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Hindsight is Golden
Here's an interesting moment from earlier today at a Cato Institute event on conservatives and foreign policy. Reps. Dana Rohrabacher, Tom McClintock, and Jimmy Duncan are asked how their fellow Republicans in Congress, looking back from 2010, feel about the decision to go to war in Iraq. Rohrabacher and McClintock both claim that virtually all of their colleagues believe the invasion was a mistake:
Kudos to Duncan, meanwhile, for being one of just six House Republicans with the courage and foresight to vote against the authorization of force in the first place.
Alex Chilton, R.I.P.
A few personal words about musician Alex Chilton, who died yesterday of a heart attack. (This will be personal, and fannish, and long, and if that's not interesting to you, move on.)
Chilton was, most importantly, singer or writer on lots of really, really great pop and rock records, from his days in the 1960s as wunderkind vocalist for the Box Tops ("The Letter," "Soul Deep") to his days in the 1970s in the cult favorite pop-rock-art act Big Star. (He went on to make solo records through the 80s and 90s, most of which were at least charming, but I wouldn't claim greatness for.) Basic discography and bio data at wiki, of course.
It's a little hard to pin down exactly what was so great about Big Star; they had piles of really great and affecting songs, to be sure, but always meant something more than that to their fans. There was the interesting legend of the "fallen star," the guy who had huge hit singles right out of the gate as a teen with the Box Tops who turned obscure pop classicist, and of the "lost album," Big Star's devastatingly strange LP alternately known as Third and Sister Lovers, first issued in 1978, years after it was recorded.
Beyond the songs as songs, Chilton and his music had an interesting cultural role, especially for those of us growing into pop-rock cratedigger and historical consciousness in the early to late 1980s. Along with the Velvet Underground, he was one of the leading acts lost in the mists of history who were being talked up and newly discovered by that generation's serious, studious, fanatical pop/rock historians and devotees and acolytes. (This was in the days, kids, when things actually could be lost in the mists of history, before all information and art was digitized and available to everyone everywhere all the time, largely the happy condition of modernity.)
But unlike the Velvets and Lou Reed, his aftercareer had neither major labels and hit singles nor a well-known and unavoidable cultural cachet. No Honda or AmEx ads for Alex; in Big Star's aftermath he made weird records for obscure and overseas labels, and then began making smooth, slight, sometimes even silly records, mostly covers of the old soul and R & B and pop that he grew up loving, the kind of stuff a Memphis teen in the mid-60s would have been formed by.
So Chilton imbued many of us with the sense that there were layers and layers to the world of culture that were not visible, and were fantastically rewarding; now-age youth heroes from R.E.M. to the Replacements (who, yes, wrote a song about Alex) to the eerie Brit 4AD crew working as This Mortal Coil were all transfixed and fed by his music and the idea of him, and whispered to their followers that there were giants in the earth in those days, giants that still never managed to break the surface of that earth.
Knowing that inspired thousands to look for more, to try to rewrite the history of pop culture and figure out that there were dozens and hundreds, not a singular, canon of cultural excellence. And also, of course, to try to emulate music that in both its blinding brightness and stygian shadows was eerie, alien, inexplicable, and harder to capture than the likes of, say, the Posies or Matthew Sweet thought.
He toured around the south pretty constantly in the mid-late '80s and I saw him play in Florida nearly 20 times, more than I saw anyone else perform. I'd never miss him. He was then almost totally eschewing what his devoted fans would have wanted of him, playing loose and smooth soul, R & B, and pop covers with mild insouciance. What he was selling, though I don't think he would have put it that way, was his pure Alex Chilton-hood, playing mostly to kids who wanted to be near him rather than hear the specific music he chose to play.
He let this eager teen fan buttonhole him in a shitty motel on Jacksonville Beach one night in 1985 after performing at the Einstein a-Go-Go. He and his boys, Rene Coman and Doug Garrison, put up with me for an hour or so, and he gently rebuffed my intense adoration for Big Star's Third in particular, a record whose gushing and barely controlled waves of anguish, love, and frankly psychotic mania spoke a little too clearly and sharply to a teen me. Oh, all that stuff was just fragments, shapeless, no really memorable songs, he insisted. He wasn't mad at me about it or anything, just amused at how wrong I (and a generation of his fans) were about that record. He never played anything from it in those days. He did what he loved, not what we loved.
