In which I defend Jonathan Chait from David Frum

…ew.

So a few days ago, Sally Quinn wrote a somewhat tone-deaf article bemoaning the fact that she doesn’t get invited to high-powered dinner parties with Big Powerful Senators any more, for which she’s been roundly derided.  Jonathan Chait more recently piled on with, among other cutting remarks, this incisive comment on the good ol’ days:

When assessing Quinn’s sense of the Lost Eden of Washington, we should also have a firmer sense of what the culture was actually like. Here is one scene from Quinn’s inculcation into the Washington elite:

Washington writer Sally Quinn told of a 1950s reception where: “My mother and I headed for the buffet table. As we were reaching for the shrimp, both of us jumped and let out a shriek. Senator Strom Thurmond, grinning from ear to ear, had one hand on my behind and the other on my mother’s. As I recall, we were both quite flattered, and thought it terribly funny and wicked of Ol’ Strom.”

Once Washington was a happy place where a girl and her mother could be groped simultaneously in good fun by a white supremacist. Sadly, it has all been ruined by Kim Kardashian and Ezra Klein.

I have never been more thankful for Kim Kardashian and Ezra Klein.  (In fairness, I don’t think I’ve ever been thankful for either in the first place.)

David Frum clearly enjoyed reading Chait’s piece as much as I did, although he probably wasn’t as surprised to enjoy a Chait column as I was.  However, he sees something sinister in the shift of power from philandering racists to pajama-wearing bloggers:

Over half a human lifetime, Washington has shifted from a city whose status hierarchy was dominated by official rank to one whose status hierarchy is determined almost entirely by money. A US senator is a smaller deal in the Washington of 2012 than his or her predecessor of 1972; a visiting billionaire a much bigger deal. Not that the senator has sunk to zero; not that the billionaire would not have been important in 1972; but the ratios have changed—and changed really quite dramatically.  Sally Quinn may not be the most sympathetic observer of the trend, but she is surely one of the most authoritative. You don’t have to like her piece to hear her message.

Frum’s implication, contra Chait, is that this change is for the worse.  I call bullshit.

Taking Frum’s comparison of Senators to billionaires literally, we see that there are 100 American Senators and, according to Forbes, 1226 billionaires in the world (of which 424 are American).  In terms of power inequality, which do you think is worse?  We’re all about reducing cronyism and spreading out access to power, aren’t we?  Surely a world where power has devolved from its concentration in lifelong Senators to a more dilute community that includes bloggers and sex-tape celebrities is a better one by this metric.

Fractions, motherfucker: Do you speak them?

Should discriminatory churches receive tax breaks?

Eugene Volokh reacts with some alarm to a proposal that they shouldn’t:

• Law professor calls for denying tax exemptions to the Catholic Church, Orthodox synagogues, and other groups that discriminate based on sex

He first notes that such denials are probably Constitutional, but voices another concern:

But I think such proposals are bad policy, and are contrary to the worthy American tradition of religious pluralism and tolerance. When the government (federal, state, and local) spends over 1/3 of the gross domestic product, and when tax exemptions are broadly available to a vast range of charitable organizations, it would be wrong, I think, to deny this same exemption to religious institutions that take a different approach to sex relations than does the government (assuming the government indeed adopts the rigid view that the professor suggests).

I take the same view as to groups (religious and ideological) that engage in constitutionally protected race discrimination, for instance in selecting clergy. While I think such discrimination is wrong, I don’t think religious and expressive groups that engage in such discrimination ought to be excluded from such generally available benefit programs.

Something about the argument that “tax exemptions are available to charitable groups, so they should be available to churches” strikes me as dangerously weaker than what Volokh has in mind.  But anyway….

The problem here is that churches are social institutions.  More or less I’d prefer to live in a world where I could say “Whatever your church doctrine states is up to your church and your faith, and it’s none of my business”.  If your church doesn’t want to ordain women, that’s your business.  If your church only wants to ordain left-handed bronies, that’s your business.  Treat religious establishments as private social clubs and I’m happy.

But we don’t live in that world.  Churches can marry people, which confers civil privileges.  Ordained ministers, last time I checked, count as special people if you need references for passport applications and the like.  Religious institutions and officials are woven into the civil framework, so discriminating by sex when ordaining those officials warps the rest of civil society.  Given that, I think the rest of civil society has some business poking its nose into the churches’ hiring practices.

Anyway, to answer the original question in my typically irritable libertarian way: No, discriminatory churches shouldn’t receive tax breaks – and neither should anyone else!

