A Gun Speech for Obama

"It has become painfully obvious that we have a problem with gun violence in this country. Guns are a very divisive and polarized issue, with strong opinions on both sides. That's OK. In a democracy, what we do is talk to people on the other side, and try to find areas of agreement.

"And in fact, I think there are substantial areas of agreement between the two sides. Unfortunately, it's been difficult to find those areas of agreement, because some people benefit from polarization. Foremost among them is the National Rifle Association.

"The NRA gets its power because many gun-owning voters assume that someone who gets an "A" rating from the NRA must be better than someone who gets a "B"  rating. They assume this because they think the NRA must be serving the interests of its members.

"Actually, it's the other way around: the members are serving the interests of the NRA. The NRA is an extremist organization, and its opinions are far more extreme than those of most of its members.

"A recent survey showed, for example, that 74 percent of current and former NRA members support background checks for anyone buying a gun, and 79 percent favor background checks for employees of gun retailers. Not the NRA. What about denying guns to people on the terrorist watch list? Seems like a no-brainer, right?  If you think that, then 71 percent of current and former NRA members agree with you. Not the NRA.

"The NRA has in fact been doing it best to scare gun owners into thinking that any politician who disagrees with any of their extreme positions is "anti-gun," "anti-Second-Amendment," and waiting for the opportunity to take away all guns. Here's the fact: Guns are dangerous. Like all dangerous things, they need to be regulated to make sure they don't fall into the wrong hands. Most gun owners know that.

"I haven't seen a poll on the attitude of NRA members toward a ban on assault weapons, but the NRA's attitude toward it borders on hysteria. Yet until 2004 we were getting along fine without assault weapons. These are weapons for which there is no plausible need other than killing large numbers of people. You don't need an assault weapon to defend your home, except in some some adolescent fantasy involving black helicopters or zombies. But it's proven to be very popular among mass murderers. I know that, now these weapons have been legal for a while, people have tried them and find that shooting them is fun. Sorry. If you're going to live among other people, you can't do everything that might be fun.

"Finally, aside from keeping guns out of the hands of dangerously unstable people, we have to try to reduce the number of dangerously unstable people. That means we have to do something to make sure mental health services are available, particularly for adolescent boys and young men. That means-- let's be clear about this-- spending more. Can we do that, with our deficit problems ? Of course we can. Here's the first thing we owe our children and grandchildren: to keep them safe."

Note: I didn't start out intending to say so much about the NRA. But as I was writing, it became apparent that the politics of this issue does not work without confronting head-on the belief of many gun owners that the NRA speaks for them.

What Do We Call the 200 Million People Who Aren't "Job Creators"?

My suggestion: "Job Doers."

American Spring? Time for a Democracy Agenda

There are a lot of policy issues that we can expect to be politically hot over the next couple of years. There is the deficit, of course, and jobs. There will probably be (in fact, probably already is, and should be) a resurgence of interest in global warming. And so on.

But I can't help feeling that the most important issues ahead are what we might call "meta-policy" issues. Specifically, how can we hope to solve all these pressing problems with American democracy as ramshackle as it is today? We need to start talking in a more focused way about how to make democracy work better in the US.

Is this just boring "process stuff" that most voters don't care about? I don't think so. Americans feel increasingly alienated from government. There seems to be an untapped political market for changes that make things work better. What is needed now is to connect a lot of fragmented problems into a democracy agenda. For example:

Elections
Once again, we have seen the folly of having national elections run by partisan state officials. (Remember 2000, when the chief elections official in Florida was the state co-chair of the Bush campaign?)  This year we  had a sudden efflorescence of photo ID requirements, attempts to purge the electoral rolls, attempts to reduce early voting, and, finally, voting lines of up to eight hours. This happened almost exclusively in states controlled by Republicans, and certainly invites the conjecture that Republicans were trying to reduce voting by groups that lean Democratic, such as the poor and students.

That we cannot do a better job on something so simple and fundamental should be a national embarrassment. Other countries can do this; why can't we? The Constitution permits (though it does not require) Congress to oversee Federal elections. National elections should be run by a non-partisan Federal agency, which would set uniform voting days and hours and uniform registration requirements. Oh, and it would make sure there are enough working voting machines. Not rocket science.

Obviously, this will become a partisan issue, and Republicans will paint it as a Federal power grab. But with the striking level of incompetence or worse by state officials in the last election, it is time to put this issue on the table. If nothing else, that will motivate states to do a better job.

