Poor America

   How did we get here?

2012: Here We Go

   One side effect of this blog for me has been a realization of the power of words. One of my New Year's resolutions a few years back was to start a blog and so one of the early posts was about my resolution for the year. I had not been historically big on resolutions, but now I had a forum and needed to write. As I wrote resolutions that first year I seemed to feel I needed to fill content and went a bit beyond what I would have considered "realistic". Nothing like having goals, I figured. As the year passed I posted updates. At the end of the year I was shocked to find that almost all of my resolutions had come to pass, one way or another.

   The next year I decided to push it a bit further to see what happened. Again, more happened than I would have expected.

   Last year my wife and I decided to try it on something big: our debt. I made one resolution. I later amended it with some smaller things that I "would like" to have happen, but I was afraid to take anything from the focus of reducing our debt. As the year went on I did not accomplish a lot, but we started to realize that the pace we had set with paying down our debt could have us completely paid off "before Thanksgiving". We kept that mindset and, despite car repairs and an emergency room visit, we were completely debt-free by Thanksgiving.

   I've decided this year to go for broke. I have a lot that I want to do this year and some of it is well beyond the scope of anything with which I have any real experience. Some of it just has to do with getting back on track after having only one primary focus last year. Let's get started:

   As I write this we are just coming out of a winter storm that brought record snow and ice and shut things down for a couple days. It makes me realize just how easy it is to let things slide and not be ready in time when something does happen. This past year we have been so focused on saving money to pay bills, when I did get a twinge that we were low on this or that I told myself we would be able to get back on track once we're out of debt. With the exception of having to scramble for firewood, we made it through this storm with little difficulty. Fortunately it was only a few days and we only lost power for a short time one night (which is more than about 300,000 homes in the area can say). Still, we need to be better prepared. My first resolution is to get back on track with our emergency preparedness.

   In line with that thought, I fully intend to continue gardening. The past couple years were disappointing in the garden. I would like to produce enough in the garden this year to have extra to can for winter. We did some canning this year, but the bulk of what we canned came from the local produce stand. I also want to can more this year -- meals like chili, soups, stews, and the like. Our pantry is well-stocked at the moment, especially considering the odd summer and fall we had. Again, though, I would like to get started canning earlier this year so we can put more away.

   I also want to get back into a brewing routine this year. As we got serious about canning it seems my beer brewing slowed and halted. I have rebuilt my bottle supply (rough work, that) and intend to bottle as well as keg. In addition, I really want to start all-grain brewing. This will require an investment into some equipment, but not a lot as I already have everything I need for extract brewing. I have just acquired a mash tun in the past few days -- that was the biggest hurdle. I now only need a propane cooker, a recipe, and the ingredients to get started. I will also need a new bottle capper to started bottling as mine was passed on a while back. This has already begun.

   I want to hunt deer and elk this year. It is my understanding that the bowhunting season for deer and elk overlap, so that is my plan. Mostly what I need to do this year is get out scouting a good hunting area. This past fall what really hurt my hunt was that the area I had scouted the season prior had been heavily logged and I failed to scout a better spot. It would be ideal to plan a camping trip before hunting season and really scout the area. Between the garden, canning, scouting, and hunting I need to expect my late summer and fall to be really busy.

   On a completely different tangent, I have a set of professional goals for this year's resolutions. I have one recording project -- a sort of reworking of an older recording project -- that I want to complete. My intent is to use this project as a learning tool that will set me up for another recording project. The second project will require me to start songwriting again, which I have already, albeit slowly, begun. There is some music and recording equipment I wish to acquire this year for various reasons that include a guitar that is quite expensive, but it should be the last performance guitar I will ever need. I also want to focus on drumming and percussion this year and have already set my drums back up n my music room/office and been working on rudiments.

   As long as I'm going for broke, I have two resolutions that are a bit out on a limb. First, my wife and I have been talking about owning a farm for several years now. Now that we are out of debt it seems we should stop talking about it and do it. I would like to own a farm this year.

   Also, it seems America is ready for a change. The corporations and politicians in power seem intent on selling out We The People and our futures for their own interests. I was with the Tea Party movement until it was hijacked by the right wing. The left seems intent on trying to hijack the Occupy movement. At the end of the day, it seems We The People are ready for change, we just need to stop playing the game. The United States of America is not about democrats or republicans. It is about a government of, for, and by the people. It's time to take it back. I resolve to do everything I can to remind people of that fact an encourage all U.S. citizens to take back our country. By the end of 2012 it should be evident that a revolution has taken place in the United States.

   If that's not enough, it is my intention to do all of this while maintaining my commitments to my wife, my son, homeschooling, and the balance of my own well-being. I also have a number of family-centric goals for this year that my wife and I have discussed (mostly things that involve more regular check-ups with doctors, dentists, and mechanics).