We need more money in politics

Radley Balko writes about the Kentucky primary, in which Tea Party insurgent candidate Thomas Massie defeated incumbent establishment candidate Alecia Webb-Edgington:

• Money and politics (The Agitator)

The gist of it is that Massie got a ton of money from the libertarian Super PAC Liberty For All, and apparently this is bad because… reasons.  Balko quotes Washington Monthly‘s Ed Kilgore thus:

Wow. Wonder if the kid down in Texas [founder of Liberty For All -- ed.] turned in a term paper to his poli sci class entitled “How I bought a congressional seat in Kentucky.”

This, taken charitably, is the usual argument against money in politics: A handful of super-rich donors will subvert and come to dominate the Sacred Institution of democracy by throwing filthy lucre at it, reducing a vibrant and robust form of government to a hollow and corrupt plutocracy.

But of course nobody owns Kentucky’s congressional seats, and thus nobody can buy them.  What Super PAC money does when it “buys” seats is largely buy advertising, which attempts to convince people to vote for the candidate being supported.  Those people — remember, you trusted them to vote just a few years ago before Citizens United came down — still get to choose for whom they vote.  This doesn’t matter to critics like Kilgore, who see voters as a bunch of ignorant and credulous rubes easily duped by whoever comes along and waves negative advertising in their faces.

Explain this to an opponent of Citizens United, and you’ll likely get a contemptuous eye-roll and dark mutterings about quasi-covert campaign organizations, Ron Paul’s delegate-”stealing”, and other insinuations straight out of a First Edition Shadowrun sourcebook.  All this infrastructure, it is implied, is bought and paid for by wheelbarrows full of Super PAC money — I guess there’s an entire underground market of Nixonian covert political operatives lurking just out of sight and charging enormous prices.  You’ll also get chided to quit being so naive, particularly if you press for details that never quite emerge, because opposition to Citizens United is usually a way for people to signal seriousness by predicting imminent disaster, and ‘splaining people their faults from an assumed position of authority goes hand-in-hand with the Serious pose.

And again, all of this infrastructure — or at least the bits that actually exist outside of bad fiction — is already available to the establishment candidates, and more and better besides.  That’s what political parties are — powerful insider networks with plenty of influence that exist to get “their guy” elected by all available means.  Parties already throw around a fuck-ton of money, which is apparently okay because look over there.  But more than that, parties wield a great deal of personal influence — well-established networks of media and donor connections, name recognition, campaign infrastructure, other incumbent office-holders — which is simply unavailable to outsider candidates.  Balko:

Kilgore is right on one point. Without the half million dollar infusion from the super PAC, it’s doubtful Massie would have won. And that of course is precisely the point. Strict limits on campaign contributions only further entrench the two major parties. If your views aren’t in line with establishment thinking, if the party machinery has backed a more traditional candidate with predictable positions, you’ll be starting your campaign in a hole. They have the phone lists, the donor lists, the existing office holders and the perks of their offices, name recognition, and the campaign infrastructure. It takes money to overcome all of that. It takes money to merely be heard. Take all the money out of politics (assuming you could—you can’t) and the two-party machinery advantages don’t go away. It just makes it more difficult to challenge them.

The fantasy underlying Kilgore’s position is that, without the money in politics, any citizen with a yearning to represent s/h/its community and a taste for Good Honest Hard Work could run for federal office and have a reasonable shot at succeeding — but once the filthy lucre flows in, only the very rich get to decide who gets nominated and elected.  Here in the real world, however, incumbents enjoy a massive electoral advantage precisely because they generally have access to all the party machinery Balko listed above.  Absent the free flow of money into political speech, our plucky citizen faces utterly dismal odds against an entrenched, well-connected, and heavily advantaged elite.  Donations from Super PACs begin to level that playing field.

Money, it turns out, is a lot easier to come by than party insider status.  Massie got half a million dollars from Liberty For All.  That’s peanuts in the political game — it’s a cheap Vancouver mortgage, or a half-assed venture capitalization.  You could get that kind of money on Kickstarter, for fuck’s sake.  Can just anyone lay their hands on half a mil?  Surely not — but it’s a lot more accessible than a position of power and influence in a major party’s federal organization, or a helpful last name.

The more money we get into politics, the less dominant insider status will be, and that strikes me as a very good thing.

(Will Wilkinson piles on.)

Dragging the feds, kicking and screaming…

…into the present age.  Yesterday I quoted and wrote:

To be clear, this is a defense of our culture, not the guy who gave the speech.

