Monday, February 02, 2004

real source of deficit - and deceit Posted here Monday, February 02, 2004 at 10:00:31 PM     Important.. from Krugman in the NYT The prime cause of giant budget deficits is a plunge in the federal government's tax take, which fell from 20.9 percent of G.D.P. in fiscal 2000 to a projected 15.7 percent this year, the lowest share since 1950. About 45 percent of this plunge can be attributed to the Bush tax cuts. The rest reflects the end of the stock market bubble, the still-depressed economy and — probably — growing tax sheltering and evasion. ********

Gaza - will this be serious, or a ploy? Posted here Monday, February 02, 2004 at 9:41:35 PM     Angering Settlers, Sharon Says Most May Have to Leave Gaza By JAMES BENNET Published: February 3, 2004 ERUSALEM, Feb. 2 — Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Monday that he might seek to evacuate almost all Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip, outraging members of the settlement movement he helped create. "I am working on the assumption that in the future there will be no Jews in Gaza," Mr. Sharon told the liberal daily Haaretz. He made similar comments in a very tense meeting of legislators from his Likud Party, said people who took part. ********

Left overs from the State of the Union. Posted here Monday, February 02, 2004 at 4:18:10 PM     From Bush state of the union.. "America is on the offensive against the terrorists who started this war. Last March, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a mastermind of September the 11th, awoke to find himself in the custody of U.S. and Pakistani authorities". After a year in captivity, what has happened? We are so in the dark. ********

Atlantic survey Posted here Monday, February 02, 2004 at 2:44:19 PM     Good to look at the Atlantic Monthy The Real State of the Union. Many good articles, and stuff to analyze. For example According to Farber's analysis of the most recent Displaced Workers Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, covering 1999 through 2001, shows that workers with more than sixteen years of education saw an average reduction in income of roughly 23 percent upon finding new jobs; in the mid-1990s the reduction averaged only 12 percent. This shows why firing and rehiring is logical for organizations. Universitites denyng tenure and hiring a younger faculty member would be a good example. and  (One recent study found that U.S. financial-service firms are planning to move more than 500,000 jobs—or eight percent of the total work force in that sector—offshore within the next five years. These relocations will include higher-status, higher-income jobs than such transfers have typically included in the past; jobs in financial analysis, research, accounting, and graphic design are among those expected to be moved offshore.) If the lead article is to be believed, economically things are not only not bad, but pretty good, *now*. Trends are harder. At the moment it appears to be an open question whether in the coming years the middle class and the poor will advance quickly (as they did in the late 1990s) or stagnate (as they did throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s). We're poised on the cusp between broad-based wealth creation and stagnation: while productivity growth has helped keep wages rising for the employed, immigration and the continued movement of jobs to offshore locations weakens the labor market and depresses wages. Given the continuing rapid pace of innovation and productivity growth, it appears likely that broad-based income gains will eventually resume, and that the prevailing conditions of the next several years will more closely resemble those of the late 1990s than those of the 1970s. But for that to be assured of happening, unemployment will need to drop significantly below six percent. And however much the typical middle- or working-class family sees its income rise on an absolute basis, the incomes of the richest families will likely improve even faster. But then look at this. Worker insurance against job loss. But what he misses is that such a program earns fees which have to be paid by someone, and it genrates profit, which goes to...?  It doesn't add up. A more radical variation on this concept comes from Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale, who believes that continuing financial-market innovations may soon enable private insurers to offer "livelihood insurance" that could protect workers from potential declines in their occupations (though not against an individual worker's underperformance within a flourishing field). Similar products might insure against the eventual devaluation of specific academic degrees in the United States (such as those in software engineering or Russian language), or even against declines in the performance of the U.S. economy as a whole, relative to the rest of the world. (As Shiller notes, the fact that the past century was a good one for America does not necessarily mean that the next one will be.) Collectively, these products might lessen the large and arguably increasing risks inherent in the U.S. capitalist system.   ********

NYT review of O'Neill Posted here Monday, February 02, 2004 at 1:41:58 PM     From the O'Neill book, via NYT review When O'Neill worked in the Nixon and Ford White Houses, Suskind writes, he served presidents whom he respected as policy makers, whatever their other faults, for two reasons: first, they were knowledgeable about the details of policy; and second, they made it a point to have their aides present them with different, and sometimes starkly warring, points of view. Nixon called on the Office of Management and Budget (where O'Neill worked) to prepare so-called Brandeis briefs, named after Justice Louis Brandeis of the Supreme Court, that presented thorough analyses of opposing arguments and made everyone ''really think deeply about the ideal of good government and how to get there,'' in O'Neill's words. The people in the room may have all been from one political party or shared a general world view. But they understood that when spending the people's money and acting on behalf of the entire country, including that segment that did not vote for their president, their obligation to fact-based inquiry and rigorous testing of hypotheses was self-evident. This book serves as that standard's obituary notice. First, Bush himself is portrayed as disturbingly unengaged. From O'Neill's first meeting with him through his last, Bush asked some questions here and there about politics and perception, but he rarely asked a specific question on a policy matter. The weekend after the Sept. 11 attacks, when O'Neill was among the group invited to Camp David to discuss responses, he espied a large stack of intelligence briefings brought by the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, and found himself thinking, ''I hope the president really reads this carefully. It's kind of his job.'' Second, O'Neill smelled at many high-level meetings the odor of a conversation set up in advance to drive the discussion toward the conclusion that Rove and the political team had already settled upon. One example: At a meeting on steel tariffs, which the administration put in place in 2002 against all free-market principle, O'Neill could tell where things were going when the United States trade representative, Robert Zoellick, ''made several oblique references to 'political realities.' '' The pattern repeated itself over and over, on tax cuts and the economy and energy policy and Iraq. In time, O'Neill grew aghast, and went to his old friend Cheney to suggest that the administration try Brandeis briefs. But Cheney -- the book's chief villain and, if Suskind and O'Neill are to be believed, our functional president -- just sat passively. ''He thanked Paul, as always, 'for his sharp insights,' '' Suskind writes. And that was the end of it.   ********