   Considering that I am posting this as February has just set upon us, I'd say it's time to get to work.

Why SOPA is a Bad Idea

PRICELE$$

Thoughts on American Capitalism

   I haven't posted anything here in a little while because I've been preoccupied with the Occupy Wall Street protest. Personally, I think it's high time Americans stood up and said, "We've had enough!" and I think it's great that the movement has gone global. Thomas Jefferson said, "I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.", and, "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the Atmosphere." What's happening now is a good thing.

   I wanted to take some time today to offer some ideas on why this rebellion has risen up. I am in no way a spokesperson for any Occupy event/movement, so don't misunderstand, these are just the thoughts of one citizen.

   I believe far too many Americans believe that we have a capitalist economy. Far too many Americans believe we have a democracy. Both of these are false and I believe that the misperceptions of these two things have helped politicians to polarize party lines.

   The U.S. government was not founded as a democracy. The founding fathers did not trust the average citizen to not be taken in by a silver-tongued devil. Looking at the country and it's media today it could be argued that the founding fathers were ahead of their time. Democracies had been shown to be too chaotic to be sustainable so they set up a republic wherein we the people get to elect representatives to make decisions and run the country on our behalf. What that means for the average citizen is, if you are not satisfied with the way your representatives in government are running things, you need to communicate that to them and if they don't listen you need to elect someone who will. I know this is more work than most Americans want to do, but if you let the government run itself it will act in it's own best interest (as it has).

   (The good news is that this is much easier to do today than it has been in the past! I would recommend going to Congress.org and signing up for updates on what your representatives are voting for and against. While you're at it look up some activist sites that concern themselves with things you care about and sign up with them. Many send out petitions and letters on key issues that you can sign and follow. Get your representatives' email addresses and phone numbers and contact them directly. Tell them what you want and ask for explanations if they don't do it. Keep them accountable!)

   Capitalism. Look around. This is not what Adam Smith had in mind. Before anyone starts quoting The Wealth of Nations out of context let me just remind everyone that Smith first wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments -- his own personally favored work -- and The Wealth of Nations was intended to be considered as the next chapter to The Theory of Moral Sentiment, not as a stand-alone piece.

   That said, do we really have a capitalist system where one person can build a business and thrive? In some cases, yes. In most cases, though, no and the odds are looking more and more like those on a lottery ticket. Assuming that one does have the resources and talent to build a business and make it successful, navigating through government regulations and personal and business litigation, that business will likely have to compete with one or more huge corporations that are likely deemed "too big to fail" by their board members in Washington D.C. The deck has been stacked and the game is not the same as it was in the late 1700's.

   I recently read an argument that if you took someone from the "rich 1%" and took away everything, they would not complain that they couldn't find a job, they would make their own job and create more jobs in the process. I feel this is oversimplified and that if you put this imaginary person into similar circumstances as the average American (i.e. school loans, children, hospital bills, auto repairs, etc.) the story might vary. But let's assume it's absolutely true. Why should we be content with a system that rewards a single talent on the backs of those with other talents? I know some people who are very good at business. I know more people who have had businesses that either failed or never fully supported them. Most of the people I know are very good at things other than owning and operating a business. Why don't we reward the people who teach the next generation or farmers who create our food supply in the same way we reward someone who can find loopholes in the tax code, has a talent for stock speculation, or is willing to neglect their health and family for the almighty dollar? Isn't the person who drives a truck or the person who builds and maintains the road an important part of the distribution system on which many businesses are built?

   The fact that our transportation and energy systems have not really changed all that much in the past one hundred years is an indicator of how we have all become complacent. The system is antiquated and it's high time for an update. Our country needs a reboot. Two hundred and some years ago when the U.S. was being established there were those who believed we should be a simple, agrarian society and not be too involved in the world's affairs. Others wanted something that looked more like England's empire. When decisions were made, guess who came to the table?

   It's time for us all to show up to the table and make our voices heard.

Americans or Corporations?

What if Solar Energy Received The Same Subsidies as Fossil Fuels?

   I copied this directly from Roger Ebert's Journal on the Sun Times website. All credit goes to him and his sources, but I could not resist sharing this.

   It's just that good:

What if solar energy received the same subsidies as fossil fuels?

[ GO TO ROGER EBERT'S POST HERE ]

State Dept. Aggressively Pushed Genetically-Modified Crops to Help Agribusiness Giants

AllGov - News - State Dept. Aggressively Pushed Genetically-Modified Crops to Help Agribusiness Giants

The latest release of government files from WikiLeaks shows that the State Department has repeatedly pushed foreign governments to approve genetically-engineered crops and promote the international business interests of corporations like Monsanto and DuPont.