And that love, and that sense of a dude who was doing exactly what he wanted the way he wanted to, came across; Chilton had the enviable and unshakeable cool of any kid leaning against the hood of a car with his cigs rolled up in his sleeve. He wasn't movin' until he wanted to move, man. The very fact that he refused to revisit whatever soup of Beatles fanatacism, futuristic guitar pop vision, and pure agonizing emotional madness from which Big Star arose made him even more interesting as a living presence for us Big Star fanatics. At least for a while. I think by the mid-90s it became a sly joke that maybe wasn't that funny anymore for any of us, and by then he'd be occasionally giving the people what they wanted touring with revived versions of the Box Tops and Big Star, with the same insouciance. He could be a pro when he needed to be.
Like a pro, but never really exactly like one, which is why I think both the music and the legend resonated with record collectors with a taste for the outre and underground. He had the convincing and real aura of an actual man, an actual artist, with concerns that we could never quite understand, and when those concerns led to an absurdly straight-faced "Volare" covers, that was even cooler than hearing him play "Back of a Car" again could be. Kind of.
The last times I saw him perform were both in one week in November 1994. (For whatever reason, he never got to L.A. much.) He did a Big Star show at the House of Blues, and then a few days later was one of dozens of artists at a tribute show for Brian Wilson, then just beginning to crawl out of years of a mental black hole. (For Wilson fanatics, this is the show where he first met and heard the Wondermints, who became the core of his touring band in the shocking revival of his touring and recording career in the late 90s, culminating in the finishing of his own tortured lost album, Smile.) Alex performed a handful of songs--I cannot be sure which at this point, but I think might have been "Custom Machine," "New Girl in School" and "Solar System." I was in the front row. It was great.
A bit later in the night, unannounced, Brian Wilson himself performed, which at that point in time was an event of galactic rarity. A few feet to my right, also standing in front, was Chilton, the two of us Brian Wilson lovers reveling in this staggering moment. We caught each others' eye. (No, I'm quite sure he had no memory of having talked to me for an hour 9 years before.)
We both broke out in wild head-shaking grins, thinking, I suspect, the same thing: This guy, this hero, this legend, this brilliant and tortured creator of perfect universal pop and agonizingly weird personal/spiritual strangeness, who shaped so many people's love and approach to modern pop and rock, who made music so intense even he could barely understand or appreciate it...there he was! Doing his thing again! Right there!
In Alex's case, it took one to know one.
I highly recommend all fans of rock music to at the very least buy and listen to Big Star's Radio City (their second, when the band became more purely Chilton's after the departure of other founder Chris Bell) and Sister Lovers/Third.
Some clips, of the sublime Big Star ballad "Thirteen"
The Box Tops doing his first big hit, "The Letter"
And for those who need politics in their music, Alex is remembered on the floor of Congress by Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat from his home city of Memphis:
But Can They Vote 'Present'?
Why spend your time in boring city council meetings just because you were elected to the city council? The Los Angeles Times reports that members of L.A.'s city council frequently leave the chamber during meetings to conduct business in the back rooms, give interviews, or grab a smoke. Sometimes they are gone for an hour or two. But they still manage to vote, thanks to software that performs that function for them (unless they want to vote no). According to the city attorney's office, the practice is perfectly legal:
The rules of the council state that members must activate their own voting machines and must be within the council chamber to be counted as present. But the city attorney who advises the council said his office has defined the "chamber" to include the back rooms, bathrooms and news conference area, all of which are out of public view.
Yet that opinion does not satisfy residents who take the trouble to attend city council meetings and think city council members should too:
Their physical absence frequently infuriates members of the public who show up to testify only to find themselves addressing one or more empty chairs.
"We go there to talk to the full City Council," said Ziggy Kruse of the Hollywood Studio District Neighborhood Council. "If you get eight people in their seats, you're lucky."
The practice shows a "profound lack of respect for the public," said Terry Francke, general counsel for Californians Aware, a group devoted to preserving open government. "It seems to me to say, 'My time is too important right now to spend it actually participating in a meeting where I was elected to represent the public.'"
