Tag Archives: Politics

Gay Marriage: Should Tactics Change?

Posted on November 5, 2009 | 5 comments

If I am going to blog about anything as controversial as gay marriage, I should state at the outset that I fully support the right of gays to marry. Two people in love should be able to marry. Period. The claim that gay marriage will weaken traditional marriage is, in my opinion, ridiculous. Here in California, I have voted for gay marriage every time it has been on the ballot (which may only be one time…I can’t really remember) and will continue to do so.

Yet while I completely share the goals of the gay marriage movement, I am going to recommend a change in tactics: stop pushing on marriage, at least for a while, and focus on strengthening civil unions. I say this in the wake of Maine – flinty, individualist Maine, state motto: “I lead” – voting against gay marriage. As we have seen in state vote after state vote (including super liberal California), the populace of this country is simply not ready to support gay marriage. Gay marriage laws have been put to the vote in 31 states and have lost every time. As the graph below shows, this is changing, and over time will continue to change, but for now, gay marriage is a losing vote.

Gay marriage attitudes over time

Gay marriage attitudes over time

While some might argue for continuing to push ballot initiatives until they win, I posit that strategy is counter-productive, because it riles up the opposition. As the NY Times reported, Maine’s vote attracted all kinds of outside money and support, including from the National Organization for Marriage and the Catholic Church. Civil unions, on the other hand, do not attract that kind of organized opposition. Marriage itself is the bright line that conservatives clearly intend to hold. The more we push gay marriage initiatives, the longer it will be until they pass, because we will continue to inspire the opposition.

Civil unions are clearly not as good as marriages. They don’t address federal laws like taxation and social security. But they do, or can, address many important issues: health care decisions, wills, community property, adoption, etc. And they can be made stronger because, as noted above, they attract less conservative opposition. So my argument is to spend the next few years focused on passing and strengthening civil unions, state by state, and wait for the citizenry of the country to catch up. As the graph below shows, they ARE catching up. As older people die and kids (who are used to seeing things like Eric come out of the closet on Gossip Girl) become eligible to vote, the tide will turn and gay marriage initiatives will be able to pass.

Attitudes toward gay marriage by age

Attitudes toward gay marriage by age

I recognize that this is all easy for me to say as a straight man. I don’t have to settle for the inferior civil union, nor do I have to live every day feeling like my society is not treating me fairly. While I can imagine that feeling, I can never completely understand it, since I can’t live it. I readily concede that saying that we should delay fairness is awful. So when gays say that they have to fight for their civil rights now, I get it, and I don’t mean this post to argue against it. This post is purely about tactics, and about what I think is the quickest way to achieve the gay marriage goal.

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America: Democracy or Dollarocracy?

Posted on October 29, 2009 | 2 comments

A mere 15 years after buying it, I am finally getting around to reading Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. Thoughtbasket readers will probably see numerous posts inspired by this book, likely spanning months, since that is how long it will take me to finish it based on my current reading pace.

The basic premise of the book is that while people, as individuals, are generally pretty moral, once they group together – as tribes, countries, companies, trade organizations – they often act in immoral ways. How Niebuhr bridges this dichotomy will require me reading beyond page 25, which is where I am now.

But in setting up the dichotomy Niebuhr discussed the forces that push man into society and ways that society enforces mores and rules. Writing in 1932, he says this:

“With the increased centralization of economic power in the period of modern industrialism, this development merely means that society as such does not control economic power as much as social well-being requires; and that the economic, rather than the political and military, power has become the significant coercive force of modern society.”

I don’t know whether to be relieved or disturbed that the economic elite have controlled our society for at least 75 years.

As the government throws trillions of dollars at Wall Street, with Goldman alumni seemingly running the Treasury department, and bankers using taxpayer dollars to pay themselves multimillion dollar bonuses (why isn’t that bonii?), it really seems like Simon Johnson is right and the financiers have taken over government via a quiet coup. But according to Niebuhr they took over government long ago, and while they have certainly managed to pillage the common man in the intervening years, the reality is that standards of living have increased since the 1930’s, so perhaps economic coercion isn’t that bad. That’s the relieved side of my brain.

US Income Distribution

The disturbed side of my brain, on the other hand, focuses on the pillaging. Note that in the above graph, standards of living have improved dramatically at the top end, but not so much at the bottom end. Not surprisingly, those who hold economic power ensure that society is set up such that most of the proceeds of growth accrue to them. Or, as Niebuhr puts it, “the dominant class….always paying itself inordinate rewards for its labors.” I wonder when and how we went from being a democracy deriving its “just powers from the consent of the governed,” to a society in which economic entities are dominant.