U.S. officials have used “outreach programs” in Africa, Asia and South America, where Western biotech agriculture has not been established. In one cable, American diplomats sought funding from Washington to send U.S. biotech experts and trade industry representatives to target countries for meetings with local politicians and agricultural officials.

Several cables showed American diplomats have promoted biotech agriculture in Tunisia,South Africa and Mozambique, which confirms what Truthout previously reported on “front groups” with U.S. and corporate backing that are trying to introduce genetically-modified crops in developing African countries.

Previously released cables revealed that during the administration of George W. Bush, American diplomats had pressured advisors to the Pope to accept GM crops and that U.S. Ambassador to France Craig Stapleton pushed his staff to create a “retaliation list” of European Union members that opposed the spread of GM foods.

-Noel Brinkerhoff, David Wallechinsky

AllGov - News - State Dept. Aggressively Pushed Genetically-Modified Crops to Help Agribusiness Giants

It's Time To Reboot

   Jefferson said the world belongs to the living, suggesting that the government he and our forefathers set-up be torn up each generation and rewritten.

   Today we have a Tea Bag Party trying to ignore everything our founders stood for and drag us back two hundred thirty years.

   The recent debt-ceiling debacle should be the final piece of evidence to the American people that the system is obsolete. It is time to wipe the hard drive, get both parties out of office, abandon this system, and  upgrade to something that is relevant and has some user support.

   How about this idea: we actually educate everyone and each person gets one vote regardless of wealth, status, or bias, and we do away with lawyers and lobbyists?

   The American Dream of our forefathers was replaced by hopes that the next generation might get it right. We have built on that model with greed, bureaucracy, and corruption.

   The question now is: do we keep building on this foundation or tear it down and start a new one?

The U.S. Government is Standing in the Way of Jobs and Health?

   I'm shocked...

Farmers Markets Could Generate Tens of Thousands of New Jobs with Modest Federal Support, New Report Finds

They’re Growing Nationally, but Federal Policies Favoring Industrial Agriculture Hold Them Back

WASHINGTON (August 4, 2011) – Over the last several decades, thousands of farmers markets have been popping up in cities and towns across the country, benefiting local farmers, consumers and economies, but they could be doing a lot better, according to a report released today by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). What’s holding farmers markets back? Federal policies that favor industrial agriculture at their expense.

“On the whole, farmers markets have seen exceptional growth, providing local communities with fresh food direct from the farm,” said Jeffrey O’Hara, the author of the report and an economist with UCS’s Food and Environment Program. “But our federal food policies are working against them. If the U.S. government diverted just a small amount of the massive subsidies it lavishes on industrial agriculture to support these markets and small local farmers, it would not only improve American diets, it would generate tens of thousands of new jobs.”

UCS released the report just a few days before the 12th annual U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Farmers Market Week, which starts on Sunday, August 7. According to the report, “Market Forces: Creating Jobs through Public Investment in Local and Regional Food Systems,” the number of farmers markets nationwide more than doubled between 2000 and 2010 jumping from 2,863 to 6,132, and now more than 100,000 farms sell food directly to local consumers.

All that growth happened with relatively little help. Last year, for example, the USDA spent $13.725 billion in commodity, crop insurance, and supplemental disaster assistance payments mostly to support large industrial farms, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The amount the agency spent that year to support local and regional food system farmers? Less than $100 million, according to USDA data.

In 2007, the most recent USDA figure, direct agricultural product sales amounted to a $1.2 billion-a-year business, and most of that money recirculates locally. “The fact that farmers are selling directly to the people who live nearby means that sales revenue stays local,” O’Hara said. “That helps stabilize local economies.”

Keeping revenues local also can mean more job opportunities. Last summer, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack asked Congress to set a goal in the 2012 Farm Bill of helping at least 100,000 Americans to become farmers by, among other things, providing entrepreneurial training and support for farmers markets. O’Hara’s report takes up Vilsack’s challenge and argues that supporting local and regional food system expansion is central to meeting that goal.

In the report, O’Hara  identified a number of initiatives the federal government could take to encourage new farmers and the growth of farmers markets in the upcoming Farm Bill. For example, the report called on Congress to:

• support the development of local food markets, including farmers markets and farm-to-school programs, which can stabilize community-supported markets and create permanent jobs. For example, the report found that the Farmers Market Promotion Program could create as many as 13,500 jobs nationally over a five-year period, if reauthorized, by providing modest funding for 100 to 500 farmers markets per year.
• level the playing field for farmers in rural regions by investing in infrastructure, such as meat-processing or dairy-bottling facilities, which would help meat, dairy and other farmers produce and market their products to consumers more efficiently. These investments could foster competition in food markets, increase product choice for consumers, and generate jobs in the community.
• allow low-income residents to redeem food nutrition subsidies at local food markets to help them afford  fresh fruits and vegetables. Currently, not all markets are able to accept Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits.

