Ben Buckman.net

I understand that a Cap & Trade system involves the government selling the rights to pollute, which can in turn be traded, but until a few moments ago I wasn't clear on the other side of the coin, allowing companies to produce credits, or carbon offsets. CNN Money just had a segment on Obama's Cap & Trade plan, and part of it, similar to the EU system, would give credits to companies who build clean-energy technology or otherwise "offset" greenhouse gases. That opens up tremendous possibilities. It allows individual consumers or families to participate in an offset market. It creates incentives for clean energy investment without any direct subsidies (saving taxpayers' money). It allows the government to phase itself out of the market completely, eventually creating a system in which every unit of dirty energy is offset by a private-sector unit of clean energy. That's how a market-based economy transitions into a clean-energy future. Why aren't conservatives cheering about this?

I read a lot of political news and commentary, and I tend to have opinions about most of it. On the huge issues of the day, though, I have to admit I lack the expertise to adequately judge. How do I know if the stimulus will really work? Or if bailing out the banks is really a good idea? Or if ultimately the tradeoffs of universal healthcare will be better than the tradeoffs of the status quo?

One principle that's at the forefront of my mind, however, is the following: the Obama administration is staffed with some of the smartest people in their fields in the country. They're riding a huge wave of political capital in incredibly troubled times. They have absolutely no incentive to fail and every incentive to succeed spectacularly. They have the political capital to try almost anything now that they think will work. They know their first-term legacy will depend largely on economic recovery (as well as success in all their other endeavors).

Opposing whatever this team proposes is a party in exile, in decline, touting heroes and principles from the 1980s, losing its moderate base to the mainstream, shifting further and further to the extremes. They don't have the resources or the brains to figure out the best solutions, and out of power, they have nothing to gain from genuine recovery. Obama's success will be the last nail in their political coffins, and they have every reason to want him to fail.

Common sense tells me that the former group is much more likely to be right. They want to be right, they need to be right, they have the brains to get it right. If they can't pull it off, no one can, so I'm going to trust them (for the forseeable future) and hope they succeed.

David Brooks on Bobby Jindal's speech last week and the state of the GOP:

Alex rounds up the news from CPAC, the conservative activists conference this past week:

This week saw the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the largest annual gathering of conservative activists in the US, and as you might expect it was full of absolutely nutty behavior. If ever you wanted an encapsulation of everything that has gone wrong with the modern Republican Party, this is it. Some examples: 

Gov. Mike Huckabee, the man I continue to believe will be the GOP nominee in 2012, invoked Lenin and Stalin in warning the crowd about the dangers of health care reform. Cliff Kincaid drew a standing ovationwhen he declared Obama a "communist" who had most likely been born in Kenya. Joe The Plumber took on the issue of reparations for slavery (a hot topic if ever there was one!) by explaining that "Jews were slaves, but they're not asking for compensation from Egypt." Tucker Carlson got booed for suggesting that conservative media operatives ought to be more professional in their approach to facts. Activists handed out "It's OK to be Ex Gay" and "Obama bin Lyin" bumper stickers and dressed up as Klondike Bar loving polar bears. And Sen. Rick Santorum went on camera to proudly proclaim that he he hopes Obama's policies will fail. [Videos@TPM for those who can stomach it]

In that last sentiment, Santorum echoed Rush Limbaugh, who recently said on his show that it is a “dirty little secret” that “every Republican in this country wants Obama to fail, but none of them have the guts to say so.” Later tonight, CPAC will award Rush their Defender of the Constitution Award. 

In Obama's speech to Congress last week, he described a vision of every American attaining some higher education. The AP asked a bunch of experts for their thoughts; in a nutshell, the idealists in the group think it's great, and the conservatives think it's stupid. It's probably a little of both, but giving up on the vision before giving it a second thought is surely stupid. If everyone had a college degree, economics or common sense would dictate that the value of a degree would decline, the way inflation of money decreases its value. If a college degree were the equivalent of a high school degree fifty years ago, then the better jobs that now require college degrees would require graduate degrees; and then you're back at square one. Sort of.

Some principles about this issue seem self evident. First, in the global "knowledge economy" the country is grudgingly transitioning into, education is valuable. Second, if no one in the U.S. had a college degree or higher, we would never have had the most powerful, innovative economy in the world (even in depression). Third, not everyone who wants to go to college, or is capable of going to college, can afford to, and given the previous two points, that's a kind of deadweight loss to society.