The Pro-Corporate Legacy of Justice John Paul Stevens
The one-two combination of Justice John Paul Stevens’ impending retirement and his recent angry dissent in the much-ballyhooed free speech case Citizens United v. F.E.C. has created an aura of fond remembrance around the geriatric justice. Exhibit A is Jeffrey Toobin’s long and very interesting New Yorker profile of Stevens, which features the plaintive subtitle, “What will the Supreme Court be like without its liberal leader?”
At the risk of spoiling all the lovely tributes going on, I’d like to suggest that Stevens’ new fans check out his majority opinion in a case that Toobin failed to mention: Kelo v. City of New London, the 2005 decision where Stevens and his most liberal colleagues (plus the "modestly libertarian" Justice Anthony Kennedy) upheld the government’s ability to seize private property via eminent domain and then hand the land over to another private party in order to widen the tax base. I’ve heard a lot recently about how Stevens stood up for “We the People” against the evil corporations in Citizens United, but what about the people who were literally forced out of their homes in New London, Connecticut, so the municipal government could clear their neighborhood and hand it over to a private developer? And let’s not forget why the developer wanted that land in the first place: The pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer had built a new research and development center on the adjacent land and the developer wanted to build a fancy new hotel, apartment buildings, and office towers to complement the Pfizer facility, something Justice John Paul Stevens was more than happy to oblige. That’s what I’d call a pro-corporate decision.
New at Reason: Matt Welch on the Obama "Narrative" Narrative
According to leading journalists like Thomas
Friedman of The New York Times, what President Barack
Obama needs is a single, one-sentence explanation for his blizzard
of initiatives and laws. Editor in Chief Matt Welch would prefer if
journalists spent more energy telling us how a crucial piece of
legislation might affect American life and public policy than on
how the president might most effectively sell it to the skeptical
sheeple.
Bernanke: Low Interest Rates Still Didn't Cause the Bubble
Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke
continues trying to sell a story nobody's buying: that the
historically low fed funds rate throughout the past decade did not
lead to the real estate bubble. Here's the relevant portion from
his exchange yesterday with Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) at a
House Financial Services Committee hearing:
Ron Paul: During the early part of the decade a lot of the free market economists would be saying interest rates were kept too low too long and there was a financial bubble and a housing bubble. There had to be a correction. And of course we did in 2008. Since 2008 many of the mainstream economists have more or less agreed with that assessment, because frequently we'll hear them say, "Interest rates were held too low too long." And I think even Secretary Geithner has made that statement. Where do you come down on that perception? Do you think interest rates were held too low too long?
Ben Bernanke: Well Congressman, I've given a speech on this.
And I think the bottom line is that nobody really knows for sure but that the evidence is really quite mixed.
And I would say that even if they were too low for too long, the magnitude of the error was not big enough to account for the huge crisis we had. I think what caused the crisis was the failures of regulation. And I would fault the Fed here too, because some of those failures were ours in the sense that we didn't do enough -- and I've admitted this and acknowledged this many times -- we didn't do enough on mortgage regulation. So I think it was the weakness of the regulatory system, not monetary policy that was most important here.
Ron Paul: Of course I don't agree with that.
But if you assume for a minute that it was too low too long and you had perfect regulations, what is the harm done by interest rates being too low too long? Do you see any damage from interest rates being artificially low for a long period of time? Sort that away from regulations for a second.
Ben Bernanke: Well certainly one possibility which [former Fed chairman Paul Volcker] knows a lot about is that if you keep rates too low for too long you'll get inflation. And every central banker wants to be sure that the price level remains stable. And that's an important consideration.
Ron Paul: Do you think the investor, the businessman makes mistakes if interest rates are lower than, say, the market? Aren't low interest rates an indication that there are savings, and if there are no savings but interest rates are low because of newly created credit by the Fed, does that not send a false signal to some investors and some business people?
Ben Bernanke: Well if interest rates are below their normal levels it's because the economy is operating at a very low level. I mean currently we're not in anything that an economist would call a Pareto optimal equilibrium or anything like that. We're certainly in a situation where a lot of people are out of work, and consumption is below its normal level, and low interest rates serve the function of creating demand and putting people back to work.