“Farmers at local markets are a new variety of innovative entrepreneurs, and we need to nurture them,” said O’Hara. “Supporting these farmers should be a Farm Bill priority.”

[READ THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE]

The Government's Job Is To Protect Business, Not People

   It's not even news. If bailouts on banks that were "too big to fail" while the average American who is "too poor to give a rat's ass about" wasn't a big enough clue that our government is no longer "of, for, and by the people", take a look at this.

   (To get a bigger picture of what's going on, I would like to refer you to this post and this post.)

Every Mother's Nightmare: Bacteria in Recalled Ground Turkey Is Resistent to Antibiotics
Laurie David

It is... maddening that our so-called "food safety system" is designed to protect giant food corporations more than individuals. Consider this scenario: That package of ground turkey sitting in your freezer right now could be tainted with a the potentially deadly Salmonella Heidelberg bacteria. Imagine for a moment that you served your family a turkey burger tomorrow tonight and that your youngest child becomes violently ill -- the poisoning is so severe that she ends up in the hospital needing antibiotics. The physician comes in -- you're praying for an end to this torture for your child -- and the doctor says the antibiotics aren't working. The Salmonella Heidelberg bacteria raging through your child's body are resistant to not one but several antibiotics -- ampicillin, tetracycline and streptomycin- why?

Perhaps it has something to do with the massive amounts of antibiotics used on factory farms every day. Food Animals use up about 29 million pounds of antibiotics a year, compared to the 7 million used in people. The overuse and misuse of antibiotics on factory farms can lead to the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria, such as Salmonella Heidelberg. You might recall last May when I asked Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack: "When will the government do something to stop producers from squandering 70% of our antibiotics on healthy farm animals?" And he answered with the question, "How do you basically legislate that?"

Well, Mr. Secretary, one thing you can do immediately is to demand that the Department of Agriculture stop turning a blind-eye to Salmonella contamination in our meat supply. When it comes to routine Salmonella testing in ground turkey meat, according to the Consumers Union, current USDA standards allow 49.9 percent of samples in a test run to be positive for Salmonella -- 44.6 percent for ground chicken. Are you kidding me?

I was astounded to learn that inspectors will not immediately issue a recall if they find resistant-Salmonella bacteria in ground turkey. The USDA and CDC admitted that 4 routine samples of retail ground turkey tested positive for the resistant Salmonella Heidelberg strain between March and June, but they waited until late July to find "proof" that it would make people sick. And it still took nearly a week before Cargill recalled the 36 million pounds of turkey meat, sold under several brands in 26 states. Tough time recalling a product already eaten!! It's not an automobile!

What is going on? I thought the goal of "food safety agencies" was to do something before people get sick. Waiting until dozens of people are sent to the hospital and one to the morgue is unacceptable!

Why would you wait if you have a good idea that the meat poses serious health risks? To save companies like Cargill time and money? What about the pain and suffering of the family members who lost a loved one, or the parents of 1-year-old Ruby Lee? According to the Oregonian, little Ruby spent 7 days in the hospital in June after she was sickened by Salmonella-tainted ground turkey.

Before this recent outbreak, the Center for Science in the Public Interest demanded that the USDA ban the sale of any ground meat that contain 4 known resistant-Salmonella strains that have been linked to outbreaks in the past, including Salmonella Heidelberg. It sounds like a no-brainer to me. They already order immediate recalls for meat that contain the potentially deadly E. coli O157:H7.

Tightening food safety regulations are important. But it is equally important to ensure that the will and resources are there to enforce them. The government can not be afraid or hampered from enforcing the rules designed to protect our health and our children's health! We must empower food safety agencies to not fear the wrath of huge corporations that do not want to be bothered with regulations. Scares like this are proof positive these huge companies can not be trusted to regulate themselves.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE

How to Turn Republicans and Democrats Into Americans

How to Turn Republicans and Democrats Into Americans
An insider’s six-step plan to fix Congress
By MICKEY EDWARDS

ANGRY AND FRUSTRATED, American voters went to the polls in November 2010 to “take back” their country. Just as they had done in 2008. And 2006. And repeatedly for decades, whether it was Republicans or Democrats from whom they were taking the country back. No matter who was put in charge, things didn’t get better. They won’t this time, either; spending levels may go down, taxes may go up, budgets will change, but American government will go on the way it has, not as a collective enterprise but as a battle between warring tribes.

