Obama and Other Peoples' Money

Nothing really new here, but what I really want to get at here is the whole idea of "fair share'.

In a combative set of remarks, the president vowed to veto any package that cuts into Medicare without raising "serious revenues" from wealthy Americans and corporations. He effectively dared Republicans to follow through on their no-tax-hike pledge as the deficit committee works under a strict timeline to find at least $1.2 trillion in deficit savings by Thanksgiving.
"We can't just cut our way out of this hole. It's going to take a balanced approach," Obama said. "It's only right that we ask everyone to pay their fair share."

Emphasis mine. First, ask this question: why does the government constantly need more money? There are a few reasonable answers, mostly involving inflation; the rest are all about the growth of bureaucracy and thus the size of government itself.

Next, define "fair share" in society. This is not commonly questioned, and most people (2/3 of Americans according to some poll I glanced at) support fleecing "rich" people. I "quote" the word rich because that's slippery these days too, and for tax reasons the definition will be arbitrary.

Put these two concepts together and it leads you in the direction of asking what people are expected to pay for, and (hopefully) why? Is my misfortune yours, and if so, what are the limits on that? People get (rightly) bent out of shape when some connected business people get bailed out by government, meaning by your tax dollars. Of course, in the US right now we have something different, businesses being saved for the unions employed there, but this elaborate vote-buying scheme still uses taxpayer money.

If you work in the ever-shrinking private sector, do you want your taxes going up to preserve bloated union salaries and benefits which have driven work out of your country and damaged your prospects? A bit less evocative than the Robin Hood-esque desire to despoil the rich, but no more "fair" than bailing out magnates.

All over the world, the Socialist state is in trouble, and has been for years. It has been proven that the welfare state is not sustainable (you'll eventually run out of other peoples' money), but Obama seeks to imprint that on the US. Here in Canada the fight continues, but we have realized that we must periodically purge the Public Service to prevent the service creep that would bankrupt us a la Greece.

I'm not sure what I think is fair, but flat-rate taxes combined with consumption taxes on non-essentials comes close. Say a minimum 5% and maximum 25% Income tax rate and a 15% VAT; rich people tend to spend more and can better afford to lose 25% of their income, but how fair is that?

If you make a household income of <$100K (most people) you don't have a lot of margin these days, and there is limited blood in a stone. Thus the temptation to squeeze the better-off, but what are they being asked to contribute to? Infrastructure, Public Health (as opposed to Health Care), Research and Defence are common goods, certainly, but do rich people use them any more than anyone else? Next, health care; do rich people have preference in a Public health care system? I bloody hope not, and if not why should they pay more for it? It's "rich people" paying for the best available treatment which advances medicine, not the stretched Public system, but that's not on most peoples' radar.

In case there was any doubt, I am significantly less than rich and have no vested interest in the top marginal tax rates, but the underlying principle at work here concerns us all. That principle is Expectations.

What is reasonable to expect of government services? Canada is founded on "Peace, Order and Good Government", which is pretty vague but not fundamentally different from the Preamble of the US Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

People get the (democratic) governments they deserve, so I suppose the People are the arbiters of "fair". Of course, the way these things work, a mere plurality of votes will establish who's in charge, so a LOT of people will be potentially discomfited by decisions as the rest are swept along by dangerous simplifications. The second and third-order effects of tax and policy decisions are never the concern of the short-lived government, but they should concern you, the tax-payer, as you'll be living with the (mostly) unforeseen consequences when the chickens come home to roost.

Far called, our NATO slips away

I had part of this earlier in the week with this article about the Visegrad Group, but the link in the title provided the missing bit for my latest installment on the irrelevance of NATO in today's world:

According to Turkish press, as quoted by Ynet, the Turkish air force will be fitting its F-16 fighter jets with new IFF systems, which will not treat the signal from an Israeli IFF transponder as friendly, and will thus facilitate more efficient attack. The F-16’s original IFF system is made to US/NATO specifications, and identifies an Israeli IFF response as friendly.

This would appear to be a basic requirement in a modern alliance: compatibility of all IFF equipment. For my part, it's obvious to me that Turkey's interests and those of the rest of NATO (diverse as they are) have fatally diverged. Turkey is trying to be a big fish in its' part of the world (again) and this is incompatible with playing nice with Israel while Turkey panders to other Muslims. Of course, the "Muslim world" is not a bloc, and playing footsie with one part will alienate others.

