TigerHawk

This is a tab dump in the truest sense -- items that have accumulated on my home computer's browser over the last three days. I do not know where they have come from and what will happen to them in the fullness of time, but I do know this: They will not perish from the earth without you having at least the option of clicking through. So, in no particular order...

Ann Coulter's health care reform proposal. It has the advantage of being short, among other virtues. Plus it has this passage, with its crystalline middle paragraph:

President Obama says we need national health care because Natoma Canfield of Ohio had to drop her insurance when she couldn't afford the $6,700 premiums, and now she's got cancer.

Much as I admire Obama's use of terminally ill human beings as political props, let me point out here that perhaps Natoma could have afforded insurance had she not been required by Ohio's state insurance mandates to purchase a plan that covers infertility treatments and unlimited OB/GYN visits, among other things.

It sounds like Natoma could have used a plan that covered only the basics -- you know, things like cancer.

Each year, the government spends an average of $927 in administrative costs per person for Medicaid and $509 for Medicare. Private insurance, on the other hand, costs only $453 per person in administrative costs.

Excuse me, but it is embarrassing—really, embarrassing to our country—that the president of the United States has again put off a state visit to Australia and Indonesia because he's having trouble passing a piece of domestic legislation he's been promising for a year will be passed next week. What an air of chaos this signals to the world. And to do this to Australia of all countries, a nation that has always had America's back and been America's friend.

How bush league, how undisciplined, how kid's stuff.

Via Glenn, we learn that the House health care "reform" bill contains a 3.8% Medicare tax "on investment income (interest, dividends, capital gains, annuities, rents) earned by those with incomes in excess of $200,000 (single) and $250,000 (joint)." That is a 25% increase in the current dividend tax, which today stands at 15% (and for those of you who snort that 15% is not so much, remember that it is on top of the 35% corporate income tax rate and frequently large state corporation taxes, so the total tax on distributed corporate profits is more like 50%).

A good policy, I suppose, if your goal were to persuade Americans to stop buying bonds and making long-term bank deposits, companies to repurchase their shares rather than to pay dividends, and potential landlords from becoming actual landlords. Dividends, in particular, are so easily frozen, reduced, or eliminated that it is a sure bet that they will shrink rapidly in coming years and that the tax revenues therefor will vanish.

Behold, a live web cam feed of an eagle's nest and its occupants, central New Jersey. Awesome.

Lots of eagle factoids at the link, too.

Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi have declared it health care "reform" crunch time, so now's the time for some last minute links, thoughts, observations, musings, and ventings. In no particular order:

C-Span has just uploaded more than 20 years of Congress caught on tape. As hard as it has been for politicians to pretend to consistency, this will make it impossible. A feast for bloggers if there ever was one.

By the time the gotcha brigade has gone through this treasure trove, everybody will seem a hypocrite. Whether that will make voters even more bitter and cynical or teach them the deeper point that arguments ought to be considered on their merits rather than according to the consistency of the advocate is a different and ultimately more important question. Me, I'm with Oscar Wilde.

I dropped by the Witherspoon Grill this afternoon during the half-price happy hour, and put away a "cubble o' paints" of the black gold with friends. The sun was shining, and the square in front of the library was packed with people in shirt sleeves enjoying a wonderful spring afternoon. How was your Paddy's day?

1) Those Congressional politicians who prioritize an attempt to restructure the healthcare payment and delivery system in an effort to increase government control of it don't do well in elections. Hillarycare begat Gingrich. So far Obamacare has given New Jersey and Virginia Republican Governors and it has given Massachusetts Scott Brown. What will happen in November? It could be shocking.

2) American Presidents who make Middle East peace a priority in their foreign policy don't do so well in elections either, especially if they agitate aggressively for Israeli concessions to achieve it. It didn't work out so well for Carter (though many would argue that was probably the single accomplishment of his administration, it is not clear that the agreed peace achieved enhanced long term regional stability). It didn't work out so well for the first Bush Presidency - that's the one where Baker ordered the Israelis to stand down when Saddam sent missiles their way and then ordered them to agree to Oslo as well. And it may not work out so well for Obama, now that he has tried multiple times to increase the pressure on Netanyahu while remaining largely mum on other destabilizers in the region - Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, for instance.

To this, a knee jerk reaction might be to invoke the Mearsheimer Walt (smear) theorem and argue that the Israeli lobby wields too much electoral clout in the US. Um, the numbers make that theorem, well, not work. Instead, I would argue that American voters don't like it when we agitate for concessions to regional de-stabilizers - which would historically have been everybody besides Israel. It's not that complicated.