If we are truly a democracy—if voters get to size up candidates for a public office and choose the one they want—why don’t the elections seem to change anything? Because we elect our leaders, and they then govern, in a system that makes cooperation almost impossible and incivility nearly inevitable, a system in which the campaign season never ends and the struggle for party advantage trumps all other considerations. When Democrat Nancy Pelosi became speaker of the House, the leader of the lawmaking branch of government, she said her priority was to … elect more Democrats. After Republican victories in 2010, the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said his goal was to … prevent the Democratic president’s reelection. With the country at war and the economy in recession, our government leaders’ first thoughts have been of party advantage.

This is not an accident. Ours is a system focused not on collective problem-solving but on a struggle for power between two private organizations. Party activists control access to the ballot through closed party primaries and conventions; partisan leaders design congressional districts. Once elected to Congress, our representatives are divided into warring camps. Partisans decide what bills to take up, what witnesses to hear, what amendments to allow.

Many Americans assume that’s just how democracy works, that this is how it’s always been, that it’s the system the Founders created. But what we have today is a far cry from what the Founders intended. George Washington and James Madison both warned of the dangers posed by political parties. Defenders of the party system argue that parties—including Madison’s own—arose almost immediately after the nation was founded. But those were not parties in the modern sense: they were factions uniting on a few major issues, not marching in lockstep on every issue, large and small. And while some defend the party system as a necessary provider of cues to voters who otherwise might not know how to vote, the Internet and mass media now make it possible for voters to educate themselves about candidates for office.

What we have today is not a legacy of 1789 but an outdated relic of the late 1800s and early 1900s, when Progressives pushed for the adoption of primary elections. By 1916, all but a handful of states had instituted the “direct primary” system, under which a party candidate was selected by a public vote, rather than by party leaders in backroom deals. But the primaries, and the nominating conventions, were open only to party members. This reform was supposed to give citizens a bigger role in the election process. Instead, the influence of party leaders has been supplanted by that of a subset of party activists who are often highly ideological and largely uninterested in finding common ground. In Delaware in 2010, a mere 30,000 of that state’s nearly 1 million people kept Mike Castle, a popular congressman and former governor, off the general-election ballot. In Utah, 3,500 people meeting in a closed convention deprived the rest of the state’s 3 million residents of an opportunity to consider reelecting their longtime senator Robert Bennett. For most of the voters who go to the polls in November, the names on the ballot have been reduced to only those candidates the political parties will allow them to choose between. Americans demand a multiplicity of options in almost every other aspect of our lives. And yet we allow small bands of activists to limit our choices of people to represent us in making the nation’s laws.

I am not calling for a magical political “center”: many of the most important steps forward in our history have not come from the center at all, including women’s suffrage and the civil-rights movement, and even our founding rebellion against the British crown. Nor am I pleading for consensus: consensus is not possible in a diverse nation of 300 million people (compromise is the essential ingredient in legislative decision-making). And I’m not pushing for harmony: democracy depends on vigorous debate among competing views. The problem is not division but partisanship—advantage-seeking by private clubs whose central goal is to win political power. There are different ways to conduct elections and manage our government—and strengthen the democratic process. Here are some suggestions designed to turn our political system on its head, so that people, not parties, control our government.

[READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AND SIX STEPS TO FIX CONGRESS HERE]

Four Things Republicans Used To Believe

Four things Republicans used to believe
Commentary: The party used to be conservative, but not extreme
By Rex Nutting

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The Republican Party used to be a center-right party, conservative but mainstream. Now it's the home of extreme views.

Just how extreme have Republican leaders become? Here are four things mainstream Washington Republicans used to believe in, but no longer do.

Taxation: The Republican Party has long favored low tax rates as a way to encourage economic efficiency, but its leaders have always recognized that some taxation is necessary and good. Under the old Republican philosophy, the purpose of taxation is to raise the revenues needed by the government. They believed, in theory, that the government shouldn’t spend money it didn’t have, so sufficient revenues were needed.

Ronald Reagan cut taxes dramatically in his first year in office, but when the deficits rose, he smartly agreed to raise taxes 12 times, including a broad tax-reform bill that eliminated many loopholes and removed many provisions of the tax code that distorted economic incentives.

Today’s Republican Party has abandoned the principle that some taxation is necessary. The party has fully bought into the “starve-the-beast” rhetoric espoused by Grover Norquist and other anti-tax zealots. It has adopted a rigid libertarian philosophy that equates taxation to tyranny, which argues that the government has no right to your money. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean all taxes are immoral.

For today’s Republicans, the proper level of taxation is no longer a question of paying for needed services in the most efficient manner, but is strictly a moral and political matter. The proper level is zero, and only political obstacles stand in the way of achieving that goal.

