It’s worth noting that Ronald Reagan was very resistant to making extravagant claims regarding the impact of tax cuts on revenues, much to the frustration of the supply-siders. He favored reducing taxes that discouraged individual initiative, yet he was not a supporter of reducing taxes in any and all circumstances. Reagan and his closest advisors were also very cautious about arguing that tax cuts would raise revenue — in many instances, the team was more inclined to argue that the revenue decreases would be less than what we’d see under static analysis, which is about right.

Reihan also noted that Reagan thought the country would have to go through two or three years of “suffering” to “pay for this binge we’ve been on”.  He also quotes Robert Mundell, an economist regarded as one of the pioneers of supply-side, as advocating limited compassion, “the virtues of Keynesian economics in a downturn”, and as saying “the idea you should always cut taxes is absurd”.

It’s always worth remembering, again, that Reagan had a Democratic Congress, so laying all of the blame for the deficits of the 80s at his feet is an exercise in inaccuracy, but let’s just look at this in a vacuum one more time.  I said before that I didn’t believe supply-side economics was designed as a theory that would reduce deficits because of tax cuts — although I admitted that I didn’t really know — and these stray quotations, although not comprehensive, seem to confirm that.  Supply-side economics isn’t a “failure” because deficits didn’t go down during the last thirty years.  Political interests simply got in the way of economic ones, as is so often the case.  Let’s not be so quick to forsake entire economic theories because of the mistaken words of a few uninformed Republican senators.

It’s one thing for gambling opponents to argue that negative external effects caused by addiction are harmful enough that giving government the power to limit the individual freedom to wager is justified. I don’t agree, but it is at least a reasonable argument. In his rebuttal, Les Bernal stakes a much more absurd, downright Orwellian position: Banning commercial gambling would expand our freedom.

“But the business model for casinos and lotteries only works if our government takes away the freedom of millions of Americans,” Bernal writes. “By definition, someone who is an addict or someone who is in deep financial debt is not free.”

Well, no. Someone who has become an addict or is in deep financial debt due to gambling is suffering the consequences his decisions. No one forced him to make those decisions. He’s no different than someone in debt from living a lifestyle beyond his means, or from speculating in high-risk real estate. You are free to walk out of a casino at any time. Scores of people do it every day, shirts still on their backs and savings intact.

Mr Bernal knows it would be unpopular to argue against personal freedom. So he’s trying to change its definition. In Mr Bernal’s world, freedom means having the government take bad decisions away from you. To borrow from (and slightly bastardise) a song by the great Kris Kristofferson, for Mr Bernal, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to choose.

Balko also addressed Bernal’s “social costs” argument, not quite as deeply as I did, but in a similar fashion:

But more broadly, any number of our day-to-day decisions can have indirect repercussions on lots of other people. If you’re going to argue that we should prohibit gambling because problem gamblers might go into debt, causing hardship on their families, or requiring them to seek publicly funded social services or welfare, you could make similar arguments for banning everything from unprotected sex, to laying on the beach, to rock climbing, to investment banking, to pie. There are people who enjoy all of these things to excess, or with an insufficient appreciation of their risk. Some indirectly harm others or require publicly funded medical care or assistance as a result. But we don’t talk about banning them. (At least not yet!)

The moderator is supposed to post a “decision” on Friday.  I guess that means there will be a winner and a loser here.  As of this writing, the proposer is only ahead by six points, which I consider a total shock having followed this entire debate.  Obviously the outcome will be affected by pre-existing convictions about the legalization of gambling, but if the outcome were decided by the quality of the arguments put forth, then it’s not even close.  Perhaps there are some good arguments out there in favor of keeping gambling illegal, but they certainly were not presented in this debate.

She is undoubtedly correct in that the court’s decision – maybe not so much this election cycle, but 2012 and all subsequent ones – will overwhelming benefit Republicans. But she’s starting to cry wolf a little on this slow-down business. This was her same reason for voting against healthcare reform, which took nearly a year (and which she’d supported in committee).