So - healthcare and middle east peace are political anchors. November 2010 will be interesting. And November 2012 will give us a new president.

For those of you who worry about the economic performance of the United States compared to other countries -- not really my thing, since I'm all for as many people getting rich, wherever they may be, as possible -- then this graph from The Big Picture is reason for long-term optimism. Our population is growing and will continue to grow on account of our superior fertility and receptivity to immigration. Moderate increases in population (as opposed to rapid increases or declines) is the first condition for economic growth, and it is second only to our national character (including our historical respect for enterprise and the taking of risk, which is under attack just now) in its importance for the future of our country and its people.

Even we Princetonians try to avoid orange today...

Barack Obama throws down some bluster:

The president will refuse to make fund-raising visits during November elections to any district whose representative has not backed the bill.

A one-night presidential appearance can bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in funds which would otherwise take months to accumulate through cold-calling by campaign volunteers.

Mr Obama's threat came as the year-long debate over his signature domestic policy entered its final week.

Like Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen, Mrs. TH and I lived together before we were married, a situation my father delicately -- with tongue firmly in cheek -- referred to as "without benefit of clergy." I confess, I did not learn as much in the process as Glenn says he did -- I think many of the really challenging issues in marriage do not emerge until after the children have, er, emerged -- but neither do I think that it disadvantaged our marriage. Any "trial run" is of short duration compared to a partnership calculated to last a life time, and the two items that most test a marriage -- children, and the sheer passage of time -- do not bear on most trial-run cohabitants.

Back at the Anchor Brewing Company bar at SFO, waiting for my red eye to Newark three hours hence and my bacon cheeseburger only minutes hence. I began the day with a 6:30 meeting in Seattle, then another at 7:45, then a flight to Portland followed by three more meetings, and now here I am. Again. There is little to report from such a hectic day, but I did get a picture of Mount St. Helens through the clouds, the airplane window, and the no doubt smeared lens of my Blackberry.

I'll try to do better next time.

At SFO, imbibing the Steam at the Anchor Brewing Company's bar and pumping out tabs. Do not confuse with wit or erudition.

[UPDATE: Post continued at the bar in the Washington Athletic Club in Seattle, several hours later.]

The case against Enronizing Lehman. In other words, it is bad policy to criminalize business failure.

Lots of people in Princeton are without power, with the prognosis of restoration later in the week but as yet uncertain. That was one very powerful wind storm.

For the parliamentarians among you, Ezra explains the latest procedural device for passing health care "reform."

If you love Paris...

Are consumers improving their personal balance sheets, or just defaulting?

Does self-conscious greeniness make you a good person? Maybe not:

When Al Gore was caught running up huge energy bills at home at the same time as lecturing on the need to save electricity, it turns out that he was only reverting to "green" type.

According to a study, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the "licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour", otherwise known as "moral balancing" or "compensatory ethics".

Do Green Products Make Us Better People is published in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science. Its authors, Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, argue that people who wear what they call the "halo of green consumerism" are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal. "Virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviours," they write.

Used my Blackberry, from a conference room around 8 this morning.

Status report: I'm sitting at the Anchor Brewing Company bar in the San Francisco airport, whiling away the 90 minutes or so until my flight to Seattle and working on a tab dump. While I while away, you guys should ponder the captioning skills of the White House flacks, who posted the following picture of His O-Ness on the official White House Facebook Wall. The "official" caption follows. You, I am quite sure, can do better.

Photo of the Day: President Barack Obama listens during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, March 11, 2010.

"Hating is a form of caring."

Link.

The Internal Revenue Service is, in at least one case, in hot pursuit of four cents. I admit, I had no idea that the feds were so zealous about saving money. Sort of shakes my whole attitude about the competence of government. Maybe health care reform really will cut costs!

Goddamn.

It is 3.14, the day we celebrate π. Laugh all you will, but without π circles would be impossible.

It is also Albert Einstein's birthday, so he is naturally our Wiki biography of the day. I admit, I never knew that he had been offered (and had refused) the position of president of Israel.

Princeton has a big celebration today, which reaches its crescendo at 3:14 pm. All the cool people will be there.