The current Republican Party pretends to care about deficits, but it clearly doesn’t. It refuses to even consider raising taxes to reduce the deficit, even by closing inefficient loopholes that distort the economy. The Republican-controlled House passed the Ryan budget plan, which cuts taxes and spending by trillions of dollars but does almost nothing to reduce the deficit over the next 10 years

A strong presidency: Republicans have long favored a strong presidency, especially in foreign affairs. Under the administration of George W. Bush, high officials even promoted an extreme theory of a “unitary executive” that claimed that the president was largely above the law, and could do pretty much what he wanted, including ignoring national and international laws banning torture and unlawful imprisonment.

That’s a far cry from today, when Republicans in the House rushed to approve a resolution to condemn President Barack Obama’s involvement in Libya’s civil war, saying he didn’t consult with Congress enough. That was the same complaint some Republicans had about Democratic President Bill Clinton’s decision to fight in Kosovo.

The Libyan crisis put the Republicans in a terrible jam. Generally, they like a good fight, especially against a cartoonish bully like Moammar Gadhafi. When the rebellion first broke out, many Republicans demanded that the U.S. get involved in the civil war. But then Obama ordered a no-fly zone over Libya, just as Republicans had demanded. Nothing infuriates Republicans more than when Obama agrees with them.

It seems as if the Republicans do have a consistent principle when it comes to the president’s war-making powers: Republican presidents are the unquestioned commander-in-chief of the armed services and may start wars wherever they please, but Democratic presidents aren’t even qualified to order lunch, much less boss the troops around.

Protecting our planet: Republicans used to be conservatives in the truest sense of the word. They favored sensible laws to conserve the water, air and land. The Environmental Protection Agency was created by Republican President Richard Nixon.

For years, Republicans favored market-based solutions to environmental problems, rather than relying on government regulations and bureaucrats. For instance, many Republicans, including John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Mark Kirk, Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney, favored a plan to give businesses an incentive to reduce greenhouse gases by giving them the right to sell their rights to emit carbon dioxide — what’s known as the cap-and-trade plan to combat climate change.

Cap and trade is a Republican idea through and through; it was modeled on the successful cap-and-trade acid-rain program initiated by the White House under Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1990. Read the Political History of Cap and Trade.

Today’s Republicans reject almost all government actions to protect the environment, saying they kill jobs. They want to drill for oil and gas everywhere, they want the EPA to stop regulating pollution, and they categorically reject all scientific evidence for climate change. They are so dead-set against conservation that they voted to kill a regulation (approved under Republican President George W. Bush) requiring that Americans use light bulbs that actually emit more light than heat.

Universal health coverage: It’s no secret that today’s Republican Party loathes the idea of universal health-care coverage. It believes requiring Americans to buy coverage is unconstitutional and immoral. One of its most cherished goals is to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

But did you know that the Affordable Care Act — derisively known as ObamaCare — is essentially a Republican plan, modeled after a 1993 Republican health-care bill and the Massachusetts state law signed by Mitt Romney?

The ambition of the 1993 bill introduced by Rhode Island Republican John Chafee was to provide universal coverage, with all Americans required to buy insurance. The bill would have subsidized coverage for those with low incomes. It would have prohibited denial of coverage based on pre-existing conditions. And it would have fined employers who did not offer a qualified health-care plan. Sound familiar?

It was sponsored by 19 Republican senators, including Bob Dole, Pete Domenici, Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Bob Bennett, Dick Lugar, Alan Simpson and Ted Stephens.

You may not recognize all those names, but you should know this group was the Republican establishment in 1993. And that Republican establishment was far to the left of today’s Republican Party.

[READ THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE]

Economists find flaws in federal estimate of climate damage

Economists find flaws in federal estimate of climate damage
July 13, 2011

A new report concludes that each ton of carbon dioxide emitted in the atmosphere inflicts as much as $900 in environmental harm - almost 45 times the amount the federal government uses when setting regulations. The gap, advocates say, disguises the true value of emissions reductions.

By Douglas Fischer

Uncle Sam's estimate of the damage caused by each ton of carbon dioxide is fundamentally flawed and "grossly understates" the potential impacts of climate change, according to an analysis released Tuesday by a group of economists.

The study found the true cost of those emissions to be far beyond the $21 per ton derived by the federal government.

The figure, commonly known as the "social cost of carbon," is used by federal agencies when weighing the costs and benefits of emissions-cutting regulations, such as air conditioner efficiency standards and greenhouse gas emissions limits for light trucks.

A truer value, according to the Economics for Equity and the Environment Network, an organization of economists who advocate for environmental protection, could be as high as $900 per ton - equivalent to adding $9 to each gallon of gas. Viewed another way, with the United States emitting the equivalent of close to 6 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, the higher figure suggests that avoiding those emissions could save the nation $5.3 trillion annually, one-third of the nation's economic output.

