers than before the crisis a mere two years ago.  And given what I see in the media, there's no reason to doubt that claim. 

More sadness:  Efforts to fix the damage, necessary though they were, also seem to have concentrated financial power even more intensely in a handful of major firms.  This idea is being pursued in an upcoming HBO flick, "Too Big To Fail."

More:  The horrendous shifts in income distribution in the U.S. over the past thirty years, and the surprising statement that this is the first generation of Americans whose sons and daughters won't live better lives than they did.  It's not that government is indebting our future; financial moguls  are doing that.

And more:  Many Republicans continue even today pushing efforts to beggar regulatory agencies, hand banks, brokers, and credit companies more power, cut taxes for corporations and robber barons, and in general to perpetuate the "what, me worry?" attitude of the famous Alfred E. Neuman, so ably channeled by "Dumbya," even while attempting to duck responsibility for his legacy by never uttering his name.

A discouraging picture, but one worth watching.  You're guaranteed to learn a little something.

Paying For Federal Pensions

This graphic appeared in Sunday's Washington Post, though it was prepared by the "National Institute on Retirement Security."  The basic purpose of the chart, and of the article it accompanied, is that employee contributions for federal pensions are considerably less than for defined benefit plans in state/local government or in the private sector.  That is a valid point, though it needs a couple of caveats:

• I think the federal government deserves credit for being ahead of the curve, back in 1980, when it redefined its 100%-traditional pension system into a mixed package of social security, defined benefit, and market-driven 401(k) plans.
• It's futile to compare federal, state/local, and private pension plans on the macro level, as the chart tries to do.  How can we make comparisons, for example, when we don't have any information about the benefit received in return for the input?   How can one federal plan be compared to 1700 state/local plans, or ten times that many private ones, each with its own different benefit structure?  Impossible.

That said, if everybody is going to be tightening their belts by paying a larger share of their defined pensions, I’m sure federal employees will be asked to – and should – pay more also. 

But that brings us to something not even whispered in this chart, or the article:  military pensions, which aren't referenced at all here.  As Morning Fog has argued before, budget cutting is fine IF we don't fence off entire sections of it from any cuts at all.  We can't exempt Medicare, Social Security, or even the U.S. armed forces, from sensible and prudent reductions.  Remember the famous robber Willie Sutton, who was asked why he robbed banks and answered, "Because that's where the money is?"   So, why should we consider cost savings in all entitlement categories?  Same reason.  (Thanks for that wisdom, Willie).

Military personnel pay into social security.  That’s all.  Their defined benefit pensions, which can kick in as early as age 50, are more generous than their civilian counterparts', and cost them nothing at all.  Two pensions for the price of one, plus  - again unlike their civilian counterparts - they are permitted to take federal employment after they retire without any penalty against their social security or pension benefits.   All the Willie Suttons in Congress appear to be overlooking this particular bank.  So for military government employees, the belt-tightening expected will be an increase of $60 per year in the premiums they pay for health care, while for civilian government employees, it will be an additional 5.2% of their salary.  What's wrong with this picture?

Now, I'm not just a civilian lamenting that it's only my ox getting gored.  I've served in the military, including combat zones; my father was an Army lifer; and I spent years in a government pay/retirement system much like the "old" one described in the chart.  So I believe I see all sides of this issue.   And what I see is that we redefined our military after Vietnam, but not our way of looking at it.   

Our current view of military pay and allowances still harks back to a bygone era, when we all shared the potential burden of military service equally (more or less) through conscription.  We who served and risked our lives were the same as everyone else, except that we served and they didn’t.  The generous benefits were designed to compensate for that difference. 

Today’s military is different – all professional, they are government workers who wear uniforms.  Are you thinking about their risking their lives?  They do, but in modern war, not so much more than our police, whose benefits are far less.  The young recruit who joined up right out of high school who got killed last week in Afghanistan?  That is tragic and sad (especially when the life was lost because of politicians playing war as a game) but those unfortunate KIAs won't be collecting a pension, so this isn't about them. Certainly pay and benefits should be commensurate to attract the people we need in the armed forces, but it is neither just nor affordable to continue to subsidize them as if they were hapless GI Joes, or not to expect them to contribute something to a very generous retirement package.  