creeping business - charging for email Posted here Monday, February 02, 2004 at 1:36:52 PM     Difficult.. hould people have to buy electronic stamps to send e-mail? Some Internet experts have long suggested that the rising tide of junk e-mail, or spam, would turn into a trickle if senders had to pay even as little as a penny for each message they sent. Such an amount might be minor for legitimate commerce and communications, but it could destroy businesses that send a million offers in hopes that 10 people will respond. The idea has been dismissed both as impractical and against the free spirit of the Internet. Now, though, the idea of e-mail postage is getting a second look from the owners of the two largest e-mail systems in the world, Microsoft and Yahoo. Ten days ago, Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that spam would not be a problem in two years, in part because of systems that would require people to pay money to send e-mail. Yahoo, meanwhile, is quietly evaluating an e-mail postage plan being developed by Goodmail, a Silicon Valley start-up company. ********

Etzione on the value of the sea vs mars. Posted here Monday, February 02, 2004 at 1:27:08 PM     The ocean floor is more promising than Mars rocks. By Amitai Etzioni You can't accuse the Bush White House of excessive imagination. The president's latest "vision" is a replay of a 40-year-old idea stolen from JFK: men (and women) heading for the moon and beyond by 2030. Real creativity would set that crew down in another place altogether: the deep ocean floor. Although oceans cover more than 70% of the Earth, less than 5% of them have been mapped with the same degree of detail as Mars, and that was before the two most recent Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, landed. We have rarely ventured below 6,500 meters in the oceans, although they reach more than 11,000 meters deep. We know much less about the ocean floor and the deepest layers of the oceans than we know about either side of the moon. And yet, the potential payoffs are huge. ********

Carville advice to dems - a review Posted here Monday, February 02, 2004 at 12:03:05 PM     Review of Carville's Had Enough. The point is, simple langauge needs to be mastered. Carville's approach--his doctrine and battle plan--is let's be fair, let's look out for the little guy, and let's roll up our sleeves and chip in some money to invest in a better tomorrow: It's a useful approach for people who want to be Democratic standard-bearers. In most of the elections of the last quarter century, the American public has elected the man whom they could envision comfortably explaining policy in the local barbershop, and not the pointy-headed intellectual or sharp Washington insider (or, in the case of some recent Democratic nominees, both). Carville writes. "They have the ability to abuse employees, shareholders, customers, neighbors and the environment. The only force powerful enough to stop that abuse is government, which is why rich people and corporations want to shrink our government or own it. Republicans are helping them do both." ********

Blue and red states and taxes Posted here Monday, February 02, 2004 at 11:46:23 AM     From the Campaign Desk (read it daily) Those reading Will's column might expect that in the 2000 presidential election, Republicans, the party of low taxes and limited government, would have carried the disgruntled Giver states -- while Democrats, the party of wild spending and bureaucracy run amok, would have appealed to the Taker states. "But it was the reverse," writes Pink. "George W. Bush was the candidate of the Taker states. Al Gore was the candidate of the Giver states." Of the 33 Taker states, reports Pink, President George W. Bush carried 25. Of the 16 Giver states, Gore carried 12. Pink also notes that seventy-eight percent of Bush' electoral votes came from Taker states and 76 percent of Gore's from Giver states. "Republicans seem to have become the new welfare party," opines Pink, "their constituents live off tax dollars paid by people who vote Democratic." That's partisan spin, of course -- but the numbers he cites are not. ********

Inexorable moves in TV Posted here Monday, February 02, 2004 at 11:41:39 AM     From NBC Viewers who tuned in expecting a big-time football game saw the Super Bowl of Sleaze instead. Sexy and violent commercials that included jokes about flatulence and bestiality mercilessly interrupted the CBS telecast of Super Bowl XXXVIII from Houston last night, making it a dubious choice for family viewing. Comment: the trend in TV is toards real sex and real death. It is the "strange attractor", the deep lure, of the medium. It will move inexorably in that direction. ********

The intel investigation.- quote from Powell. Posted here Monday, February 02, 2004 at 8:51:10 AM     From Slate's summary of the day's news. Meanwhile, Post columnist William Raspberry quotes from Secretary of State Powell's seemingly solid Iraq U.N. speech last February. "Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions," Powell said. Raspberry ponders that and concludes it's about more than bad intel. He says he is "increasingly inclined to believe that the administration lied to us." And  from the Observer, "Senior American officials concluded at the beginning of last May that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, The Observer has learnt. Intelligence sources, policy makers and weapons inspectors familiar with the details of the hunt for WMD told The Observer it was widely known that Iraq had no WMD within three weeks of Baghdad falling, despite the assertions of senior Bush administration figures and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Comment: the problem is, we clearly neer knew what the dministration was actually doing. Conclusions, such as to go to war, reached early, and the world acted as if there was some deliberation still going on.   ********