One of the hypotheses I’ve drawn out of following politics for the past few years is that the politicians and party elites are at least a decade behind We The People.  Rather than praise Obama’s courage, we should be praising the electoral masses for dragging him kicking and screaming into the present decade.

Today, Scott Shackford has an insightful article over at Reason’s Hit & Run blog on a similar topic:

• States’ rights aren’t the enemy in gay marriage battle

Even though pretty much every gain in recognition of gay marriage has taken place on the state level, the Tenth Amendment is still frequently seen on the left as an excuse for cranky right-wing secessionists to try to force schools to teach creationism.

I suspect, rather, that progressives see “States’ Rights” as a racist dog-whistle, pricking up the ears of the sorts of folks who talk about the “War of Northern Aggression”.  This frustrates the hell out of me, because instead of being associated with fire-hoses in Alabama, it could just as easily be associated with gay marriage in Iowa and New York, or medical marijuana in Oregon and Colorado, or hell, even strict automobile emissions standards in California.  Shackford points out that these things are happening at the state level because the feds move too slowly:

Fighting on the state level for gay marriage recognition is mandatory because of how slow and conservative (in temperament, not necessarily political philosophy) the federal government often is. By the time the Supreme Court actually struck down anti-miscegenation laws in 1967, they had already been repealed in all but 17 states. Many states had already struck down sodomy laws by the time the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional in 2003. Even though four out of five Americans had decided by 2010 that prohibiting gays from serving openly in the military was stupid, it took a tremendous amount of political maneuvering to actually end the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, and some Republican presidential candidates swore they would bring it back if elected in 2012. Federal government is slow.

Of course, the problem is that if some states are going to be New York and Oregon, others are going to be North Carolina:

The fear of embracing the Tenth Amendment resides in the acknowledgment that if a state has the authority to recognize gay marriage, then it also has the authority to deny it. And thus gay marriage is an equality issue, a Fifth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment issue. It’s not about states’ rights.

But a blanket federal decision on civil rights depends upon precedent, and that precedent happens at the state level:

While ultimately true (just at it was ultimately true with interracial marriage bans), the actions on the state level help inform and sharpen the debate before the federal government. Anti-miscegenation came before the Supreme Court first in 1883 and the laws were upheld. Most states had these laws, but they started falling after World War II. The states led the way to the Supreme Court decision.

Consider the arguments that will likely be used to defend California’s Proposition 8 or the Defense of Marriage Act before the Supreme Court. How many of those arguments regarding the “compelling state interest” in denying marriage recognition to gays and lesbians can be countered by virtue of the gains made on the state level in the past five years? How much harder would it be to attempt to argue for the federal recognition of gay marriage if no state had taken the plunge yet?

The gay and lesbian community should not fear states’ rights or the Tenth Amendment. History has shown that these smaller political battles are the building bricks that will lead to the national consensus, and thus the desirable federal outcome.

Come to think of it, that’s more or less exactly how it worked out in Canada.

Pretty much this

Thoreau sums up how I feel about Obama’s evolved viewpoint on gay marriage:

 I think it says something positive about how far we’ve gone that giving a speech in favor of gay marriage is considered an unimpressive, tepid, and not-courageous thing for a general election candidate to do in an election year.

Also, Radley Balko:

Obama’s statement doesn’t change a single policy. He has basically adopted a federalist approach to the issue. To my knowledge, gay marriage also happens to be the only issue in which Obama embraces federalism. Obama apparently believes the states should be able to discriminate when it comes to marriage benefits, but if they allow cancer and AIDS patients to smoke pot, he asserts the supremacy of federal law, and sends in the SWAT teams.

To be fair, he’s a politician, which means he’s a weathervane pretty much by definition.  So, quoting Thoreau again:

To be clear, this is a defense of our culture, not the guy who gave the speech.

One of the hypotheses I’ve drawn out of following politics for the past few years is that the politicians and party elites are at least a decade behind We The People.  Rather than praise Obama’s courage, we should be praising the electoral masses for dragging him kicking and screaming into the present decade.

M’aidez!

Nice to see that New York City is still being New York City:

• NYPD celebrates May Day (The Agitator)

Well, not “nice” at all:

Think about what just happened, here. On a day strongly associated with the old Soviet bloc, armed government agents staged early morning raids on the homes of suspected political dissidents, detained them, then interrogated them about their plans and political affiliations.

[...]

Bonus bit of May Day trivia: American Cold War presidents responded to the commie May Day celebrations by declaring May 1st “Loyalty Day.” Because nothing celebrates “freedom” like a presidential proclamation encouraging the citizenry to declare their loyalty to the government!

Yeah.  Not creepy at all, there, Mr. President.