Since this is the road that Erdrogan wants to go down, let me speculate a bit about consequences. Turkey has a problem common with Iran, and Iraq for that matter: Kurds. This pulls Ankara into line with Tehran (already happening) and with Iraq's government in Iran's back pocket we have a confluence of interests if not an alliance. Add Syria into the mix as a client of Tehran and you have a real bloc. This last point is unlikely at present, but Assad's regime is still hanging on in the face of massive public disapproval.

Turkey is of course threatening Syria with military action, but I suspect this has more to do with securing their common border than any permanent problem. In the bigger picture, any government which takes over in Syria is unlikely to like Israel, so another confluence of interests. Even more troublesome, if Hezbollah's (and consequently Tehran's) hold on Lebanon is not broken, there's another brick in the bloc.

Turkey will never recover the extent of influence, let alone control of the peak of Ottoman power, but it looks to be moving to become a regional Power, and jumping on the Palestinian bandwagon will give them a lot of the Arab street. Turkey has less skin in the game than the Arabs, but its' recent threat to provide naval escort to break the blockade of Gaza would add it to the group of countries who have lost a fight to Israel and possibly to war. The Israelis have let a lot slide (relatively) of late and this has pissed of the populace, so the odds of the Turkish navy being allowed to do this unmolested in this climate are not good.

If I know this, they know this, so it's likely just a lot of posturing. The IFF thing may or may not physically happen, as announcing it was obviously political, and actually doing it is probably a big no-no in NATO with some sort of consequences. Now if Turkey no longer cares...

Turkey and Greece have hated each other for 4000 years and there is no reason for that to change, always an anomaly within NATO. Israel aligning with Greece and Cyprus is extremely rational, and a partial counterbalance to Erdrogan's neo-Ottomanism. It is also another crack in the peeling facade of NATO, as you now have a NATO country having a "military understanding" with a non-NATO country plainly aimed at another member.

It gets better. I have mentioned the backroom deals Israel has made with the Saudis in relation to Iran, and as things develop it's not out of the question for more co-operation with the Saudis and the rest of the Gulf Cooperation council. Hell, what if Israel can make common cause with the Sunni Arabs, especially as Israel begin to exploit its' hydrocarbon reserves?

Keeping Shia Iran's influence in check is a matter of survival to a lot of ruling families (House of Saud not the least) and viewed objectively Israel is no threat to the Gulf states; there's significant common ground. Way out in left field is the idea of Saudi acting as a "sugar daddy" for Israel to beat up on Hezbollah (modern munitions are expensive...) as a stick in the Mullahs' spokes. Unlikely? Yes, but less so all the time, especially if the Saudis grasp the strategic threat of a new axis of Turkey-Lebanon-Syria-Iraq-Iran.

"A country has no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent Interests". Those interests are not always appreciated by the governments of the day, but something will stand in for them if the real ones aren't sufficiently compelling. Since Western Europe is no longer worried about Russian tanks crossing the Rhine, NATO has lost it's raison d'etre with some of the results evident here, others in Libya, and yet others in Central Europe. For anyone curious about the title of this post, it's inspired by Recessional by Rudyard Kipling:

Far-called our navies melt away—
On dune and headland sinks the fire—
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget

It's rare that empires fall in a vacuum; usually they get tired and replaced by more energetic neighbours (Byzantine) or simply fragment (Habsburg). NATO isn't an empire, but as the defacto American empire which underpinned it from its' foundation shrinks back into the Western Hemisphere the whole thing spins apart. No loss, but it creates local vacuums or at least opportunities for those hungry (or desperate) enough to fill somehow.

The Internet islanders amid the Lumpen Proletariat

Fred Reed says what he thinks and doesn't give a fuck, which is a rare trait at least in people who will put their name to things. (I keep mine off of here for work reasons; when I'm retired it'll be full attribution if this place lasts that long). I don't agree with everything he says, but it's rare that he says anything that I couldn't make a case for, and the linked post is well worth paying attention to:

The night closes in. Read the surveys of what children know, what students in universities know. Approximately nothing. We have become wanton morons. As the intellectual shadows fall again, as literacy declines and minds grow dim in the new twilight, who will copy the parchments this time?

No longer are we a schooled people. Brash new peasants grin and peck at their iPods. Unknowing, incurious, they gaze at their screens and twiddle, twiddle. They will not preserve the works of five millenia. They cannot. They do not even know why.