Ron Paul: But you don't think that if interest rates are two and three percent instead of six percent -- without artificially low interest rates -- there wouldn't be a temptation for people to build too many houses, or people to try to capitalize on the fact that they're anticipating price inflation and participate in the bubble?
Ben Bernanke: Well Congressman, interest rates are very low right now and I don't think building too many houses is really a problem.
Ron Paul: And that makes a very important point. You know, in the boom part of the cycle, interest rates cause people to do things that might not be proper and in the best interest of the economy, and then when the bust comes we resort to that same policy of keeping interest rates, you know, extremely low for too long. What are the chances? Do you think there's any chance that in a year or two or three and say, "Well not only were they too low too long in the early part of the decade, they were too low too long in the latter part of the decade." Because when the prices start to go up, it's sort of a little bit too late, then you have the job of reining that all in.
Ben Bernanke: Well it's a difficult, um... Central banking is an art, and we need to balance our dual mandate. Our dual mandate is to maximum employment and price stability. We need to find an appropriate policy that gets us as close as we can to that mandate.
Ron Paul: See the free market people see that it the dependency on regulation is just imaginary, because the fault is all these mistakes being made because they have false information. Nobody's advocating wage and price controls because of all the false information. You can't run an economy with price fixing, that's why socialism fails. But if you fix the price of interest rates, one half of the economy goes, "You're messing around with the financial system." And then all of sudden, instead of dealing with that we say, "We just need more and smarter regulations that will solve all these problems." Doesn't that concern you at all?
Ben Bernanke: Well you need some system to set the money supply. I know -- I guess you're a gold standard supporter. I don't know. Is that correct?
Ron Paul: I'm for the Constitution.
Ben Bernanke: Every major country though, currently in the world, uses a central bank which must make some decision, whether to keep it stable or to move it around. Nevertheless it's a choice that's made.
I
think Bernanke got the better of this exchange because debate is
not about truth but about dinging people, and "interest rates are
very low right now and I don't think building too many houses is
really a problem" played pretty well. But his argument is very
strange. If low interest rates are a mark of an economy below
normal, then he must believe that the economy of the 21st century
is competely different from the economy of even the 1990s. The fed
funds rate has
gone above 5 percent just twice since 2000, and the drastic,
two-and-a-half-year campaign of rate cutting that began in 2001 was
not really reversed until the middle of 2006 -- by which point all
you had to do was attend a Sunday afternoon open house to know the
real estate bubble was already beginning to pop. Take a look back
at where the fed funds rate was in the mid-nineties. Take a
Dramamine and look at where it was in 1990. Take heroin and look at
where it was in the 1980s. I wouldn't want those interest rates
back (though we all may get them anyway), but it raises a question
Bernanke should at least address: Why did the Fed consider this
past decade different from all other decades?
The weird part is that Bernanke has plausible deniability: The bubble was caused by the freebooting ways of his Ayn Rand-maddened predecessor. But to do that would be to acknowledge too much about the Fed's limited -- possibly non-existent -- power to orchestrate outcomes. Bernanke would rather look like the last chump in the country than call the dignity of his office into question. I guess there's honor in that.
What If The Government Gave an Estate Sale?
Over at Big Goverment, Reason columnist and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy suggests the government host a garage sale to pay down its debt:
Here is an idea: Greece is getting ready to sell some of its assets to pay for its gigantic debt (Corfu and the Parthenon are not on the auction block yet), and the US should do the same. According to the Financial Statement of the United States, there is about $2.6 trillion of stuff we could sell (See Page 49 of the report, it’s page 69 of the whole document). A few items on my list:
Loans receivable and mortgage backed securities: $540 billion
TARP direct loans and equity investments: $240 billion
Property, plant, and equipment: $784 billion
Freddie and Fannie preferred stocks: $65 billion
In Hasta La Vista, Arnold: What California's Budget Mess Means for America, Reason.tv suggested the Golden State do the same thing.
Feel The Liberal Love For...Walmart?
Who said this in praise of Walmart's in-house check-cashing operations?
If you’re cashing, for example, a $1,000 biweekly paycheck then $6 is almost one third the price MoneyGram is asking. Nothing too earth-shattering about this, but it underscores the point that a lot of the time the best solution to abusive business practices is to find ways to get competing firms into the business.
