Quote of the Day
If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.
Albert Einstein
Japan Focuses On Nuclear Power Plant Crises
The power systems behind cooling units to the reactor cores failed as a result of the Japan earthquake/tsunami events. Inadequate cooling of the reactor core can result in a partial meltdown (e.g., Three Mile Island) or a full meltdown (Chernobyl). The Japanese nuclear safety agency is currently rating one of two more serious reactors suspected of a partial meltdown as a 4 out of 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, just below Three Mile Island. Currently seawater (versus preferred freshwater) is being pumped in Fukushima #1, but US experts are skeptical about its success and worry about the need to pump in a sand/cement mixture to deal with a full meltdown. A sixth reactor has failed. So far these events and occasional bursts of steam have not posed a major health hazard, although precautions have been taken to clear relevant areas. Let us continue to pray for the intentions of victims and their surviving families. The death toll has reached 801 with another 2100 missing or injured, and there are estimates that the deaths could exceed 1400.
Not to underestimate the nature of the tragedy, but one wonders if the Obama Administration will overreact to the Japanese failed reactors just like it overreacted to the BP oil spill crisis. For one thing, Japan has known geological risks which are not relevant for a number of potential US plant locations, and there have been advances in nuclear power plant design since Three Mile Island. We must also point out that the Japanese earthquake at 8.9 on the Richter scale was one of the strongest events in recent history. (No doubt cooling system power reliability will be a key item on any Congressional/White House policy agenda.)
Fox Main Event: Palin vs. O'Reilly/Christie (R-NJ)
There were a couple of notable (paid Fox contributor) Sarah Palin clips about a week ago on the Fox cable networks which got some coverage on The Hill and Politico, and I thought it was time to provide my perspective. Fair disclosure: this blog is not favorably disposed towards Sarah Palin, and these clips did little to change that perspective.
The first clip is from an O'Reilly Factor I did not see at the time, but O'Reilly himself referenced in one of his usual defensive "what-did-I-do" segments with another guest, apparently stung by the predictable reaction of the fanatical pro-Palin base. The general gist was that some felt O'Reilly was rudely interrupting her. She had one of those Gwen Ifill (VP debate) moments when she didn't like the interviewer/moderator interrupting her train of thought. I think the interview was vintage O'Reilly where he wants to hit a number of questions in a limited segment and occasionally some probing follow-ups when a guest decides to go off on some extended talking point.
There is some discussion here of entitlements. The first is how to handle social security and Palin quickly espouses the conventional George W. Bush/Paul Ryan discussion of allowing younger people to be able to self-direct a certain percentage of their contributions, in turn receiving an appropriate lower fixed-income social security payment. The basic goal is to shrink the unsustainable beast. O'Reilly doesn't address the problem of replacing the lower income by the partial privatization and the current pay-as-you-go logistics (where current beneficiaries are paid from current payroll contributions and any excess is put in reserve). If you lower the inflows, the reserves will empty faster. In theory, this should be a wash over time, i.e., the lower distributions in time will offset the current payroll income lost, but how do you make up the difference? The key point is the federal government would need to float a loan to the SSA which would be paid off in time by the incremental savings in distributions: with an exploding $14.2T debt, are we prepared to do that?
O'Reilly doesn't really address the cash flow timing issue of the Bush/Ryan plan, and he doesn't raise at all the typical progressive "solutions" of lifting the income cap subject to payroll taxes and means-testing distributions, which conceptually transforms the system into a general welfare program for seniors. There is almost no discussion of slightly increasing payroll taxes. (Palin would almost certainly reject these.) O'Reilly seems more concerned about what age does one set for grandfathering workers to existing retirement age criteria. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that existing 55-year-olds are able to file (for full benefits) at 67, and say the reform results in a gradual increase to 68.5. So at what current age worker do we say, "You have to wait until 67 and 3 months"? The idea is that when you are within striking distance of the retirement endzone, it's unfair to move the goalposts. Palin is just giving an estimate of 55 years old. But the salient point is even if we reform retirement age, it's not likely to occur in one fell swoop, i.e., 54-year-olds can't file for social security until 68.5. I think O'Reilly's questioning was fuzzy and very limited on the issue: as the European riots last fall showed, retirement age is an explosive political issue.