'Dramatic simplifications'
A second, separate report released Tuesday buttressed the argument, finding that the government routinely underestimates the benefits of avoiding climate change when conducting cost-benefit analysis on regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

This second report, published jointly by the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank, and the Environmental Law Institute, found that government models on climate impacts often contain "dramatic simplifications and assumptions" - such as when calculating the social cost of carbon - that underplay the benefits society gains by curbing emissions.

Together, the two reports suggest policy makers are looking at a distorted picture as they assess the economic impacts of climate regulations.

The issue has gained urgency as efforts to create a cap-and-trade system or impose a carbon tax have stalled in Congress and federal rules - via the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency - become the primary vehicle for reducing emissions.

"Based on what we know today, the government's current range of social costs is very likely a serious underestimation of what we think those costs will be," said Kristen Sheeran, executive director of the E3 Network.

"It does not reflect the urgency of the climate crisis," she added. "It could lead to a degree of inaction on climate change that frankly is not supported by either the economics or the science at this point."

Costly impacts missed
A lower social cost of carbon - particularly when combined with an underestimate of the benefits of reducing emissions - makes justifying expensive emissions-cutting regulations much harder, advocates say.

But how to value the cost of climate change has proven to be a contentious issue.

Computer models attempting to assess the economic impacts of climate change are, in many cases, streamlined affairs that can only look at impacts broadly - at a scale of hundreds of miles, instead of, say, at a particular watershed, township, or even state.

Economists at the E3 Network, an umbrella group of about 200 economists, contend many potentially costly impacts are missed: Sweltering inland temperatures are averaged with cooler coastal weather. Or an intense, deadly rainstorm never shows up in a monthly average rainfall tally.

That leads to considerable uncertainty about the severity of the damages. For example, a global model used in part by the federal government to derive the $21-per-ton price finds that a 4.5ºF (2.5ºC) temperature rise will cost 1.8 percent of the world GDP. But University of California, Berkeley, economist Michael Hanemann, conducting a detailed review of that estimate as it applies just to the United States, found it should be four times as large.

Inflated assumptions
The point, say E3 economists, is that when the latest science on cost of climate extremes, the pace of global change, and how to account for those damages in the future are incorporated into the federal government's mathematics, the picture changes dramatically.

"Now that we know how much we could end up paying to endure the impacts of climate change, investing in reducing our emissions is clearly the prudent option," Frank Ackerman, an economist with the Stockholm Environment Institute and one of the report's two authors, said in a statement. "It's the difference between servicing your car, or waiting for it to break down on the highway."

Officials at the EPA were unavailable for comment Tuesday evening. Michael Greenstone, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor who led the federal effort to price the cost of climate impacts (pdf), was similarly unavailable.

In an interview earlier this year, however, Greenstone said the federal panel charged with pricing impacts did consider several studies that pegged the social cost of carbon closer to $3,000 per ton of carbon dioxide. But those higher values were based on unlikely assumptions, Greenstone said. When the panel held those assumptions and variables constant, the picture changed dramatically, and the federal estimate fell within the mid-range of the published literature, he said.

The federal panel published its $21-per-ton figure in February 2010 with a promise to reassess its work within two years. Sheeran noted 18 months have passed, with no evidence the estimate is being revised.

"It does not appear to be a priority within the administration," she said.

[READ THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE]

TIME Article on Elizabeth Warren

   From Time.com:

Elizabethan Drama
By MICHAEL CROWLEY Thursday, June 30, 2011

Here's some good news for consumers who feel themselves trampled by soulless banking and credit giants: on July 21, a new consumer-protection agency will open its doors in Washington, with the mission of making everything from mortgage documents to credit statements fairer and easier to understand and generally giving the little guy more power against the financial corporate juggernauts.

Here's the bad news: it's not clear that President Obama will be able to appoint anyone to run it.

It's an unexpected twist to a larger Obama policy achievement that has been slowly unraveling in recent months. Last July, Obama signed a sweeping bill, passed by the Democratic Congress, that overhauled Washington's regulation of Wall Street banks and other financial-services companies whose greed and risk taking helped wreck the U.S. economy. The idea was to prevent another financial crisis through tighter rules and closer supervision. A year later, Obama is fighting off emboldened Republicans who — backed by Wall Street money and lobbyists — are trying to gut the measure. The battle is raging mostly out of public view, in the realm of regulators and budgetmakers.
(See TIME's cover story: "The New Sheriffs of Wall Street.")

But a more visible showdown is unfolding over what some advocates say is the best feature of the Wall Street reform bill: a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau created to safeguard ordinary Americans from confusing, sneaky and downright dishonest tactics by the likes of banks, mortgage lenders and credit-card companies. Obama has hailed the office as "a new consumer watchdog with just one job: looking out for people — not big banks, not lenders, not investment houses ... as they interact with the financial system."