Should we blame greedy businessmen and craven politicians? Of course. But we need to look in a mirror too. Gary Cross discussed at length in An All-Consuming Century the trade-offs that labor organizations consciously made to ensure steady employment at a stable wage. Many of these trade-offs transferred power from unionized masses to the corporate elite. And as I’ve noted before, we all need to be more active and informed voters; when our representatives are more beholden to corporations than to people, we need to vote them out.

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Another Data Point on Health Care Reform

Posted on October 26, 2009 | Leave a comment

Apparently there is an ongoing debate in ophthalmological circles about using Lucentis or Avastin to treat macular degeneration. These are two closely related drugs, both made by Genentech from the same molecule. Avastin has been approved for treating various cancers, but ophthalmologists have evidently been using it off-label for a while to treat macular degeneration. This off-label use is one of the reasons Genentech produced Lucentis, which has been approved for macular degeneration.

Why is this relevant to health care reform? Because Lucentis costs thousands of dollars per dose while Avastin costs less than one hundred dollars. Even worse, as I was told by an ophthalmologist over the weekend, insurance policies keep even those doctors who are worried about costs from using Avastin. Doctors pay $50 for a dose of the drug, but only get reimbursed $7, so they are losing $43 per treatment. If they use Lucentis, they get full reimbursement. One might argue (in fact, I probably would) that the ophthalmologists are making so much charging for the treatment that they should eat the $40 loss, but I doubt many of the doctors will listen.

I know that there are many complexities here: you can’t expect insurance companies to fund the use of unapproved drugs, and you want a drug approval system that errs on the side of safety, and there hasn’t been a head-to-head trial to see if Avastin is fully equivalent to Lucentis. But surely there is a middle ground, where drugs are sufficiently vetted yet we are not incenting doctors to prescribe thousand dollar drugs instead of fifty dollar drugs.

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Even Sadder History of Lobbyists

Posted on October 22, 2009 | Leave a comment

I recently posted about how corporate lobbyists stymied consumer protection reform in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Now here is a quote from Baron Arthur Salter’s book Recovery, from 1932:

“Government is failing above all because it has become enmeshed in the task of giving discretionary, particular preferential, privileges to competitive industry.”

Ugh. Will the system ever be as responsive to individuals as it is to corporate interests?

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NY Times is Copying Me

Posted on October 8, 2009 | 1 comment

I’m not here to criticize Nicholas Kristof; not only have I linked to him before, but he is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a Rhodes Scholar. But his most recent column says exactly what I’ve been saying recently.

First he says that “universal health care is not an economic or technical question but a moral one.” That is precisely what I said in this post. Then he quotes the new study showing 45,000 annual deaths from lack of insurance. Just as I did in this post. Then he closes by calling America a “great nation,” which is pretty similar to my phrasing: “the greatest…country.”

I’m not saying that Kristof is plagiarizing me. Let’s be honest: I’d be freaking psyched if a NY Times columnist stole my words. I’m just saying that if you want to know what the Times is going to say a fortnight hence, read Thoughtbasket now.

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Posted in Politics, Pop culture

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Real Estate Ripoffs: No Repercussions

Posted on October 2, 2009 | 1 comment

Back in February the New Yorker wrote an article about how Florida was sort of the epicenter of the real estate madness, full of frauds and crooks, and that the entire state was essentially a giant ponzi scheme. The story mentioned one man in particular, Sonny Kim, who sold 90 properties, netting $4 million. Here is a link to a story in the local paper about Mr. Kim. The buyers were mostly in on the scam, putting no money down, getting liar loan mortgages from foolish loan officers, and then walking away, sticking the bank (meaning the taxpayers) with the house while Mr. Kim kept his proceeds.

Here is how it works: “A common scam works like this:  Someone with cash buys a crummy house cheap. A mortgage broker signs on and finds an appraiser to inflate the value. The broker shops the loan application, with false data about the borrower and the house. Bank loan officers approve it.”

Sonny Kim bought one house for $100, and three months later “flipped it for the sum of three hundred thousand dollars, with the help of a no-money-down mortgage from a subsidiary of Washington Mutual Bank, which later foreclosed on the house.”