Reapportionment
You may have heard that Republicans got a minority of the votes for the House of Representatives, even though they won a majority of the seats. The difference is attributable to the venerable institution of the gerrymander, in which state legislators redraw the boundaries of Congressional districts to make sure that favored Congressmen get reelected. After the 2010 election there were a lot of Republican-dominated state legislatures, hence today a lot of Republican safe seats. But this is a bipartisan tradition, which Democrats practice as assiduously as Republicans.

Therefore, changing it need not be a partisan issue, especially since it won't affect Congressional districts until 2022. (Redistricting is only done after the decennial census.) Congress's Constitutional authority surely extends to using a nonpartisan agency to draw districts, and to writing rules for how to go about it. In the long run, I imagine, everyone in Congress would prefer to minimize the chances of being shafted by the opposite party.

The Filibuster
In 1975, the Senate rules were changed to allow a filibuster to be broken with a vote of three-fifths rather two-thirds of the Senate, but three-fifths of all Senators, not just those present. So staying home counted as vote against stopping the filibuster. In addition, the new rules permitted other legislation to go forward while a bill was being filibustered, so a filibuster no longer required actual talking.

Over time, these rules have reduced the cost of filibustering to the point where virtually everything requires sixty votes in the Senate to  pass. It has been a sort of stealth Constitutional amendment, turning the Senate into a body where any legislation requires a supermajority. This, together with an unprecedented degree of party discipline, has made the Senate, and hence Congress, virtually unworkable, contributing to a loss of faith in political institutions.

There is a good chance, I'd guess better than 50%, that this situation will end next January, and that we will go back to what is now called the "talking filibuster," what I earlier called the "honest filibuster." (I intended a touch of irony, like George Washington Plunkitt's "honest graft.")

Campaign Finance
I was as surprised as Karl Rove and Sheldon Adelson must have been to discover that huge pots of dark money did not have discernible influence on the 2012 election. Nonetheless, our present campaign finance system is hugely corrupting, making elected officials the servants of a vast lobbying industry. If there's anything that gives voters the feeling that the game is rigged, that's it. And the public remains interested in reform.

I credit myself with discovering a key fact about campaign finance reform: if you get small contributions from a lot people, you get enough money to swamp the money from big contributors. So you can simply disregard big money, thereby avoiding all the legal and logistical problems of keeping money out.

I suggested one possible approach a few months ago: Give everyone a $100 refundable tax credit for political donations. In order words, political contributions up to $100 are, from the donor's perspective, free. If we assume that half of all tax-filers take advantage of this opportunity, that raises $7 billion a year, which is $28 billion over four years.

(This turns out to be quite similar to the proposal of Lawrence Lessig to give every voting-age citizen a $50 voucher usable for political contributions. That plan is slightly more expensive, about $12 billion a year, but I'm not clear on whether sees this as being every year-- presumably at least every other year, since it's aimed at Congress. He proposes requiring candidates to decline large contributions if they are accepting vouchers, but, as I noted above, I doubt the necessity of that.)

Imagine a world where members of Congress didn't have to be anxious about money.

     *******************

That's a first stab at a democracy agenda. Is it politically feasible? If political feasibility is determined by elected officials and opinion-makers probably not. If by voter support, probably so. The problem, as always, is to coalesce individual opinions into popular opinion.

Puzzles of Oenopolitics

The talks also began on a friendly note: With reporters and cameras briefly allowed in the room, Mr. Obama wished a happy birthday to Mr. Boehner, who turns 63 on Saturday. The president gave the speaker, who favors merlot, a bottle of 1997 brunello wine, a pricey Italian red.

Questions: How does The New York Times know that Speaker Boehner favors merlot? Is this common knowledge inside the Beltway? If so, why did the president give him something else? Why did the Times even mention merlot? Is it trying to imply that president deliberately slighted Boehner? Why would he give a bottle of Italian wine, be it ever so pricey, instead of American wine, especially when there are so many California merlots? What message was he trying to send? And why 1997?

Let's get Fox News working on Brunellogate. To start with, what did Obama give Susan Rice for her birthday?

Who Voted for Obama?

The world, or at least the political world, would be a better place if journalists knew something about statistics. For example, we now know that the following groups voted heavily for Obama:

• Single people
• People with incomes below $50,000
• Younger people
• Gays and lesbians
• Nonwhites.

But what does this actually tell us? One would guess that the young are more likely to be single and to have  incomes below $50,000. One would also guess that gays are less likely to be married, and that nonwhites tend to have lower incomes. So which of these things actually matters, controlling for everything else?

There is a relatively simple way to answer this question-- multiple regression. Essentially that gives us an estimate of the separate effect of each of these characteristics. If you gave me exit-poll data on an Excel spreadsheet, I could do it in a couple of hours. If I didn't have the software, I could still get pretty far with cross-tabs.