That’s the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, in case you’ve been living on Socotra Island, which prevents the feds from capping the amount of money private donors can give to political campaigns.  Presumably, the ruling will “overwhelming[ly]” benefit the GOP because those damnable corporations can now give however much money they desire to Republicans candidates, and we all know that for corporations, Republicans good and Democrats bad!  Of course, we could always pull out the data, which says that those evil corporations donated more money to 44 than they did to John McCain and that organized labor has taken advantage of the ruling’s implications more so than any private company so far.  But let’s not bother with the facts.

Anyway, the reason I bring up Tomasky’s piece is because I like the James Madison quotation that he cites at the end of it.  According to the guy who basically wrote the Constitution:

In all cases where justice or the general good might require new laws to be passed, or active measures to be pursued, the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed. It would be no longer the majority that would rule; the power would be transferred to the minority.

So Madison opposed supermajority requirements except in extraordinary cases such as treaty approval and the deposing of members.  Never mind that the filibuster was an accident in the first place.

Now, I do have a problem with the discourse surrounding this argument.  Obviously, it’s necessary to look past the actions of opportunistic politicians to really see what the problem with the filibuster is — Democrats like it when it allows them to prevent the confirmation of Supreme Court justices by a Republican President, while the Republicans like it when it allow them to prevent the passage of things like the PPACA.  The central argument, as I gather it, coming from liberals on this issue is that an elected party should have a chance to “advance its agenda”.  I don’t really see the merits of that explanation, especially since ending the filibuster would quite conveniently benefit liberals more than conservatives, since there tends to be no “undo” button on liberal policy initiatives (see: the income tax, Social Security, Medicare, PPACA).  I think the Left enjoys pretending that it would benefit both sides equally, but they probably know who would emerge victorious from this fracas.

Unfortunately, that’s not a good reason to support the filibuster.  I think Madison trod softly on the line between opposing and supporting it — he certainly didn’t believe that every law ought to be subject to the approval of a supermajority, but he also worried quite seriously about the trampling on the “rights of the minority” by an “interested and overbearing majority”.  But treading the fine line doesn’t really fly anymore.  Nowadays, you can’t say that you sometimes support the filibuster and other times don’t, especially when it comes to laws like health-care reform which are strictly the business of the legislature.  The idea that it should exist for “special cases” means that politicians will use it every time they decide something is a special case, which is quite often in an era where Congress is no longer “authoritarian, hierarchical” or “opaque”.  And that’s not really a good way to run a legislature, just like deeming laws unconstitutional via 5-4 votes isn’t really a good way to run a judiciary.  These practices need to be switched.

The problem is that it’s impossible to separate instances where the filibuster should be used and where it shouldn’t be used.  And, if that’s the case, then it probably shouldn’t exist a’tall.  Yes, even though that will enable liberals to enact their government programs that are almost impossible to undo.  Yes, even though that will expose the minority to the whims of an impassioned majority.  Despite these drawbacks, the practice of sometimes invoking a rule that requires a three-fifths majority to confirm judges or pass unemployment insurance strikes me as fairly arbitrary.  And that’s not a good way to run a legislature.

There will be fewer places to smoke on campus starting Aug. 1 when a new smoking policy for the university will take effect. Smoking on the academic campus will now be limited to outdoor sites that will have signs that read “designated smoking area” and cigarette urns for disposal.

While smoking is not permitted in any university building, there were previously no restrictions on smoking outside on the academic campus. Under the new policy, smoking is now prohibited outside except in the designated smoking areas. The new policy is a change for the academic campus only. Smoking is already limited on the medical center campus to outdoor locations along that campus’ perimeter.

Ha ha ha ha ha.  Having laughed about this, fumed about it, and looked at this from several angles, I’ve concluded that it’s a simple recruiting pitch.