I would have emphasized the following points (but O'Reilly didn't ask me): (1) the current system is unsustainable; (2) we need to ask for SHARED SACRIFICE: for lower/middle income people, this will require concessions on future benefit increases, a modest payroll tax increase, and retirement age increase; (3) we will probably need to adjust the income ceiling and cap the returns/distributions of higher-income people. Notice here I'm talking about a likely COMPROMISE. As a libertarian conservative, I oppose the mandatory collection of retirement funds for my own good by a spendthrift federal government, which uses captive social security reserves to cover its excessive spending, a moral hazard.
The remaining discussion is a confused discussion about Medicaid. (Medicare, the 800-lb gorilla with huge unfunded liabilities--including a largely unpaid for drug plan, isn't really discussed.) O'Reilly for some reason is trying to pin down Palin on Medicaid and a safety net. I think O'Reilly is all but telegraphing where I think O'Reilly wants her to go with a response: I believe O'Reilly is trying to lead Palin to observe that the Democrats keep pushing up Medicaid eligibility on household income, a stealth approach towards a single-payer system, when in fact many eligible lower-income people aren't signing up. The conventional conservative talking point is to focus funding on the genuinely needy, which Palin totally ignores. Now for the genuine conservative, Palin's concession of a safety net is, at best, dubious. And then she goes on this predictable rant about how the federal government is counterproductively barring sufficient development of Alaska's natural resources (I completely agree, but that's beside the point). But I was bitterly disappointed that a "conservative" like Palin wasn't stressing self-reliance, initiative and hard work of the fiercely independent Alaskan and how entitlement programs constitute moral hazard, an undue dependence on government. I thought her implied characterization of the Alaskan economy as wholly based on natural research development, versus a more diversified one, was quite telling.
Palin's meandering, loosely organized speaking style comes across to me like a teacher scraping fingernails against a blackboard. She inevitably contributes little more than conventional talking points, nothing really that original or insightful. At the risk of sounding "sexist" I find very few of the Fox female contributors to be compelling from an ideas standpoint--most of them repeat the same talking points, and there are a few polarizing ones (Coulter, Malkin, Palin, and Ingraham), etc. Megyn Kelly, Greta Van Susteren and Monica Crowley make a better impression with me, although I often disagree with them. I would like to see more contributors like, say, Debra Saunders, Peggy Noonan, or Kim Strassel.
I think the male contributors are better across the board. Chris Wallace, Andrew Napolitano, Brit Hume, John Stossel and Charles Krauthammer are world-class contributors. Glenn Beck is simply unacceptable, at least in his current role; I have had to mute his screaming tirades. He talks a little too much about himself, his rhetoric is overly judgmental and repetitive, and the apocalyptic monologues verge on paranoia. Sean Hannity is an interesting case, because his politics is polarizing and predictable, but he comes across as very personable. I personally would like to George Will, Thomas Sowell, almost any economist from the Chicago School, and more airtime for Wall Street Journal and National Review contributors.
The second video clip features a snide attack by Ms. Palin on Governor Christie (R-NJ). If the interested reader is not aware, the former governor wanted to establish herself as a Republican kingmaker, presumably on which to launch a bid for the Presidency using political IOU's for potential support in state primary campaigns. The political quid pro quo was made abundantly clear in Todd Palin's tirade against last year's GOP Senate nominee Joe Miller (AK). Palin's role as kingmaker was muddled with high-profile Senate losses by endorsed candidates in Delaware, California, Alaska, and Nevada. There were three marquee races in the fall/winter of 2009-2010, including the New Jersey race. Sensing public sentiment had shifted against the Democrats, even in blue states like New Jersey where a highly unpopular Governor Corzine was running for reelection, Palin was eager to publicly endorse Christie, but the Christie campaign made it clear that it didn't want or need her help (no doubt because of her unpopularity with independents and moderates, which Christie needed to beat the incumbent). There was also the recent kerfuffle whereby Christie suggested that Palin needed more "unscripted moments", i.e., Palin needed to make herself available the major news networks, not just fawning Fox News spots. So when the first question of the interview dealt with Christie's review of the potential 2012 GOP Presidential field as largely uninspiring, Palin knew that Christie included her in that group.