As it is, though, we'll never know, at least not until the political-science journal articles start appearing. Pity. In the meantime we'll have to listen to a lot of blather from pundits who don't even know what they don't know.

A Debate Question, Answered

QUESTION: Your energy secretary, Steven Chu, has now been on record three times stating it's not policy of his department to help lower gas prices. Do you agree with Secretary Chu that this is not the job of the Energy Department?

This was a question from the second Presidential debate, and as you may have noticed both candidates dodged it and talked about their own energy policies. But I think this question was answerable, and an answer would have advanced public debate. In particular, it would have dried up a couple of perennial Republican talking points.

"The main thing that determines gasoline prices is the world price of oil. We're a part of the world oil market. The oil that we produce doesn't remain in a separate pot marked "American oil;" it goes into world oil supply, and the oil that we consume comes out of world oil supply. So the question you're asking could be asked as: what can Secretary Chu do to reduce world oil prices? 

"The answer, unfortunately, is not very much. If supply increases, then the price will go down. So world oil prices will go down, somewhat,  if we produce more. However, oil prices will also go down if Norway or Saudi Arabia produces more. Similarly, if demand decreases, the price will go down, so we can lower the price, somewhat, by using less energy. But again, oil prices will also go down if other countries use less energy.

"The best way that we can insulate ourselves from higher gasoline prices is to make gasoline a smaller part of our budgets. Back when people were getting around by horse, a big increase in the price of oats would have really hurt the economy. Now most people wouldn't notice. As more fuel-efficient cars get on the road, the price of gasoline will be less and less important.

"So I would say Secretary Chu's job is not to lower gas prices, which he can't do very much about; it's to help us get to a future where gas prices are not so important. And he's doing a good job of that."

More Meaningless Numbers

What on earth makes journalists write things like this?

Australians, as it turns out, watch lots of telly. According to the survey data, in 2008, the year that the researchers chose as their benchmark, Australian adults viewed a collective 9.8 billion hours of television.

  The New York Times

A collective 9.8 billion hours! OK, quick, how much television does the average Australian watch in a day? I have no idea, but if you paid them $10 per hour of TV watching, it would form a stack of dollar bills 6000 miles high. That's lots of telly! Or maybe not. Again, I have no idea. (Do Australians say "telly," by the way? I thought that was more a British thing.)

I think the problem here (and here and here) is an attempt to make numbers look big by multiplying them by other big numbers, such as the population of a country or the days in a year. But what actually defines a number as big is comparison to similar numbers. A large number without other numbers for comparison looks big, but doesn't give much information about whether it actually is or not.

This may be the intended effect if you're a politician trying to avoid scrutiny of your ideas. Classic recent example: cite cost of Obamacare by giving total cost over a ten-year period (almost a trillion dollars!) without comparing it to, say, total health-care costs over the same period (30 trillion dollars!).

But journalists should have higher aspirations than that.

Note: If you're wondering, it comes out to about an hour and fifteen minutes per day. Not real couch potato territory, but that's just the average. Apparently, though, the reporter decided the story needed a big number to make a point (about an Australian  study that finds sitting is bad for you), so she threw in an impressive-sounding but meaningless number.

Just Give Us the Facts

As I was commenting just the other day, OK, I'm a bit partisan at times. But I am also a small-d democrat. I would like to see the electoral process work.

That's what's really upsetting about Obama's performance in the first debate. Yes, he definitely did himself some short-run damage in public opinion. But the long-run damage is that Romney was able to win the debate while egesting a huge amount of misinformation  and deception.

You probably have heard about some of the more blatant, um, inaccuracies: that under Romney's proposal for health care people with preexisting conditions would be covered (they wouldn't), that half of all the green-energy companies that got support in the stimulus went bankrupt (not even close), and of course the famous $716 billion raid on Medicare. None of these was effectively countered by Obama.

 If this is allowed to stand, democracy in America is pretty much a lost cause. Candidates who are approximately truthful will be crowded out by the most creative, morally untethered fantasists. If there is no price to pay for misleading the public, then it's a race to the bottom. All that is necessary for the triumph of gibberish is for the informed to do nothing.

But the whole debate was just a particularly egregious example of a political failure of Obama throughout his administration. There's a hackneyed old lawyers' adage that begins, "When the facts are on your side, pound the facts." What this administration has consistently neglected to do is pound the facts, even though usually the facts are on their side. We saw this clearly in the health care debate, when neither fact (we're worse than Cuba on infant mortality, yet we have by far the most expensive health care system in the world) nor fiction (death panels, government takeover of health care) was clearly labeled as such by the administration.