Twilight really does come. Sales of books fall. Attention spans shorten. Music gives way to angry urban grunting. The young count on their fingers when they do not have a calculator, know less by the year. We have already seen the frist[sic] American generations less educated than their parents. College graduates do not know when World War One happened, or what the Raj was. They have read nothing except the nothing that they read, and little of that. Democracy was an interesting thought.

This hit a chord with me because I read a LOT and I notice two things. One, I can never read enough to know all that I wish I did, and two, hardly anyone else even cares what's going on unless they see it on TV or Facebook. I don't do small talk worth a damn, because it's BORING. I want an exchange of ideas (the partial purpose of this blog, alas unrealized) and I want people to THINK.

We are a highly specialized society, at least the parts of it still doing anything but it's difficult for students to even get those specialized skills let alone know much general history and a smattering of philosophy to round them out. I'm not big on philosophy myself except as it helps us to understand how and why we understand/believe things, but ignorance is no virtue.

Fred of course is particularly referring to the US, but the same rot is apparent across most of the Western world. High School is irrelevant to the job market, so kids spend four years + to get a piece of paper that will allow them to pay tens of thousands of dollars/pounds/whatever and several more of the best years of their lives for a shot at the job market. Sounds to me like indentured service, without the guarantee of work and a chance to pay it back.

More Fred on education:

Home-schooling, it seems to me, becomes a towering social responsibility. I have actually seen a teacher saying that parents should not let children learn to read before they reach school. You see, it would put them out of synch with the mammalian larvae that children are now made to be. Bright children not only face enstupiation and hideous boredom in schools taught by complacent imbeciles. No. They are also encouraged to believe that stupidity is a moral imperative.

Once they begin reading a few years ahead of their grade, which commonly is at once, school becomes an obstacle to advancement. This is especially true for the very bright. To put a kid with an IQ of 150 in the same room with a barely literate affirmative-action hire clocking 85 is child abuse.

If I win the lottery, my kids are going to private schools unless I can find a good paedagogue for home, but I would pull them out of the public school tomorrow if I had an affordable option. Stupidity and regimentation is moving into Canadian Public schools, but MY 7-year-old at least knows what a Monotreme is (because I told her and looked it up to make sure I was right); I wonder if her teacher does? We're not at the pass Fred describes yet, and I hope we can keep it that way.

Everything you could ever hope to know is available online; the only thing a teacher is required for is to guide students to knowledge and teach them to think and ask real questions. In my experience, there are few people who have those traits, so the odds of getting a teacher like that are slim. There is as Fred says still hope for bright kids, especially the bright motivated ones. Even the less-bright motivated ones (like me) can do a lot of damage with what they can learn from the net, though us older types still like books. I have enough books on certain topics that I can cross-reference stuff and can now (at least try to) use the Internet to resolve discrepancies.

Fred laments the passing of a sound general education, and that is a Bad Thing, but if we're honest about it, how many people ever got that much out of theirs? It was a particular segment of the bell curve, the same segment which can sort itself out today if it is even pointed in the right direction.

I'd like to think of myself as doing my part to keep civilization alive on the 'net, and I may retract (with new information that proves to me that I was incorrect), but I will never apologize for saying what I think. Evey little bit helps keep the civilization's lights on, and I'm raising my kids to do the same, i.e. THINK, not regurgitate catechisms of whatever provenance. With luck I'll succeed, and with more luck my kids will be able to find friends they can actually talk to.

How much Bang is stopped for your Bucks?

Back to Slate again, but not to excoriate this time. It's pretty 'Progressive" but balanced enough or I wouldn't read it, and today's link ties into whatever it is that I've been on about here lately. The trend seems to be "efficiently fighting bad people" and here is the authors' explanation of "cost effectiveness":

A conventional approach to cost-effectiveness compares the costs of security measures with the benefits as tallied in lives saved and damages averted. The benefit of a security measure is a multiplicative composite of three considerations: the probability of a successful attack, the losses sustained in a successful attack, and the reduction in risk furnished by security measures. This product, the benefit, is then compared to the cost of the security measure instituted to attain the benefit. A security measure is cost-effective when the benefit of the measure outweighs the costs of providing the security measures.

Hearken back to my problems with the methods of the TSA in the last post, and we're all on the same page here. The enemy of cost effectiveness is bureaucratic empire building, and we come to where that begins in the context of American Homeland Security:

To evaluate the reduction in risk provided by security measures, we need to consider their effectiveness in foiling, deterring, disrupting, or protecting against a terrorist attack. In assessing risk reduction, it is important first to look at the effectiveness of homeland security measures that were in place before 9/11. The 9/11 Commission's report points to a number of failures, but it acknowledges as well that terrorism was already a high priority of the government before 9/11. More pointed is an observation of Michael Sheehan, former New York City deputy commissioner for counterterrorism: "The most important work in protecting our country since 9/11 has been accomplished with the capacity that was in place when the event happened, not with any of the new capability bought since 9/11. I firmly believe that those huge budget increases have not significantly contributed to our post-9/11 security."