Firstly, exactly whom is benefiting from the rule?  Secondhand smoke isn’t a problem outside unless you happen to be hanging out in a small, windless area where there’s a whole bunch of people smoking cigarettes.  Does that sound like a “designated smoking area” to you?  Has Vanderbilt just created the problem of outdoor secondhand smoke?

Secondly, just how in the hell do they plan on enforcing this?  Presumably, the cops are going to be the guys that tell you to put out your cigarette if you’re not in a DSA.  If you take a glance at the map, however, you’ll notice that not one single fraternity house is a DSA.  Are the cops going to go through a party on Friday night and ticket every single person who’s smoking a cigarette at the frat house?  College campuses aren’t office buildings — there are a lot of events that feature large crowds, and running a bunch of police officers through parties in order to crack down on cigarette smoking isn’t a very good sell for your institution of higher learning.

So what’s going to happen?  Well, quite obviously, the cops are just not going to enforce the smoking ban.  The university administration will throw it up on their website and make sure all prospective students know about it, and it’ll be sure to reassure their parents that their precious child isn’t going to be forced to walk to class next to another student who’s smoking one of those cancer sticks.  But when push comes to shove, nothing will actually be done about it.  The school just wants to project the image that they’re very interested in their students’ health without ruffling any real feathers about it.  “Yes, we don’t let kids inhale secondhand smoke, but we don’t kill social functions either!  We’re the best of both worlds!”

So what am I complaining about, you ask?  If the rule is strictly nominal, why get your panties in a wad?  Because I think it’s ridiculous that administrations enact laws that they quite literally have zero plans to enforce.  What’s the difference, in the school’s bylaws, between a law that is enforced and one that’s not?  Is there some kind of special section for so-called laws that the university gets to say it has but does nothing about?  Or is it just picking and choosing which laws it wants to impose?  Do the rules really mean anything?  If you found out, as a parent, that a university’s rule against drinking aren’t really enforced because the cops have no real definition of what constitutes a drinking game, would you feel that the school lied to you about what its rules are?  If you realized halfway into your daughter’s college career that the university wasn’t really checking the IDs of everybody who entered its dorm rooms after 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights because they didn’t want to pay all the security guards to do that, would you feel that the rules meant anything?

But, to bring it full circle, this is simply a recruiting tactic for the school, like the two aforementioned (hypothetical) scenarios were.  I guess the admissions office is benefiting from this smoking ban, but I can’t think of anybody else who is.

The main thing you’ll notice is that highly educated native-born women are employed at much higher rates than immigrants, while native-born men are employed at slightly lower rates at almost every education level.

I disagree.  I’d say the main thing I notice about these graphs is the fact that the percentage of people sans high-school education who are employed is twice that among folks from Mexico and Central America as it is among native-born workers.   I’d also notice that it’s about 50% higher for those who have been to high school but have no diploma and that it’s about 20% even for those who do have high-school diplomas.  But is wage reduction really an issue here?  How about competition in job-seeking for the less-educated among us?  What about the payroll taxes that these migrants and their unemployed counterparts aren’t paying?  Naaaaaaaah.

• Phillies (-300) v. D-backs
• White Sox (-168) v. M’s
• Over 7 ½ (-110) in Natrals v. Braves
• Under 8 (-110) in Giants v. Marlins

Froggy:

• Over 8 ½ (-120) in Angels v. Red Sox
• Padres (-106) v. Dodgers

Yesterday: 2-3 (0-1)

This is your typical pretender. He’s not a thinker. He’s not a scholar. He’s not accomplished. What, exactly, does he know about climate in specific or science generally? What has he studied on these subjects? He doesn’t tell us. He neither presents evidence to justify what he says nor says anything interesting let alone compelling. Douthat is illustrative of a desperate climber trying to claw his way to the top. And he is encouraged on his journey by other obscure light-weights who clap like trained seals for they share in his delusion. But he damns himself with his regular ramblings in the New York Times — he, a failed author to boot. Thoughts?