Palin's attack on Governor Christie is laughable, and Christie is a big boy, doesn't need my help and has handled a lot worse. But to summarize her response below, she basically dismisses Christie's accomplishments as little more than doing what any governor would have to do under the circumstances; she then makes a transparent attempt to argue she is the REAL governor because she cut spending in good times which really requires "courage". OK, where do we start here?
First, to balance the budget, there are 2 ways to balance a budget: raise revenues or reduce expenditures. [Well, you can also draw on any rainy day fund--as we will see below.] Now, you can check almost any blue state in the country: almost none have relied exclusively on cutting spending, and almost no one has taken on the unions, for the kind of reasons we've seen the past few weeks in Wisconsin. Furthermore when you discuss cutting spending, most politicians, unlike Governor Christie, have focused on cutting INCREASES in budgets or relied on handouts, e.g., the federal government's stimulus plan. More to the point, many have resorted to tax increases. Christie has also had to battle a state legislature controlled by Democrats.
Second, Palin is materially and unbelievably spinning her own record in Alaska. Alaska, including through the tenure of Governor Palin, attracts the most federal money per capita. Palin INCREASED business taxes; state spending increased by 31% under Palin (there were even larger growths in spending as Wasilla mayor). There is no state income tax and many municipal areas have no property tax or modest miscellaneous taxes, and each Alaska resident gets an annual dividend check from the State of Alaska. Palin during her gubernatorial campaign supported the Gravina Island Bridge (i.e., the Bridge to Nowhere), and it took her almost 10 months to cancel the bridge even after she learned that project costs had doubled. (Also, unlike what she implied in her VP nomination acceptance, she did not return the $230M or so dollars for the project; in fact, Congress allowed Alaska to use the money on other projects--and they did.) Unlike Christie, Palin had an Alaskan legislature controlled by Republicans, and what she conveniently forgets to tell viewers is that her new-found fiscal conservatism occurred AFTER her unsuccessful 2008 bid with John McCain--in the months leading up to her resignation, which Alaskan legislators felt had more to do with her national political ambitions.
But, Ms. Palin, after slamming Chris Christie for merely doing his job cutting spending in recessionary times, talks about her political courage in cutting spending while running a surplus. Let us take a trip back in time to February 2009 as Alaskan state revenues dropped with the price of oil in the recession. From the Anchorage Daily News:
But, Ms. Palin, after slamming Chris Christie for merely doing his job cutting spending in recessionary times, talks about her political courage in cutting spending while running a surplus. Let us take a trip back in time to February 2009 as Alaskan state revenues dropped with the price of oil in the recession. From the Anchorage Daily News:
The state is facing a budget shortfall approaching $1.65 billion this year, the Palin administration said Tuesday. It's a far bigger problem than state officials predicted two months ago in their last forecast. Gov. Sarah Palin responded to the shortfall with a proposal that taps state savings. Palin said she was also reducing spending by $268.6 million. But a closer look shows most of that is just accounting [lowering expected payments in oil tax credits] -- not cuts from how much the state would otherwise spend on programs. Palin budget director Karen Rehfeld ... said slashing the budget would not be responsible.
Ms. Palin, I submit that Governor Christie's cuts in spending did not involve payments in oil tax credits. But draining the rainy day fund without cutting the budget--now surely THAT shows "political courage"!
Political Humor
A few originals:
- Qaddafi and Charlie Sheen are bringing a whole new meaning to "March Madness"....
- Michael Moore says that America is NOT broke. Never mind the fact that tax revenues have generally pulled in less than 20% of GDP (regardless of tax rates), we are spending nearly a quarter of GDP, interest rates are at unsustainable record lows, commodity prices are soaring, and we are just beginning to pay for underfunded baby boomer entitlements. Apparently Michael Moore is looking at US national debt charts using the same funhouse mirror in his home that convinces him that he is really a thin man...
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
America, "California Dreamin'". It seems odd to start out this short series with a remake of the Mamas and Papas' classic, but there are a few hit remakes I love better than the original hit like the one below: Dan Fogelberg's "Rhythm of the Falling Rain", the Hollies' "Stop! In the Name of Love", and Dave Mason's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?"