There is another consideration. The tragic events of 9/11 massively heightened the awareness of the public to the threat of terrorism, resulting in extra vigilance that has often resulted in the arrest of terrorists or the foiling of terrorist attempts.

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, we come back to the fact (visited a couple of posts back) that history and terrorism didn't pop out of nowhere ten years ago. I will make the argument that 9/11 was Team bin Laden's peak (safe bet at this point) and only worked because they had element of strategic surprise about the suicide bombing thing. No one will ever again allow terrorists to take over an airplane, and you'll notice they have stopped trying and merely try to destroy them in air. A cost effective solution to hijacking: lock the cockpit door and give flight attendants tasers.

With that in mind, into the meat of Mueller and Stewart's excerpt:

Putting this all together, we find that, in order for the $75 billion in enhanced expenditures on homeland security to be deemed cost-effective under our approach—which substantially biases the consideration toward finding them effective—they would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect each year against 1,667 otherwise successful attacks of something like the one attempted in Times Square in 2010. In other words, we'd have to foil more than four major attacks every day to justify the spending.

I don't crunch numbers too much here, so I'll use theirs and take this at face value. Assuming there was this much terrorist activity in the USA (it's a big place, but seriously?) how much of it is there that wouldn't be picked off by routine law enforcement? Standard police work with some elementary triggers (chemical purchases, reports from concerned citizens, etc.) will sort most of this out, and indeed there were warnings about the 9/11 hijackers which could have been acted on.

Now the age-old question: how much is your life worth?

It is possible, of course, that any relaxation in these measures will increase the terrorism hazard, that the counterterrorism effort is the reason for the low-hazard terrorism currently present. However, in order for the terrorism risk to border on becoming "unacceptable" by established risk conventions, the number of fatalities from all forms of terrorism in the United States would have to increase 35-fold, equivalent to experiencing attacks as devastating as those on 9/11 at least once a year or 18 Oklahoma City bombings every year. Even if all the (mostly embryonic and in many cases moronic) terrorist plots exposed since 9/11 in the United States had been successfully carried out, their likely consequences would have been much lower. Indeed, as noted earlier, the number of people killed by terrorists throughout the world outside (and sometimes within) war zones both before and after 2001 generally registers at far below that number.

At the end of the day it again comes down to leadership or the lack thereof. If rational decisions are made and explained by calm, rational people to the rest of us, we will (mostly) follow that example. secure in the knowledge that our concerns are taken seriously and are being acted on. However, the Zero-Defect mentality is enforced by the media, and it takes a very strong personality to stand their ground in face of the shit-storm should something slip through, as it inevitably will.

Even with the extra multi-billions spent on all of this, things still slip through to be stopped only by alert and motivated members of the public. All that money and a Dutch tourist sitting next to the would-be bomber had to do the job; your organization was not very cost effective, was it, Ms Napolitano? Good leadership is also shown by subordinates who know when to act, but huge expensive bureaucracies don't generate many of those, and promote even fewer. Good thing the Americans can afford all of this...

After 10 years, what have we GWOT?

Today's post is my attempt to digest Abe Greenwald's article in Commentary this month. He has a very different view of Bush II than the subject of my last post, but that doesn't mean that I agree with everything he has to say either. I encourage you to read it, lengthy as it is, and form your own opinions, but as a primer, here are a few things I liked/took issue with:

1. Over the course of the 10 years, American authorities foiled more than two dozen al-Qaeda plots. Those averted tragedies were not foremost on the minds of revelers who gathered to celebrate Bin Laden’s demise on May 1 at Ground Zero, Times Square, and in front of the White House. But if a mere few of the plots had materialized, those spaces might not even have been open to public assembly. 9/11 was the result of systematic intelligence failures in the US, and intelligence agencies are more reliably evaluated on how much they can prevent or influence. On that basis the lack of post-9/11 al Qaeda attacks in the USA can be taken as a "win".