Bonus lulz from commenter Yizmo Gizmo:

The police mentioned are just being nostalgiac…remember May Day used to be full of young maidens in white surrounding 40 foot phallus-symbols. Accordingly, these cops are being huge dicks in celebration of the festival spirit.

Ilya Somin prefers to commemorate Victims Of Communism Day instead.  Which I guess is as good a reason as any to repost this:

Me, I’m celebrating by being relentlessly entrepreneurial (my latest invoice gets paid out today) and engaging in mutually-beneficial euvoluntary exchange (i.e. paying rent).

Tax incidence, motherfucker: Do you speak it?

It is standard practice in Canadian policy circles to assume that for the purposes of estimating the changes in revenues from a given tax measure, people will make exactly the same decisions as before, with the only difference being the difference in the amount of tax they pay. This assumption is made because it simplifies the analysis, not because anyone believes that it’s a reasonable assumption to make. All tax changes produce a behaviour response of some kind.

That’s Stephen Gordon tilting at the windmill of explaining tax incidence to the Globe and Mail‘s online readership, and incidentally supporting my authoritarian fantasy that — when the right people are in charge — everyone be required to take a differential calculus course (in particular: “change in a value with respect to time”) and demonstrate their retention of key concepts before being permitted to exercise their franchise.  He has an even better article up here:

• Be careful when taxing the rich: someone else might pay (Economy Lab)

Key point:

But high earners are different. There aren’t many of them, and they have market power that most workers do not. If their tax rates go up, they will try to leverage that bargaining power and obtain a salary increase that at least partially offsets the higher tax burden.

An extreme example of this sort of effect occurred when the UK government imposed a 50 per cent bonus ‘supertax’ on banks last year: banks simply doubled the size of the bonus pool so that after-tax bonuses would stay the same.

[...]

What becomes more problematic is just who will bear the burden of those taxes – or, in the language of public finance, what is the incidenceof increased income taxes on high earners? The ostensible targets of the UK bonus supertax were high-earning bank employees, and since they bore the statutory incidence of the supertax, they did indeed pay more taxes. But since they were able to obtain increases that left their after-tax incomes untouched, they weren’t left out of pocket by the measure: the economic incidence was passed on to shareholders, other employees and bank customers – in short, everyone except the original target. If the goal of the bonus supertax was to reduce the gap between high earners and the rest of the income distribution, it’s hard to see how it could be considered a success.

(Emphasis added.)

Now, tax incidence is a pretty important concept in general, but for the most part I linked to those two posts so that I could snark about this:

• McGuinty agrees to NDP’s tax-the-rich Ontario budget demand (Globe and Mail)

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty is making a major concession in a bid to save his minority Liberal government by agreeing to impose a new tax on the rich.

Those who earn more than $500,000 a year would be asked to pay a 2 per cent surtax, Mr. McGuinty announced at a news conference on Monday. The new tax would generate revenues of $470-million next year, all of which, he said, would be used to help reduce the deficit.

Don’t worry, Ontario: There’ll be plenty of jobs waiting for you in the oilpatch when your province goes the way of Michigan.

“Snoozegate”? You’re kidding, right?

Remember junior high?  Remember being addled on adolescent hormones and trying to figure out just how the fuck you were supposed to behave in a group of your arbitrarily-selected peers?  Remember how every minor perceived deviation from group norms turned into a drama-tastic shit show that was OMG the end of the world until some other drama-tastic shit show popped up a day and a half later?

Remember out-growing that when you hit adulthood and had real things like jobs and rent to give you a double handful of perspective?

Yeah, about that….

• Christie/Springsteen Snoozegate even dumber than Obama dog-eating story (Reason Hit & Run)

Here’s Tim Cavanaugh:

At issue: During a performance of a plodding number off Springsteen’s new Wrecking Ballcollection, the portly Garden State chief executive shut his peepers for an indeterminate period of time.

Observers claim Christie, who had already been lambasted by another concertgoer during one of Bruce’s signature shaggy dog stories, was catching a catnap.

Christie denies sleeping but does claim to have been in some kind of “spiritual” transport inspired by the E-Street Band’s performance of “Rocky Ground, ” which I’m not sure is any less embarrassing.

Thinking back to when I was twelve, I’m not even sure that anyone in my class would’ve given half a fuck about this story.  ”Chris went to a Boomer rock show and fell asleep?  So what?  Did you hear that Brian wore silk boxers to school and started showing them to people?  In class?  Ewww!“

I’m with Tim on this one:

As with most political disputes, this is one where I’d like to see both sides lose.