Incidentally, the Wall Street Journal notes that Wal-Mart once tried and failed to get a full bank charter which would have allowed it to accept deposits and make loans. If they had the license, how many of the 17 million Americans who currently lack a bank account would have one today? And how much damage would it have done to the business models of incumbent depositary institutions?
The answer, in a post titled, "Competition Works," may surprise you.
Hat Tip: Alan Vanneman.
Reason gave Walmart love back when it was called Wal-Mart. And here's a brief on the good things done by the check-cashing industry.
Dig In!
The 152-page Health Care and Education Affordability Reconciliation Act of 2010 (PDF) is now available at the website of the House Rules Committee. If you read it in conjunction with the 2,409-page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PDF), approved by the Senate in December, and the CBO’s preliminary analysis (PDF) of the two bills (only 25 pages!), you can finally see what President Obama has in mind when he talks about "health care reform." But don't worry: The president promises you will have "many days" to digest it all before your representative votes on it. This weekend.
Addendum: The Republican members of the House Budget Committee have a three-page response to the CBO analysis here (PDF). In addition to the points I mentioned earlier today, they note several other tricks that the Democrats use to undercount spending and exaggerate savings, including frontloading taxes and Medicare cuts while backloading insurance subsidies. "When you strip away the double-counting of Medicare cuts, the so-called savings from Social Security payroll taxes, and the CLASS Act [premiums for long-term care insurance]," their analysis says, "the deficit increases by $433 billion over the first ten years."
Senate Approves Bill to Shrink the Crack Gap
Yesterday the Senate unanimously approved a bill that addresses the unjust, arbitrary treatment of crack cocaine offenses. Under rules enacted by Congress in the 1980s, five grams of crack cocaine is treated the same as 500 grams of cocaine powder, triggering a five-year mandatory minimum sentence; likewise, 50 grams of crack triggers the same 10-year penalty as five kilograms of powder. The distinction, which is not based on any inherent difference between the smoked and snorted forms of the drug, has led to striking racial disparities in punishment. But instead of eliminating the distinction, as a bill passed by the House last summer would do, the Senate bill would reduce the 100-to-1 weight ratio, making it a less outrageous but equally arbitrary 18 to 1. The bill also would eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for simple possession of crack by first-time offenders. The American Bar Association says "the unanimous Senate vote on this long-contentious issue represents a rare bipartisan achievement in the criminal justice reform area." Jasmine Tyler of the Drug Policy Alliance is more ambivalent:
Today is a bittersweet day. On one hand, we've moved the issue of disparate sentencing for two forms of the same drug forward, restoring some integrity to our criminal justice system. But on the other hand, the Senate, by reducing the 100 to 1 disparity to 18 to 1, instead of eliminating it, has proven how difficult it is to ensure racial justice, even in 2010.
Julie Stewart of Families Against Mandatory Minimums has a similarly mixed reaction:
This is a big improvement over current crack sentencing penalties. It could lower sentences for almost 3,000 people each year. However, the bill is not retroactive and would not help anyone who is already in prison serving a crack cocaine sentence. So, after working on this issue for almost as long as FAMM has been in existence, I'm not thrilled that this is all we got.
In a 2007 column, I explained why the crack gap makes no sense.
Public=Online
I'm at an event at Google D.C. HQ right now, hosted by the Sunlight Foundation, along with lots of government geeks and IT nerds.
The event is the launch of a new government transparency initiative. The guiding ideas: 1) If it's not online, it's not really public. 2) If public officials are not online, they're not really accessible.
It's called Public=Online.
Not much to add to the title besides: duh.
Science Shows That Markets Make People Fairer
Are people
innately fair-minded or is it learned behavior? A fascinating new
study, "Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of
Fairness and Punishment," that is a big step toward resolving this
question is being published today in the journal Science
[subscription required]. The researchers find strong evidence that
market institutions cause people to treat each other, especially,
strangers more fairly. The research is based on the results of
behaviorial experiments in 15 different societies which have
varying amounts of integration into markets. The study, headed up
by University of British Columbia anthropologist Joseph Henrich,
finds:
... a crucial ingredient in the rise of more-complex societies was the development of new social norms and informal institutions that are capable of domesticating our innate psychology for life in ever-expanding populations. Larger and more-complex societies prospered and spread to the degree that their norms and institutions effectively sustained successful interaction in ever-widening socioeconomic spheres, well beyond individuals’ local networks of kin and long-term relationships. It is these particular norms and their gradual internalization as proximate motivations that recalibrate our innate psychology for life in small-scale societies in a manner that permits successful larger-scale cooperation and exchange in vast communities...