The New York Times reports that Obama and the Democrats raised $181 million in September (back when Obama was far ahead in the polls). How about spending some of that money calling out some of the false claims that Romney made in the debates? That would be good for Democrats. And democrats.

In Which I Shovel Against the Tide

OK, I'm a bit partisan at times. But I am also a small-d democrat. I would like to see the electoral process work. So it is depressing to see the sheer level of evasiveness and deception in the Romney campaign. Even the evasions contain new deceptions. Perhaps this is by design: either you correct the deceptions, or you persist with the original question. No one has the energy to do both.

Thus, this report from FactCheck.org:

When we asked the Romney campaign for more information on his plan to balance the budget, spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom sent us this statement:

Fehrnstrom: Governor Romney has balanced many budgets over his career, in private business, at the Olympics and in government. His track record speaks for itself. President Obama doesn’t even have a budget. Before Obama’s election, America had never run a trillion dollar deficit. Since Obama’s been in office, we’ve had four trillion dollar deficits in a row.

So, we’re left to wonder how spending possibly could be reduced in the next decade to balance the budget. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which has liberal leanings, ran the numbers in May and found that, assuming Social Security is not cut, all other non-defense programs would have to be cut by 29 percent in 2016 and 47 percent in 2022, if the cuts were spread evenly across the board — and if Romney’s tax plan was revenue-neutral.

FactCheck.org has chosen the second strategy, to persist with the original question. This runs the risk of implicitly accepting all the claims in the evasion. Let's unpack Fehrnstrom's claims.

Governor Romney has balanced many budgets: State governors running for national office are always making some variant of this claim. "I balanced the budget X years in a row" is popular. Journalists sometimes point out that state governments are required by law to balance their budgets, so that doing so may not indicate exceptional frugality.

But this misses a larger point, that the budgets they are balancing are not comparable to the Federal budget. States are required to balance their operating budgets, but not their capital budgets for long-lived investments. The Federal government makes no distinction; long-lived investments are just lumped in with everything else. How much easier would it be to balance the budget if long-lived investments were not included? Capital investments are not a huge part of the Federal budget, but they would normally include things such as military equipment and weapons, highways, land purchases, and possibly scientific research. Say $300-400 billion a year.

President Obama doesn't even have a budget: The Obama Administration did indeed submit a budget to Congress this year, the usual fat book.  The President is not in charge of passing a budget, Congress is. A key role is played by the chairman of the House Budget Committee, who is currently Paul Ryan.

Before Obama's election, America had never run a trillion-dollar deficit: I had thought this was merely a deception based on the difference between the date of Obama's election and the date of his inauguration, but it turns out to be factually untrue. The first trillion-dollar deficit, and still the largest deficit in US history, was for the fiscal year that began in October of 2008. (No, the stimulus bill of 2009 was only a small part of that.)

That's a lot of mendacity for one short paragraph. Who has time to keep up with it?

Some Missing Pages From Obama's Speech

"Republicans often accuse me of not believing in 'American exceptionalism.' Well, I believe America is an exceptional country. My own life is testimony to the truth of that.

"Where I differ from Republicans is that they seem to believe that we can be exceptional just by saying we are. I think that being exceptional is hard work. Previous generations did that work for our benefit. Now a lot of people who claim to be concerned about future generations think we should just shirk our responsibilities.

"For example, Americans' deep belief in individual liberty and individual responsibility led us to establish free public education in this country, first at the elementary and then at the secondary level. And we established state universities and the G.I. Bill, to make college education feasible for millions of people who would never have had that opportunity otherwise. As a result, we had exceptionally well educated workers, and that is one of the reasons America became an economic powerhouse and a land of opportunity.

"Today, local governments are being forced to lay off teachers, state governments are raising tuition at universities, and Federal tuition assistance has lagged far behind college costs. Do we think we can continue to be an economic powerhouse and a land of opportunity if that keeps up?

"Or take infrastructure. Government has an important role to play in making sure that we have good transportation systems to knit this country together and lower the cost of getting goods to market. Americans have always understood this, from the Erie Canal in 1825 to the interstate highway system begun under President Eisenhower.

"But today there are more than sixty thousand state and interstate bridges, and almost another eighty thousand city and county bridges, that are rated structurally deficient or obsolete. Overall, the total infrastructure backlog in this country is more than $2 trillion. Do we think we can continue as the world's most powerful economy without taking action on this? The work will have to be done sooner or later. The best time to do it is when we have large numbers of workers and large amounts of capital sitting idle, as we do now.

"The truth is, the Republican path, of empty boasts and unnecessary wars, of paying lip service to future generations while making no investments, is not what made America great. That path is the path to American decline."