2. It was the Freedom Agenda of the George W. Bush administration—delineated and formulated as a conscious alternative to jihadism—that showed the way. Indeed, the costly American nation-building in Iraq has now led to the creation of the world’s first and only functioning democratic Arab state. One popular indictment of Bush maintains that he settled on the Freedom Agenda as justification for war after U.S. forces and inspectors found no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The record shows otherwise. “A free Iraq can be a source of hope for all the Middle East,” he said before the invasion, in February 2003. “Iraq can be an example of progress and prosperity in a region that needs both.” I'm a bit ambivalent about the end result, but I have maintained for years that Bush invaded Iraq because he believed that Democracy conquers all, and most emphatically NOT for oil. The (democratically elected) Iraqi government freezing American oil companies out in favour of Chinese ones seems to vindicate much of my view of cause and effect in "Iraqi/Enduring Freedom".



3. Incensed civil libertarians on the right, for their part, also fail to acknowledge some extraordinary facts. The TSA pat-downs, no-fly lists, travel restrictions, and legislation aimed at stopping would-be terrorist attacks have in fact worked. Ok, I take this a bit out of context, but I don't agree 100%. Even if it has worked as well as claimed, what sort of price should we pay for our freedom? I suspect it could be dialed back a bit and be just as effective while being more efficient, but the ways to make that happen will make the left froth at the mouth (e.g. Profiling).

It's long, but worth your time. I've seen things before which suggest that G.W. Bush will be looked back on more kindly by Posterity for "The Bush Doctrine", and this piece is a brick on that path. Obama has inherited any successes he's had in foreign policy from the system (mostly intact) built back then, because a lot of it works. I still hold that Iraq could have been done a lot better if it needed to be done at all, and that too will be laid at the Bush Administration's door by Posterity, rather like the dead animals your cat barfs up on your step.

As Winston Churchill said, “War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.” Indeed, and things are rarely as simple as people would like them to be. I retain the right to change my mind to fit the facts, but I'll fight any inversion of that. Go read this and tell me what YOU think of it.

OBL's Bleed to Bankruptcy vs. FDR and The Giant Sucking Sound

This is from Slate (link) and is so blatantly half-assed and short-hindsighted that it begs me to challenge it, so I will in my own half-assed way which at least remembers things that happened more than 10 years ago.

The Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks by al-Qaida were meant to harm the United States, and they did, but in ways that Osama Bin Laden probably never imagined. President George W. Bush's response to the attacks compromised America's basic principles, undermined its economy, and weakened its security.

Boilerplate, but I take exception with "in ways that OBL probably never imagined". This indicates that the opposition had a pretty good idea of the economics involved in sucking the Americans into wars to ruin their economy. The rest of it is blatantly partisan (vs. Bush and the GOP) and mind-bogglingly simplistic and superficial in attribution of the USA's current economic malaise.

Example: Today, America is focused on unemployment and the deficit. Both threats to America's future can, in no small measure, be traced to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Increased defense spending, together with the Bush tax cuts, is a key reason why America went from a fiscal surplus of 2 percent of GDP when Bush was elected to its parlous deficit and debt position today. Direct government spending on those wars so far amounts to roughly $2 trillion—$17,000 for every U.S. household—with bills yet to be received increasing this amount by more than 50 percent.

I won't quibble about the numbers, but the emphasis above is mine as it is evidence of an axe to grind at the expense of the big picture and gutted fundamentals of America's post-industrial society and economy. Perot came up with "giant sucking sound" in 1992 about American jobs moving south, but we can look back on NAFTA as the "good old days" in terms of North American employment. The Rust Belt started to decline in the 1970s and the US has been hemorrhaging jobs ever since. To sum up after Mexico, all those manufacturing jobs moved to Asia and show no signs of coming back.

THAT is NOT Bush's fault, and if I had to blame anyone it'd be FDR with his "New Deal" back in the 1930s. That is not meant to be a comprehensive policy statement, but the culture of Entitlement which that swept in led to the high cost of doing business in the US, and the Environmental and Litigation lobbies which were waiting in the wings and always there (respectively) knocked the US economy to its' knees and put the bullet in the nape of its' neck.

The thing to do when you get into a hole is to stop digging, and American politicians as a group have no concept of actually DOING it, even if they'll mouth words about restraint. Regardless, history didn't start in 2001, and the system which has brought America to the current pass didn't pop up mushroom-like overnight (though it is fertilized much the same way). My message to Mr Stiglitz: if you're going to ascribe causes to profound issues in huge systems, make sure there's some depth to your simplification for the casual reader. Most Slate readers won't question your cant, but we're not all so ignorant that you can slide such sloppy journalism past us.