[punishment, signaling, and reputational] ... norms can facilitate trust, fairness, and cooperation in a diverse array of interactions, thereby allowing the most productive use of unevenly distributed skills, knowledge, and resources, as well as increasing cooperation in exchange, public goods, and warfare. More-effective norms and institutions can spread among societies by a variety of theoretically and empirically grounded mechanisms, including conquest and assimilation, preferential imitation of more-successful societies, or forwardlooking decision making by leaders or high-status coalitions.
This is exactly the sort of argument that libertarian thinker and economics Nobelist Friedrich Hayek made, especially in his last book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. Successful societies are those that adopt market norms and they tend over time to outcompete societies organized in more primitive top-down ways. The upshot is that efforts to extract people from markets (e.g., communism, socialism, fascism) encourage them to revert to the innate savagery of dealing fairly only with kin and fellow tribespeople.
As the press release for the study notes:
Members of large-scale, complex human societies have learned to play nice with strangers through the norms that are associated with market participation and world religions, and not solely due to an evolved psychology for cooperation in small groups as previously believed, according to UBC-led research.
In a paper to appear in the March 19 issue of Science, lead author Joe Henrich and a 13-member research team explore the evolutionary underpinnings of human societies.
Fifteen years in the making, the study combines two major, comparative cross-cultural projects that examine how motivations for fairness and punishment influence economic decisions, and how these motivations relate to variables that differ across societies, such as community size, adherence to a world religion and market dependence and exchange.
"Our results contradict previous theories that humans learned to treat strangers fairly by transferring behaviour and norms developed in their actions and attitudes toward family and kin," says Prof. Henrich, an anthropologist who holds the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Coevolution and teaches in the UBC Departments of Psychology and Economics.
The interdisciplinary team of anthropologists and economists conducted behavioral experiments with 2,100 respondents from 15 societies, whose communities ranged in size from 20 to 10,000 people. These small-scale societies, from Africa, North and South America, Oceania, New Guinea, and Asia, included hunter-gatherers, marine foragers, pastoralists, horticulturalists, and wage laborers.
"Our findings suggest that the evolution of societal complexity, especially as it has occurred over the last 10 millennia, involved the selective spread of those norms and institutions that best facilitated successful exchange and interaction in socioeconomic spheres well beyond local networks of durable kin and reciprocity-based relationships," says Henrich.
The study measured participants' motivations for fairness and their willingness to punish unfairness in interactions with an anonymous other. These experiments took the form of games played with real money where participants would give a portion of the cash to the second player, someone unknown to them. Some of the games allowed the second player or a third-party participant to pay some of their money to punish the first player for making low offers.
The findings show that people living in small communities lacking market integration or a world religion – absences that likely characterized all societies until about 10,000 years ago – display relatively little concern with fairness or punishing unfairness in transactions involving strangers or anonymous others, a pattern that makes sense given how local norms and institutions actually function in these societies.
Third-party observers, for example, from the smallest-scale, purely face-to-face, communities from Tanzania and Kenya to Amazonia and Oceania, show little willingness to pay to punish those making unfair offers.
"It's a pattern that makes sense given how local norms and institutions actually function in these societies," says Henrich. "Small-scale communities have local norms governing all kinds of interactions, but they often don't have default social norms of dealing with strangers or anonymous others in monetary transactions."
In contrast, the largest societies with the highest levels of market integration and participation in world religions show both a greater willingness to make fair offers and the most willingness to punish unfair offers.
I reported on earlier research in this area in my 2002 column, "Do Markets Make People More Generous?"
Set Tivos to Stun: Drew Carey, Nick Gillespie, Dennis Kucinich, Reason Saves Cleveland on Stossel Tonight, 8PM
Tonight on John Stossel's eponymous Fox Business show, which airs at 8PM ET (check your local listings), Drew Carey, Nick Gillespie, former Mayor Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and others talk about Reason.tv's Reason Saves Cleveland With Drew Carey, urban decline, and urban renewal.