I’m not sure I can count on one hand how many levels on which this is weird.  Levin writes about Douthat’s column as though it were some kind of treatise on how climate change’s existence has been perverted by the American Right.  There are, in fact, exactly three sentences in the 1000-word column that rebuke conservatives for effectively shrugging off climate change.  The rest of the piece basically justifies conservative skepticism in terms of its approach to global warming and tacitly rejoices the death of Harry Reid’s climate bill.  It’s not about whether or not climate change indeed real, and whether or not it’s interesting is obviously a matter of personal preference.

So what does Levin find so objectionable about it?  I guess it’s because he’s exceedingly opposed to Douthat’s being given a position at a “dishonorable, liberal media outlet” from which he apparently “influence[s] the conservative movement”.  Presumably, he disapproves of that position not belonging to somebody more aligned with mainstream conservative ideology (yes, this happens frequently).  And this leads him to… attack Douthat as a “pretender”, a “desperate climber”, a “light-weight”, and a “failed author”.  All because Douthat wrote a column that opposes cap-and-trade.

Of course, there could be some left-over some resentment from that little dust-up Levin had with Jim Manzi a few months ago, exacerbated by Douthat’s identifying Manzi as “the American right’s most persuasive critic of climate-change legislation”, but I don’t particularly care about the personal issues.  Unfortunately, those may be the only issues that matter here.  Frum noted this about Levin a coupla weeks ago:

Whatever you may think of his radio persona, Mark Levin is not a stupid person, and he is not a cynical person. He can’t laugh his way to the bank. He wants more than the money. He wants to be regarded as the author not just of a commercially successful book, but of an intellectually important book. Unfortunately for Levin, people like Conor have disproportionate sway over the accolades Levin covets. A Sean Hannity would not understand. A Glenn Beck would not care. But Levin does understand, and does care.

Can it really be that simple?  Is Levin’s contempt of Douthat really based in his failure to recognize Levin as a leading conservative intellectual and his complementing the loathsome Jim Manzi for his criticisms of climate-change legislation?  Or is it simply the “he’s not a real conservative and it’s a travesty that he’s one of the alleged Right-wing voices at The New York Times” thing?  I honestly cannot answer that question, but I just find it extremely weird that Levin would react so vigorously to a column that, again, expressed disdain for cap-and-trade on the basis of its merits as policy.

I don’t know how intellectually persuasive Levin wants to be — all the evidence suggests that he has considerable ambition to that end — but if there ever a way not to convince somebody who’s not already a loyal fan of yours that you’re right about something, it’s to deride a pundit with whom you disagree for what you perceive him to not have accomplished and to mock him for not selling as many books as you do.   That’s going to make anybody who has any respect for said pundit — which, in Douthat’s case, is a significant contingent of conservatives, independents, and liberals — immediately dismiss what you have to say.  And that’s fine if you want your fans to believe that somebody is disreputable, but if you want to convince Douthat or another other audience of that fact, then that’s not really the way to go about doing it.

To understand modern Republican thinking on fiscal policy, we need to go back to perhaps the most politically brilliant (albeit economically unconvincing) idea in the history of fiscal policy: “supply-side economics”. Supply-side economics liberated conservatives from any need to insist on fiscal rectitude and balanced budgets. Supply-side economics said that one could cut taxes and balance budgets, because incentive effects would generate new activity and so higher revenue.

The political genius of this idea is evident. Supply-side economics transformed Republicans from a minority party into a majority party. It allowed them to promise lower taxes, lower deficits and, in effect, unchanged spending. Why should people not like this combination? Who does not like a free lunch?

He then outlines what he believes the step-by-step (political process) was for politically expedient policy-makers:

How did supply-side economics bring these benefits? First, it allowed conservatives to ignore deficits. They could argue that, whatever the impact of the tax cuts in the short run, they would bring the budget back into balance, in the longer run. Second, the theory gave an economic justification – the argument from incentives – for lowering taxes on politically important supporters. Finally, if deficits did not, in fact, disappear, conservatives could fall back on the “starve the beast” theory: deficits would create a fiscal crisis that would force the government to cut spending and even destroy the hated welfare state.