Republican Congressman Patrick McHenry (no doubt close friends with James McMadison and George McWashington) has proposed substituting Ronald Reagan for U.S. Grant on the fifty dollar Federal Reserve note. My first reaction was to support the idea, but mostly because it would embroil the Congress in another pointless squabble between now and the November election. Every minute spent posturing about the proper way to honor the various great presidents is a minute not spent passing laws that will actually hurt the country. Burn that clock!

That said, I found the opposing argument, from (admittedly liberal) presidential historian Sean Wilentz, persuasive. It absolutely must be discussed at length before any final decision is made, preferably in lengthy Congressional hearings comparing the achievements of the Grant and Reagan administrations, after which I would probably support retaining Lincoln's general.

But I want to hear more.

I suspect David Brooks is closer to the truth on Barack Obama than most people, left or right, who write about him. If you lop off the last paragraph, Brooks wrote a good column that assesses Obama more accurately than either echo chamber, which is not hard to do. The last paragraph, though, misapprehends the nature of the country:

In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.

How many of you caught the made-for-TV movie on Lifetime about the con man "Clark Rockefeller," or at least saw the trailers? Did any of you remember my prediction?

As previously reported, there are trees down all over Princeton. One of them landed on the house of a colleague of mine -- she occupies the third floor apartment on which that tree now rests. The bad news: The fire department has evacuated the house at least until somebody competent ascertains its structural integrity or lack thereof. The good news: My friend had departed from usual practice and parked her car, that grey VW, on the street instead of in the driveway next to the house because she was planning on just running in and grabbing some things before driving in to New York. If the car had been in the driveway, it would have been crushed like a beer can.

Among bloggers, at least, I stand second to none in my enthusiasm for high executive compensation, but even I think this is beyond the Pale. Outrageous!

You cannot get to Sola Sollew from downtown Princeton. The wind is howling, and trees and power lines are down all over town. Alexander Road, Washington Road, and Nassau Street are closed at various places from downed lines. Mercer Street is already closed owing to construction. We have no word on 206 from either south or north. If various of my family members were not out in the mess on some unnecessary mission or another, I would not be anxious. But still, there can be something quite nice in the right sort of howling storm.

Marc Ambinder jumps on the story that David Petraeus is heading to New Hampshire, correctly dismissing it as evidence that he might be toying with a run for president. As Ambinder points out, Petraeus has any number of reasons to go to New Hampshire.

However, Ambinder keeps the rumors of a Petraeus candidacy alive with this closing tidbit:

When Petraeus sets food [sic] in Cedar Rapids...now that'll be something to watch.

Climate "skeptics" argue that the official temperature record has not adequately controlled for "urban heat islands," places where population growth and development raise the ambient temperature around the surface stations. This would seem to be a rather compelling example.

Now, this is one of several reasons why the historical temperature data need to be "adjusted" if we are to understand what is actually happening to the climate. The problem is that we now know these adjustments were not made systematically or transparently. We need to rebuild the adjusted data sets, starting with the raw data, and justify each adjustment at each station with a particular explanation that can be examined, criticized, or reproduced by others.

We've seen declines in the rate of growth of consumer credit before, but it actually is "different this time." Short commentary below the graph.

Commentary

Obviously, such a huge decline in consumer credit in such a short period of time is both a cause of our economic woes and a result of them. No doubt a professional economist could estimate the proportion that is cause vs. effect. Regardless, American GDP is roughly 70% consumer spending (including government health care spending, which sort of mucks up the numbers) and that will not return in force until consumer credit starts growing again.

A related question: To what degree does the decline in outstanding consumer credit reflect changes in preferences that might outlast the recession? Are some people saving more and paying down debt simply because they can? I hope so, but I fear not.

Finally, the decline in consumer credit also reflects the massive socialization of debt. If the federal government goes in to debt to "create or preserve" jobs and the lucky beneficiaries use government money to pay off their own creditors, we have done nothing other than to spread responsibility for its repayment from an individual to present and future American taxpayers. It is far from obvious whether that is the right result for our national character, even if it makes us more prosperous over the short term.

I hate to be reductionist about this, but Tom Hanks is a moron. His defense, on the small chance he found it necessary to mount one, is that he is the product of a school system that devotes a lot of time to the lives of average people in days gone by and almost none to geopolitical or military history. Sorry, but it is a lot more important for students to know how cataclysmic wars start than how soap was made on a Kansas farm 130 years ago.

An early indicator, transactions data for big purchases, suggests that the American consumer is about to roll over. Can anybody say double dip?

A Colorado winter fuzzes up the horses like nobody's business...