Here's Stossel previewing the show:
Recently at Reason.tv: Reason Saves Cleveland With Drew Carey Episodes 1, 2, 3, & 4!
Episode 1, The Decline of a Once-Great City
Sixty years ago, Cleveland was a booming city full of promise, opportunity, and people. Today, the city’s population is less half of what it was in its prime and it ranks as one of the poorest big cities in the United States. Hometown hero Drew Carey reflects on how the city became “the mistake on the lake” and wonders about the city’s future. Is a Cleveland renaissance possible or is the city doomed to long, slow death?
Episode 2, Fix The Schools
Cleveland’s public schools are failing to prepare students for their futures and as a result, all parents who can afford to have been fleeing to the suburbs for decades.
Yet some urban schools, like Think College Now in Oakland, California are finding out that a combination of administrative autonomy and accountability can lead to amazing results. Within Cleveland's own boundaries, charter schools are booming and delivering quality education at a fraction of the cost of traditional public schools.
Does Cleveland have what it takes to fundamentally reform its K-12 education system and become a leader in 21st-century education?
Episode 3, Privatize It
Should cities be in the business of running businesses ranging from convention centers to farmers markets? Selling off golf courses, contracting out parking concessions, and all manner of public-private partnerships are generating billions of dollars in revenue and dramatically improving city services in places such as Chicago and Indianapolis. Will Cleveland's elected officials learn the right lessons in time?
Episode 4, Take Care of Business
After World War II, Cleveland was booming, thanks to its leadership role in heavy industry and a business-friendly climate. Today, the city’s high taxes and onerous regulatory demands make it nearly impossible for new businesses to set up shop while choking the life out of existing companies. While relatively laissez-faire cities such as Houston are growing even during the current recession, Cleveland remains stuck in a rut. How can city officials make the city a more welcoming place for entrepreneurs to thrive?
Reason Saves Cleveland with Drew Carey is written and produced by Paul Feine; camera and editing by Roger Richards and Alex Manning; narrated by Nick Gillespie; music by the Cleveland band Cats on Holiday.
Go here for iPod, HD, and audio versions of this video. Go here for a full episode guide and release schedule for Reason Saves Cleveland With Drew Carey.
Subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel and receive automatic notifications when new videos go live.
These are the first four of six episodes that will air between March 15-19, 2010.
The fifth episode in the series, Encourage Bottom-Up Redevelopment, is now live at Reason.tv and YouTube.
Go to Reason.tv for iPod, HD, and audio versions of these videos.
Subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel and receive automatic notification when new videos go live.
A Few Tricks to Make Your Deficit Look Smaller
I'm sure Peter Suderman will have more later, but here are a few things worth noting about the CBO's preliminary analysis (PDF) of the Senate health care bill as modified by the reconciliation bill Democrats have put together:
1. The Medicare savings, which may not actually materialize because they depend on reimbursement changes Congress has been loath to maintain in the past, total about $500 billion during the first decade, compared to total deficit reduction of $130 billion.
2. The reconciliation bill includes changes to student loan programs that CBO estimates will reduce spending by $19.4 billion during the first decade. By contrast, the "doc fix" that was originally envisioned as part of the health care package, since it deals with Medicare payments to physicians, was carved out and placed in a separate bill. It costs more than $200 billion.
3. CBO warns that it "does not generally provide cost estimates beyond the 10-year budget projection period" and that its projections for the second decade are subject to "an even greater degree of uncertainty" than its projections for the first 10 years. It estimates that the unmodified Senate bill "would have a total effect during that [second] decade that is in a broad range between one-quarter percent and one-half percent of gross domestic product." The changes in the reconciliation bill, it says, would "further reduce federal budget deficits in that decade, with a total effect that is in a broad range between zero and one-quarter percent of GDP." When the range of numbers in a projection includes zero, it seems fair to say the projection is not very helpful as a guide to policy decisions. Yet the Democrats have transformed these highly uncertain projections into a seemingly precise and reliable dollar figure: $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction during the second decade.
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