Fair enough, but I have a beef with this line of reasoning.  Just because you lost a bunch of games 10-9 after you adopted sabermetric analysis on the offensive side of your baseball strategy doesn’t mean that sabermetrics is wrong.  It just means you forgot about/were unwilling to do anything about your pitching.

Sure, contemporary conservatives (at least nominal conservatives) have been schooled in this tradition.  Jon Kyl and Mitch McConnell may buy into this hooey — or, more cynically, are still scheming as those Republicans of the early 80s did, attempting to resurrect the free-lunch theory for political gain.  But Wolf gives no evidence that the original theories of supply-side economics were designed to be implemented in the absence of spending cuts.  I’m no Homer, and I wasn’t a politically sentient organism in the 80s, but I think it’s very likely that the “tax cuts pay for themselves” belief arose from the fact that tax receipts increased in the 80s where they had been lagging in the 70s.

Of course, that’s because the economy picked up the 80s — people were making more money and more people were employed, therefore tax receipts were higher.  What Wolf and others are seeing as a vast conspiracy I’m seeing as a simple correlation-v-causation error.  I don’t see that supply-side theory necessarily exists in the absence of spending cuts, nor am I aware of any evidence that it was sold that way during its early stages.  Do supply-side theories about the level of taxation on businesses and individuals mandate that levels of spending elsewhere in government remain unchanged?  Are those aspects of supply-side economics invalidated because of the deficits we’ve seen during the past thirty years?

Again, what Wolf sees as a failure of supply-side I see as a failure by Republican and Democratic leadership alike to reduce spending, especially in the entitlement area.  Sure, “starve the beast” is a farce, and Republicans did nothing about spending when they had the chance — save their effort to privatize Social Security — but if you subtract the “tax cuts pay for themselves” element from the rest of supply-side theory, are you left with nothing?  Or are you left with the idea that low taxes on businesses and individuals foster economic growth without producing mass inflation?  I don’t see that those ideas are dependent on one another, and I don’t see how the deficits of the Bush and Reagan years are evidence of the abject failure of supply-side economics.

• Yankees (-240) at Indians
• Cardinals (-144) at Mets
• Phillies (-235) v. D-backs
• White Sox (-245) v. M’s

For the froggy:

• Under 6 ½ (-110) in Natrals v. Braves
• Under 6 (-110) in Giants v. Marlins

Sunday: 3-3 (0-2)

Week: 21-14 (8-4)

Year: 102-85 (30-28)

At the end of the day, the WikiLeaks papers will change few opinions. Those who want us out of Afghanistan will cite them ad nauseum; those who recognize the stakes for what they are — the need to preclude that country from once again serving as a breeding ground for al Qaeda and their copycats — will give them short shrift. What matters more is whether General Petraeus can affect the turnaround that made him a war hero in Iraq. If he does, the WikiLeaks papers will make good grist for historians’ footnotes, and nothing more.

This is the reason everybody needs to be sober about this right now.  If we’re to remember anything about this, it ought to be that, as the NYT reporters conclude, “Over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war.”  It’s going to be quite sickening in the coming months to see reporters and pundits cite WikiLeaks as a good reason to get out of Afghanistan — that the spin the White House and the feds are putting on the war effort is somehow affecting public opinion towards AfPak more than daily news reporters detailing the massive obstacles we’re going to have to overcome in order to succeed over there the way we want to do.

And it really boils down to a matter of sloth and repetition: I’m sure that rational commentators as well as pro-war pundits are going to grow quite weary of having to explain over and over again that this particular WikiLeaks gusher (as Peter Fearver aptly re-dubs it) isn’t a bombshell and that it’s not a good reason to pick our toys up and go home.  Unfortunately, 1000-word journalism has a way of incorporating shaky evidence in order to meet a space quota, and doubtless this story will find a way to seep into the public’s conscious as a reason to oppose the use of military force in Afghanistan.  And it will be a mistake.