Statistically, a college degree is supposed to open bigger and better doors for people, help them earn more money over their lifetime, etc. Personally I could argue that taking out huge loans to go to an expensive private university was probably not really worth it; I could have gone into the same line of work without a degree, or with a cheaper one; the opportunity costs of paying off loans vs a theoretically smaller income don't necesarily favor the former. But this seems a pointless line of reasoning to go down on the one hand, and only underscores the problem of cost on the other, not the value of higher education per se.

Our 1-in-4 high school dropout rate is obviously a national tragedy that demands action at multiple levels. Common sense suggests that this statistic is closely correlated with another national tragedy, the incerceration rate. Someone responding to a call for drastic improvement on these fronts with, "what a waste of money," or "most people are too stupid to go to college anyway," doesn't deserve much serious attention. Surely the education system in this country needs a lot of improvement at all levels. No one seriously believes everyone in 10 years will have a college degree, or even that everyone should; but you'd have to be really intellectually bankrupt to mock the vision to try.

 A relative in finance wrote to me saying we need tax cuts to stimulate the economy. Fed up, I replied with this:

The tax cuts mantra has become so amusing to me that I made a site, gopproblemsolver.com, all about it. Bush cut $1.4 trillion in taxes. The result was a few years of phantom growth focused at the top and in housing, followed by a systemic collapse. For most people during the Bush years, actual living standards declined, and now they're in the pits. So what was the problem, he didn't cut enough? What empirical evidence would it take to put to rest the dogma of tax cuts?

I remember you supported the initial TARP plan on the premise that it would be profitable for the government. It's clear now that it won't, and the plan that you thought could be profitable had to be scapped because it was unworkable. (It looks like the only way we'll know what toxic assets the big banks have, in order to get rid of them, is if we nationalize them.) So I find everyone in your industry incredibly hypocritical, to say the least: you/they supported the bank bailout (duh - it's your asses that got bailed out), but the minute regular irresponsible people get bailed out of their mortgages, all hell breaks loose on the trading floor, Santelli goes on his rant, and "this is America!" And everything your industry did was *responsible*? BoA leveraging itself 45 times over was responsible? Finance was built on a house of cards that made a lot of people in your profession very rich. The house collapsed. Where is the industry's self-reckoning? To say the answer is tax cuts, after all this, is astonishing to me.

I followed up with this:

Just so it's clear, too, I'm paying more taxes this year myself than I ever have, and after filing my taxes I have to pay another big chunk that weren't already taken out. I don't *like* taxes. No one likes taxes. But the idea that tax cuts will save the economy are just empirically wrong and ideologically dogmatic. You'd be out of a job if it weren't for federal bailouts funded by the promise of future tax revenues. We're not always at the right side of the Laffer curve; at some point taxes need to go up to pay for all the stuff we want. Zero taxes won't mean infinite revenue. You told me a long time ago that there's a legitimate role of government in helping the really helpless who are trying to help themselves. Now that counts millions of people, thanks largely to your industry. (The housing crash alone would not have toppled the world economy, if an over-leveraged bubble hadn't been built by overpaid casino bankers on top of its promised unlimited growth.) Why don't we nationalize BoA and Citi and sell their junk to pay for their own bailouts? Wall Street is lucky the government loves them too much, but you'd never know it listening to them.

19,755 hits and counting...

This morning, NYU law professor Jay Rosen tweeted,

GOPproblemsolver.com. Plain white screen with a box: "enter any problem here." Click. Tells you how big the tax cuts need to be to solve it.

I thought the idea was fantastic. So I went to GoDaddy, bought the domain for $10, and in an hour and a half had it set up. Enjoy! GOPProblemSolver.com

(If you'd be so kind as to tweet or blog about it yourself, I'd love to see how far it spreads!)

Update 1: immediate demand totally knocked out the server. Back up, working on optimizing for the long term...

Update 2: responses are incredible. (Tweet search here.) HuffPost mentioned it. Trying to get work done today... :-/

Responding to conservative charges that fiscal stimulus never worked and the New Deal didn't really do any good, Rachel Maddow showed a graph like this one on her show yesterday: