Encouragement

Senator Jim DeMint (R - South Carolina) has come out against the tax cut deal that President Obama has worked out with the Republican leadership. One of his main reasons for this stance, the fact that it will increase the budget deficit makes perfect sense. But some of his reasoning is a little dubious.

I don’t think we need to extend unemployment any further without paying for it, and without making some modifications such as turning it into a loan at some point. It then encourages people to go back to work.

This is one of the common Republican objections to extending unemployment - that my making it less painful to be out of work, the incentive to do whatever it takes to get a job is lessened. But unless Senator DeMint is hoping that some people (Democratic voters, more than likely) simply leave the country entirely in their quest for jobs, one wonders just what exactly the incentive of looming poverty is expected to accomplish.

In "Read This Shirt" in the July 24th-30th issue of The Economist, which deals with the fight over unemployment benefits in Congress, a chart is presented that shows that as of the end of the first quarter of 2010, there were just shy of 5 unemployed people per job opening. (But I'm not sure if this is being measured against the official unemployment rate - other statistics in the article are - or against the overall number of workforce-eligible but unemployed persons.) What proponents of the "unemployment benefits cause malingering" philosophy never seem to get around to answering is why they expect that ending unemployment benefits - or reforming them into loans that must be repaid - would reduce the ratio of unemployed people to job openings. According to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Fransisco, about 5% of the officially unemployed (the unemployment rate was about 10% at the time) were taking it easy because of access to unemployment benefits.

If we work under the assumption that none of the job openings identified in the Bureau of Labor Statistics data mentioned in the Economist article are due to the inability to find qualified candidates, it might be worthwhile to presume that you could reduce the number of open positions to 0 by cutting off access to other means of support for the unemployed. But that would still leave more than 75% of unemployed people high and dry.

I may have mentioned this before when writing about this topic, but I have yet to encounter anyone who disputes the BLS numbers. So either Senator DeMint is willing to punish the majority of the unemployed to lever those that can find work to to do whatever it takes to get what jobs are out there, or he knows something that the rest of us don't. The only thing that comes to mind off the top of my head is that businesses are holding jobs back, due to wage rates being too high for their liking. Once the oversupply of labor pushes people into being willing to work for mush less than they would otherwise, employers will unveil these jobs, and offer them to the public. It is, essentially, a game of chicken, with the wealthy betting that they can wait out the public with the help of conservative lawmakers who begrudge the populace any policies or conditions that work against a factory-friendly business environment.

It's possible that Senator DeMint honestly believes that a factory-style business environment, where the public serves mainly as a labor force for businesses that charitably allow people to work for them, is the single best exemplar of Capitalism and the best thing for modern Democracy. I suppose it beats thinking that he's a cynical bastard who is deliberately playing out an active prejudice against the poor and middle-class. But sooner or later, we need to pin him, and his allies, down on just what they plan to do to increase the number of available jobs out there to be had, rather than simply resting on the idea that the public is lazy and needs to be whipped into shape.

And Now, For a Moment of WTF?

"Unicoi County, Tennessee, has 17,700 people, and it hasn’t had a reported murder in six years. Its SWAT team recently acquired an armored personnel vehicle."
Radley Balko, The Case of Cory Maye.

At the risk of sounding soft on crime, and therefore adding to the long list of things that I've said that pretty much ensure my perpetual ineligibility for any sort of elective office, isn't an APV a bit of overkill (not that the SWAT team itself isn't a bit of overkill) for a county with a population smaller than that of some college campuses, and with an enviable violent crime rate?

Barbie Can See You Now

The story about how the FBI has become concerned that the new Barbie Video Girl doll could be used as an "unconventional avenue" for creating child pornography has been floating around for a bit now, but it still becomes just a little bit funnier every time I read it.

I suspect that BBC staffers laughed themselves silly when the news first made it across the pond. I'm not going to make the obvious wisecrack about how the FBI, of all people, should have more important things on their mind than worrying about weirdos with Barbie dolls. Mainly because the sexual exploitation of children is a fairly serious topic. But what I don't get is just what is it about the Barbie camera that you couldn't do with any other camera that might appeal to children; and that's where the whole flap begins to veer into the comedic.

Growing Up

"But I am saying that Bowles, Simpson, and everyone else involved in the 'adult conversation' are going to have to sell it by convincing people that, for them personally, there's an upside as at least as much as a downside to reducing the deficit."
Stan Collender, Attention Bowles And Simpson: You've Got To Talk About More Than The Pain

With all due respect to Mr. Collender, the constant quest for personal upsides is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place. The whole reason why the deficit reduction conversation is happening is a dawning realization that the steady parade of "tax cuts, prescription drug coverage for Medicare, contracts from the government, corporate subsidies, and research grants" funded by borrowing from overseas creditors can't go on forever, if for no other reason that eventually the accumulated interest will demolish our ability to keep even basic functions running.

But I understand the political reality that he's referencing, and it's a bleak one. The American public, taken as a whole, is simply too short-sighted to understand that a (reasonably) soft landing now or in the near future is substantially better than a (potentially catastrophic) hard landing later - especially when there are people out there willing to sell us the idea that the hard landing will magically never come. Just the other day, I heard someone tell the BBC that the Bowles - Simpson plan was bad medicine because it didn't take into account future economic growth that would substantially increase tax revenues, as if this wonderful period of expansion were a guarantee graven in stone.

The "adult conversation" that we're looking for can't be predicated on the idea that we're entitled to a certain standard of living, regardless of our collective ability to fund it. But for right now, it seems it will be, simply because that's what get's people elected. According to Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois: "The Bowles-Simpson plan further erodes the middle class and threatens low-income Americans." But I fail to understand how letting the status quo continue until financial reality runs it down shores up the middle class and removes threats to low-income Americans. If these groups are, in effect, reliant on government handouts to support themselves, what will they do when taxes are increased and services cut back? Even if the United States simply walks away from its debts, spending will still have to plunge to match receipts. It seems unlikely that the poor and middle-class will still be able to rely on government programs in such an event. Given this, it simply doesn't seem reasonable to set any sort of direct personal benefit as the price of agreeing to no longer live beyond our (collective) means. Allowing the discussion to be sidetracked into what payoffs are going to be required to end the current payoffs will do nothing but indulge a childish impulse that threatens to reduce the United States to a destitute shell. So, if anything, the "adult conversation" that Bowles and Simpson want to have is imperiled just as much by a lack of other adults to converse with, as anything else.

Perhaps this is the real reason Why Fixing the Budget Is Hopeless, even if it must be admitted that the average person's complete lack of understanding of it plays a major role...

Required Reading

Bruce Schneier has penned an excellent essay on being straight with ourselves about terrorism. It's a must-read for anyone who thinks that effective security and security theater are two different beasts. While it might be true that a pleasant falsehood is more palatable than an inconvenient truth, those of us that are ready, willing and able to deal with reality, need to do a better job of making ourselves heard.

P.S.: Turns out that this is the six-hundred and sixty-sixth post. I wonder if it's possessed...