 

It's Academic, Dear Watson

A tempest has erupted over comments made by a university professor about Obama's progressivism and independence.  Cornel West, described as a "well-known Princeton professor and author," seems to have misgivings about Obama, calling him a "black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs" -- among other things.

I can't say how "well-known" this gent is.  I've never heard of him, have you?  Well-known, perhaps in academic circles.  But that's just the problem.  The academic world is so divorced from reality that it's possible - nay, even desirable - to construct a "pure" and principled mindset from which no deviation can be permitted, even when reality rears its ugly head.  It's why we talk about the "ivory tower."  In this case the prof built himself a model of what an African-American politician should do, say, and believe -- and not surprisingly, it's a clone of the prof himself!  (who, by the way, is peevish since he wasn't invited to the White House.) 

Thus, West accuses Obama of not being the President he (West) wanted him to be.  That's probably pretty good for the rest of us, though.  As Al Sharpton observes, Obama is "not the President of African-Americans."  And as anyone outside the Grove of Academe would readily observe, politics, unlike teaching or "scholaring," requires constant adaptation to the ideas of others.  West's commentary arises out of nothing but a lack of common sense about the art of the possible.   

That in turn implies we shouldn't pay much attention to it.  There's no reason for a debate to "ignite," or for the bloggers to "erupt."  It's legitimate for debate to occur in university circles.  That what they do.  Beyond that, it's academic, and it's irrelevant. 

Military Compensation, Civilian Compensation

Since I last wrote here, the House has approved a modest increase in the premiums that certain retired military personnel will pay for their health care plan.  Now the Senate must deal with the same issue.  As I said earlier, the small increase seems more than justified (perhaps even a little too small) given that there has been no increase in 16 years. What isn't so reasonable is the concept military retiree organizations are pushing, and which the House appears to have accepted:  limiting the amount of future increases to the general inflation rate, rather than to the actual cost of the benefits provided.  

The Senate should kill that provision; it mortgages the future and limits our flexibility.  The only logical and fair way to engineer an enduring method of handling future premium increases is on the basis of cost.  Otherwise, the growing gap between premiums paid in by retirees, and the costs of benefits received, will contribute in perpetuity to our budget deficits.  This is the dilemma of all our entitlement programs in microcosm.

The topic of paying for health insurance, of course, is immense, and all the issues involved won't be resolved in this space.  But on this small part of the puzzle, I'd propose that we avoid future problems by defining the premium as a fixed percentage of costs.  It would take a bit of study to figure what that percentage would be.  It might be the percentage these retirees would be paying once the current increase becomes effective (we're not told here what that is).

Such a system would provide a mechanism that would track better with trends and wouldn't need to be re-jiggered every year.  On the other hand, it would also provide a means of regularizing gradual increases in premiums, without having to wait sixteen years for the next tiny increase.  In addition, a cost factor might provide some small incentive for individuals to consider pricing and need in their health care decisions.  It could even permit premiums to decrease in future, if we can succeed in getting a handle on skyrocketing health care costs.  

There was a time when we collectively might have thought that we could define a premium to be paid that would remain fairly constant over many years.   With the sorts of cost increases we're seeing recently, that clearly is no longer the case.   That presumably is why the cost of Medicare for civilians has risen about 22% in just the past two years.  Tricare is the military equivalent of Medicare.  The implications are evident.    

Military Health Care Premiums

There's an interesting debate pending over the premiums to be paid by military retirees for their health care.  The Defense Department has proposed that such retirees pay an additional $5 per month, which would raise their annual premium for family coverage to $520 per year. 

The system, known as Tricare, is the military equivalent of Medicare, and its costs are rising just as quickly as Medicare's.  Also in parallel to Medicare, there are military groups that equate loosely to AARP (the Military Officers' Association of America is one) that see Tricare as an entitlement, a reward to service members for their sacrifices, so they naturally oppose increases.  In this case, MOAA has conceded a small increase may be necessary but wants to limit future increases to the pace of inflation (3%) rather than the pace of actual costs (6%).  Some in Congress join MOAA in opposing an increase.

Though some of these issues supposedly were to be decided in Congress last week, I have been unable to find any report that they actually were.  The results will be interesting to see.

