The Problems in This Country Are Pretty Obvious

From Ezra Klein's blog in today's Washington Post:

New jobless claims rose to 500,000 this week. Meanwhile:

Karin Wilzig has a hard time choosing a favorite color from among the 64 that she and her husband can use to illuminate the 14 1/2- foot, 450-gallon aquarium in their TriBeCa town house. The default is fuchsia, which turns the dozen koi a deep pink.

“Not pink,” said Mrs. Wilzig, 40, an artist and a mother of two small children. “Alan, go to the turquoise.”

Her husband, Alan Wilzig, 45, a former banker who collects motorcycles and prides himself on the orange tanning bed in his basement, goes to the James Bond-like control panel in the kitchen, where a touch of a button turns the fish — which are specially bred to be colorless — a vivid blue.

To be fair, it's actually good for rich people to buy fancy aquariums. Economic activity is economic activity. But it's odd to read these sorts of articles in a world where one of the two major political parties wants to borrow $700 billion for a tax cut for the rich but says we don't have enough money to offer further relief for the jobless and the struggling.

What I like about Ezra is that he's a lefty, but he's fair. He's spent a lot of time turning over Paul Ryan's economic proposals, examining the pros and cons, and interviewing Ryan himself. He's come out as saying most of Ryan's plan isn't workable, and Ryan's a bit (okay, a lot) disingenuous in his descriptions, but he's also out out enough information for his reader to come to a different conclusion if he's paying attention and thinking about it.

I have but one complaint with this post: "But it's odd to read these sorts of articles in a world where one of the two major political parties wants to borrow $700 billion for a tax cut for the rich but says we don't have enough money to offer further relief for the jobless and the struggling."

It's not odd; it's disgusting.

Abso-fucking-lutely

From Ezra Klein's blog in The Washington Post (read the entire post for proper context):

As Miller says, this sort of politics lends itself nicely to thinly sliced marginal tax rates. Right now, the top tax bracket begins at $373,650 and extends into infinity. But there's no reason you couldn't have a slightly higher rate starting at $500,000. And then a bit higher at $1 million and on and on...

Yup

Ezra Klein, in today's Washington Post:

Contracts are sacred only when rich people are getting paid

Shahien Nasiripour reports that J.P. Morgan plans to go hard against policies to modify underwater mortgages because contracts are sacred documents premised on the borrowers' "promise to repay."

This struck one union employee as a bit odd: After all, the business community is constantly demanding that autoworkers and steelworkers and other well-compensated laborers change their contracts to remain more in sync with the times. In those cases, contracts don't appear to be all that sacred, and employers' aren't seen as having some cosmic "promise to repay."

"Next time big business or Republican Governors or Mayors are talking about how working families need to 'sacrifice' or 'give back' for the good of the community by altering their contracts," e-mailed the AFL-CIO's Eddie Vale, "let's remember what happens when the shoe is on the other foot."

Why Politicians Aren't Trusted

Ezra Klein interviewed retiring Indiana Senator Evan Bayh over the weekend. While discussing the importance of interpersonal relationships among senators in both parties, and how this can create the comity necessary for consensus, Bayh made the following comment:

My father [the late Indiana Senator Birch Bayh] was on the Judiciary Committee all 18 years. He had a good personal relationship with Jim Eastland. They probably didn't agree on practically anything, or very little, from a public policy standpoint. But they were willing to work through that to see what they could get done just because they knew each other and liked each other. Eastland was a strident anti-Communist and would routinely denounce Castro on the floor of the Senate, and called my dad in one day, sat down, and he's got this humidor and says, "Birch, can I offer you one of these fine Havana cigars?" So there was an example of even Senator Eastland putting pragmatism ahead of ideology.

James Eastland was not a pragmatist; he was a hypocrit and criminal. For someone to "routinely denounce Castro on the floor of the Senate" while violating the embargo on Cuban goods is prima facie evidence of both. (We'll leave aside the fact that Eastland was an ardent racist for a different discussion.)

Congress has long made itself above the people it has sworn to govern; laws that apply to the rest of us don't apply to them. That's not whining about their sense of entitlement; the laws are actually writtne that way. The next time a congressman or senator laments the low esteem in which the public holds our government institutions, hand him a mirror. The clean-up can start there.

Small States and Filibusters

Fred Hiatt, with whom I agree about as often as Dick Cheney admits error, has some good points in a recent Washington Post op-ed. Fred being Fred, he still manages to annoy me with the following comment:

The advent of the 60-vote rule in the Senate has magnified the already formidable checks and balances built into the Constitution, with the disproportionate blocking power it awards small and rural states.

Health insurance reform advocates have lamented for months the influence of small and rural states on crafting the legislation, as Max Baucus’s Gang of Six was wholly made up of senators from small, rural states. Dissing small and rural states is a recent phenomenon, and reflects poorly on those—mostly progressives—who put it forward.

Small states are still states. Just because most of them are in what the MSM thinks of as “fly-over country,” not part of either coast, doesn’t make them any less worthy. They are just as likely to produce fine lawmakers as larger states. The problem with the Gang of Six wasn’t that they were from small or rural states; it was that Charles Grassley was a duplicitous bastard who did his best to sell Baucus out, and Mike Enzi was essentially a mole who never wanted to make a deal in the first place. Is their behavior unique to small states? Are the senators of larger states immune to such duplicity?

The “disproportionate blocking power” of these states is on people’s minds now because of the 60 votes needed to halt a filibuster. Ezra Klein, with whom I agree several times a day, advocates doing away with the filibuster here. Contrary to what Klein says, the filibuster provides a potentially valuable role by keeping public policy from swaying with the winds of public opinion. The last thing the country needs is to have large swaths of legislation changing from Congress to Congress. Some stability is needed, if only to sort things out and give them time to work.

The problem we have today is not the filibuster; it’s the misuse of the filibuster. I’m old enough to remember a time when the Senate routinely passed bills with less than 60 votes. (And no, that’s not because there weren’t as many senators then.) Senators used to be able to say they didn’t want a bill to pass, but that it deserved to come to a vote and the majority could rule.

No more. Now virtually everything that won’t stop the government dead (and is thus subject to the reconciliation process, which bypasses filibusters) requires 60 votes. That’s not the purpose of the filibuster. It’s designed to keep the majority from running roughshod over the rights or interests of a sizeable minority.

Some would say that’s why using the filibuster is a legitimate means to kill health insurance reform. Maybe. Let’s line up everyone who is threatening to vote against cloture and survey them on past positions, or on the reason they’re voting to kill the bill. I’m willing to bet at least a dozen will cite reasons that are at best disingenuous, or, at worst, downright dishonest. Those senators, as individuals, are misusing the filibuster. That’s where the problem lies, not in how big or small their states are or whether the filibuster serves a useful purpose in its proper place.

What's Left Unsaid

Ezra Klein is fast becoming an elite blogger, what others should aspire to: someone who can do his own reporting and put what he finds into perspective. Today he posted on the true costs of political calculus.