I saved the article, so that I could go back to it later and see what happened to these folks. According to the St. Petersburg Times, which broke the story, nothing has happened. Sonny Kim hasn’t been charged with any crime. The title agent who managed a third of Kim’s deal, and was arrested on other fraud charges, hasn’t been charged for these deals. Nobody at WAMU is in jail. So all the people who made money on these fraudulent deals are sitting pretty, spending their money on mojitos, while the taxpayers are footing the bill for the bailout. That seems wrong somehow.

In fact, here is a quote from another house flipper, who started his real estate career while on probation from a cocaine conviction: “I drive a Hummer and own a 1970 vintage Oldsmobile 442. I always wanted diamonds and now I own them legally and no one can take them away.”

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Lack of Insurance Causes 45,000 Annual US Deaths

Posted on October 1, 2009 | 1 comment

Here is a link to a new study which estimates that 44,789 Americans die each year because they lack health insurance. This is the study that Rep. Alan Grayson referenced when he faux-apologized for mocking the Republicans’ lack of a health plan.

This is a purely statistical study, and I am totally unqualified to assess its methodology. However, it is being published in a peer-reviewed academic journal, and was written by fancy-pants researchers at Harvard Medical School, so it’s probably a pretty decent piece of work.

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Posted in Politics

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I Agree With WSJ Op-Ed — Amazing!

Posted on September 30, 2009 | Leave a comment

This is truly a miracle! For the first time in memory, there is an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with which I actually agree. Mostly. And it’s by Holman Jenkins, who is usually such a tax-cutting, market-loving, poor person-hating cretin that I am often amazed he is even literate. But here we are on the same page. He expresses his views in his usual caustic and hyperbolic fashion, but I’m on board with his analysis.

The issue is net neutrality, and the possibility of FCC regulations on the matter. Jenkins points out that while there is a theoretical possibility of carriers favoring their own content over 3rd party content, this has yet to actually happen. He also notes that carriers invest billions in the infrastructure needed to carry ever more data, and that they need to recoup that investment. Finally, he points out that if carriers do not charge differential rates to content suppliers, the obvious solution is to charge differential rates to content users, namely charging more for heavy bandwidth users, which is clearly an equitable solution. In all cases, I agree with Jenkins.

This is also rare for the Journal, but the first two letters to the editor regarding Jenkins’ column, which can be found here, are also quite reasonable.

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Follow Up to Markets & Health Care

Posted on September 28, 2009 | Leave a comment

Just a quick link to this article by a pediatric cardiologist giving both data and anecdotes on what bad consumers we all are when it comes to health care. Something to keep in mind as we look at more market-driven approaches to our health care system.

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The Benefits of Financial Regulation

Posted on September 28, 2009 | Leave a comment

Harvard Magazine recently published an article regarding bank regulation. Like many articles (in fact, like the vast majority of articles I’ve seen), it makes the case that the current situation virtually guarantees another financial meltdown, since all major financial institutions now have implicit government backing, under the “too big to fail (TBTF)” doctrine. However, this article is a little different than many because it’s written not by a journalist, but by David Moss, a professor at Harvard Business School, which is, of course, the main source of the overconfident financiers who created the recent meltdown.

Professor Moss suggests a number of solutions to the TBTF problem and the moral hazard it creates. Most of these suggestions revolve around making the implicit guarantee an explicit one, with transparent limits and with the government charging for the guarantee. He would also add a tight regulatory regime.

The most interesting thing about Moss’ article was the graph I’ve inserted below. This graph has the date on the X axis, from 1864 to 2000. The Y axis shows the number of bank failures during each year. As you can see, bank failures were a regular occurrence in the American economy until 1932, when in the wake of the Great Depression a whole series of regulations were implemented, including Glass-Steagall. Then there is a long, calm period with very few bank failures, running up to the early 1980’s, when bank deregulation began under the Reagan administration. This graph speaks volumes.

Bank Failures Over Time

Bank Failures Over Time

Bank CEOs and Republicans are arguing strenuously against new bank regulations. CEOs have a good reason: they want to make as much money as possible. But Republicans are fighting regulation simply because they have an ideology that regulation is inherently bad. I think the last two years have proven this ideology wrong, but even if you don’t buy that, it’s hard to argue with the chart. So the question for Republicans is whether they are going to look at 136 years of data, or listen to the anti-government ramblings of people like former exterminator and creepy dancer Tom Delay, or fact-hindered quasi-philosopher Ayn Rand?

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