It seems self-evident to me that if we're going to fix our budget deficit problems, we will need not just cuts in the non-military discretionary portion of the budget, but also in the main (civilian) entitlement programs and in military spending.   A slightly higher health care premium would certainly be a sensible part of the latter, though I'm sure there are far greater savings to be found in the costs of military hardware and supplies.

It goes beyond reducing the deficit, however; it's also a matter of what is fair and reasonable, to service members and to the society they serve.  The overall package of benefits we provide our military personnel is generous -- I invite any reader, for example, to compare his retirement health care costs with those stated above.   And it must remain generous enough to provide both security and incentive, but we need to think about them in the right contemporary context.  

Our thinking about compensating our armed forces originated in the era of a citizen army with conscription.  People from all walks of life were called on, often randomly, and possibly against their "druthers," to perform a dangerous duty for their country, while their neighbors, friends, or relatives were not.  That's no longer the case, and we may need to adjust our thinking accordingly.  

 

 

Senate Gangs

I thought this piece by David Farenthold was a fluffy but insightful little bit of political lore.  It reminds us that the Senate has often spontaneously created various special small groups or committees to find compromise solutions to a difficult problem.  These groups in recent years have often come to be called "gangs," like the  "Gang of Six" now beavering away to find a bipartisan way to reduce the deficit.  

The article also reminds us that such "gangs" have almost always failed.  It's not surprising.  This writer points out that the Senate is a collection of cantankerous (my word, not his) individualists and that it's difficult for any small group to create something that will fly with all 100 Senators, or even a majority of them.  More to the point, I think, is just that a committee -- not just in the Senate, but in any organization -- is usually a poor way to deal with a problem that's really contentious.  Committees work better when there's some generally shared goal, a limited task, or even broad agreement where only a few details have to be worked out.

When I think of effectively solving or at least progressing on a controversial issue, I think of someone like Lyndon Johnson, buttonholing one Senator after another, trading both ideas and favors to reach a deal.  The key is to have a single trusted leader with an idea and the will to implement it.  The Senate lacks such leaders now; Ted Kennedy may have been the last of them.

Well, if the Gang of Six is doomed to failure, so be it.  But I think we should at least be grateful to them for trying!

"Apologize?" he said, interrogatorily.

Today in the Washington Post we hear from a distant - very distant! - corner of the realm of rational thought, one ex-political operative and current columnist Marc Thiessen, who suggests that "Obama owes thanks, and an apology, to CIA interrogators."  The theory, now gaining traction with the conspiracy gang and being peddled by former Bush administration officials who would like to claim credit for eliminating Osama Bin Laden, is that the intelligence break that led to finding him came out of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that Obama has criticized.

This is claptrap. There is no evidence the illegal interrogations produced this intelligence coup.  That requires a suspension of disbelief (or of the clock), for it means that detainees taken into custody years before OBL took up residence in his fancy digs (in fact, years before the hideaway compound reportedly was built)  could have known where it was.

Actually, in my view it's much more likely the info came from an informant on the ground, a mole, and was refined and confirmed by other means such as aerial surveillance.  So why might some officials who seem to be in a position to know, suggest it was interrogation of those Guantanamo detainees?  Given the nature of intelligence work, no one -- neither those currently involved nor those "enhanced interrogators" -- would ever want to confess publicly that there was a spy or double agent in place.  That's how you blow your sources' covers and destroy years of work.   
 
In any event, prisoner interrogation has always existed in a sort of moral and legal no-man's-land (as do other CIA ops).   Thiessen should watch more television, or read up on his LeCarre.  Those fictional accounts, I think, reflect a reality that critics on both sides are often unwilling to admit:  Those in the profession know very well they may have to push the boundaries of legality occasionally to do their job. They also know that if they do, and it becomes public, their actions are illegal and might even be subject to prosecution.

The idea that the President should publicly both confirm and condone illegal action by apologizing is ridiculous and unacceptable.  It's interesting to note Thiessen has twisted himself into this logically, morally, and legally dubious position in an effort to make heroes of people conservatives normally despise:  government workers!    I'm sure a political angle never even crossed Mr. Thiessen's mind; otherwise, we might suspect that his argument was tailored mainly to minimize any political credit Obama might reap from the events of two days ago.