The different climate data sets may not be as independent as was claimed in the wake of the "ClimateGate" scandal. This is important, because it means that the corruption -- or, more accurately, impeachment -- of the Climate Research Unit data set cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the validity of the other data sets. If I read the linked story properly (and a critical link there is broken, so it is tough to verify), two of the other three data sets may not have been independent of CRU influence after all.

Earlier today I received the following deck from Deutsche Bank, which surveyed institutional investors -- the professional portfolio managers who invest money in health care stocks for mutual funds, pension funds, and hedge funds -- to assess their expectations for the enactment of health care "reform" and its impact on various sectors of the industry. It is more or less self-explanatory, but two or three items bear mentioning. First, 78% of respondents believe that some version of "reform" will pass. Those are better odds than are now being given by pundits, particularly those on the right. Second, according to these pros hospitals will be big beneficiaries if "reform" passes, and other players (such as medical devices, my own company's sector) if it does not. Third, the slide with the "write-in" comments would be hilarious if it were not so tragic.

Deutsche Bank survey on health care reform

Much as this offends my knee-jerk proclivity to defend Big Oil, it is damned funny. If actual environmentalists had such a sense of humor they would make more progress against their policy objectives.

It's Wednesday, and there has been no dump of tabs since the weekend. Allah forbid that my computer should crash before I off-load my accumulated reading for your pleasure or consternation, as the case may be. Herewith, therefore, a dancing plethora of tabs!

In the category of ugly charts, look at what has happened to federal income tax withholding over the past year. Ouch.

Brookings releases its latest wad of statistics that purport to show "how we're doing in the world." Interesting, although the tone of the accompanying analysis, or at least its lede, does not precisely square with the data, framed as it is with reference to Barack Obama's performance.

The largest gold coin. Ever. And you'll never guess who struck it, and when.

Three things liberals can't admit. Candidly, I can think of more than three things, but Lowry's focusing on the health care fight.

Yet another price that apparently must be paid in order to get health care "reform" through. Oh, and another.

According to this analysis, California -- a center for "green jobs" because of its vibrant tech and venture capital community -- will nevertheless lose jobs because of its aggressive greenhouse gas regulation. Of course, pro-regulation activists will say that this presents a false choice. Or a moral one. Either way.

Barack Obama, a putatively great communicator who has manifestly failed to make the case for his most important policy initiatives, has recruited an important new ally in his propaganda war. At least we're going to get some good graphs.

Speaking of graphs and such, look at how much cleaner the air of America has gotten in the last 30 years. There's something for everybody in that post. On the one hand, there are some hilariously wrong predictions from Paul Ehrlich, perhaps the wrongest person who ever lived, and various others. On the other hand, the Clean Air Act seems to have worked rather decisively, at least insofar as the objective was reducing air pollution (no comment on whether it might have been done more efficiently).

A page of links from Maggie's. Hey, it was an open tab, and this is a tab dump.

Virginia Postrel on innovation and health care reform (video).

Nouriel Rabini, whose fame has compounded on account of his prediction of the world financial crisis, is not optimistic:

Even if the euro zone does not suffer a double dip, growth in demand will be even more limited and this will hurt the United States' potential for export growth, according to Roubini's paper.

The Roubini Global Economics benchmark scenario puts the risk of a double dip at 20 percent, while a slow, protracted, U-shaped recovery is given the highest probability of 60 percent. [Choking off free trade to buy union support for health care "reform" is not going to help the situation. - ed.]

But since the end of February new macroeconomic data from the US have come out and "they have been almost uniformly poor, if not outright awful," Roubini wrote.

The top right-wing blogs, at least according to Right Wing News. Yes, we're there, even though we've lost some of our mojo in recent months, or at least spread it around to other activities.

For anybody who was ever excluded by the cool kids....

I'm about 60 pages in to The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff and recommend it highly. It is the most thought-provoking book I've read in ages.

This is an excellent idea, and I'm going to do it. I encourage you to do it as well. The act in and of itself sends a message about our government's obsession with race and ethnicity.

Notorious TigerHawk comment troll and erstwhile TigerHawk roommate, Christopher Chambers, was interviewed about segregation, de jure and otherwise. My sister responds and expands on her blog. Apart from Chris' apparent denunciation of "course behavior" -- seriously? -- it was solid work by both of them, I'd say.

On the matter of the intellectual honesty of the editors of the New York Times, the prosecution rests.

CWCID: Glenn Reynolds.