Now the fate of that watchdog is in doubt. At the center of the fight is Elizabeth Warren, a strong-willed Harvard Law professor who has become the most celebrated consumer advocate since Ralph Nader. Warren's supporters — and there are many, especially on the activist left — argue that she's the obvious choice to run the new bureau. In part that's because it's her brainchild: it was Warren who asked in a 2007 essay why consumers were protected from buying appliances with unseen faulty wiring that could burn down their homes but not from hidden terms, fees and risks that could sink their finances. Obama picked up her idea for a consumer-protection bureau and campaigned on it in 2008, even before the financial crisis gave the concept some urgency.
(See "The Elizabeth Warren Test.")

But Obama has yet to appoint Warren to the top job, and Republicans have long made clear that they will oppose Warren's appointment if he does. In May, they upped their ante. In a letter to Obama, 44 Senate Republicans — enough to filibuster any Senate action — declared that they would oppose any nominee to run the bureau unless Obama agreed to changes in its structure and funding. Democrats say those changes would effectively neuter the bureau and hand the financial industry yet another victory over the little guy.

That leaves Obama with three options, none of them appealing. He can muscle Warren into a short-term recess appointment this summer, an act sure to enrage Republicans and prevent Warren from serving a full term. He can officially nominate her, or someone else, and hope a public-relations effort will force the GOP to capitulate. Or he can try to cut a deal to sacrifice Warren but save her agency, which would surely disappoint his already restive liberal supporters. (One progressive group has warned that such a deal would show "complete and utter weakness.") At the moment, no one is sure what he'll do. Including Warren.

[READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE]

How Obama Can Fix the Housing Market and the Economy

From HuffingtonPost.com, By John R. Talbott:

Right now there are millions of residential properties that have been foreclosed on and are held by the banks. In addition there are tens of millions more homes that are underwater, that is the mortgage loan balance is greater than the current market value of the home. Such a large overhang of troubled mortgages and properties prevents the housing market from properly clearing and establishing a true floor to home prices. The uncertainty in the housing market as well as this debt overhang are the prime reasons consumers aren't buying, the economy is stalled and unemployment is stuck at a seemingly permanently high level. Companies are sitting on lots of idle cash, but before they invest it or begin to hire again they have to see consumer demand return for their products and services.

And Obama needs to do something about the economy if he hopes to win reelection in 2012. The big key electoral battleground states are already shaping up as Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, all of which are suffering from weak economies with high unemployment. Cutting taxes or increasing government spending doesn't seem to make much sense in a country drowning in government deficits and debt, especially given that previous tax cuts and government stimuli didn't seem to help much. The Fed has lowered short term interest rates about as low as they can go and no one seems enthused about the Fed pursuing any additional asset purchases financed with newly printed money as QE1 and QE2 seemed to have done little to help the economy but certainly harmed the value of the dollar. It would probably be prudent to look at ways to lower the deficit and get the debt under control, but it is hard to see how those efforts will do much to help stimulate consumer demand in the short run. What is Obama to do?

Before the invention of mortgage securitizations and CDO's in which mortgages are packaged by banks into securities and sold upstream to investors, mortgages were typically held on the books of the bank that issued them. This made it much easier for banks to negotiate changes in the terms of a troubled mortgage because any bank loss generated by forgiving a portion of the principal or interest on the mortgage loan would be offset by the fact that a successful restructuring of the loan would move the loan off the bank's list of non-performing or delinquent loans.

Securitization has broken this link and led banks to be very slow in offering any debt forgiveness on outstanding troubled loans. The reason is quite simple really. With securitization, one mortgage may be held by hundreds of different investors who are difficult to organize and have no real incentive to get the troubled loan off their books quickly, especially if it means recognizing a loss, much less do something solely to stimulate the general economy. There is an easy solution to this dilemma, but it needs the involvement of government to organize the effort as no single party in the securitization food chain has the proper motivation to get the ball rolling.

Right now, homebuyers with good credit and proper down payments can get thirty-year fixed-rate mortgages for around 4.5%. But this rate is not available to people with troubled mortgages or who are sitting on homes that are underwater and wish to remain in their homes. The government should step in and offer a 3% fixed-rate thirty-year mortgage to any person, regardless of credit worthiness or delinquency history, who is refinancing an existing underwater mortgage or any properly qualified person with good credit buying a foreclosed property from a bank. The new mortgage could be guaranteed by the U.S. Treasury and then packaged and sold upstream so the government's debt load is not increased.

Take a simple example. Imagine Joe and Mary bought their house for $400,000 in 2004 with no money down. Assume that the house today is worth $300,000. No bank would be anxious to refinance this $400,000 loan as the home is clearly worth less than the loan balance and the bank does not want to recognize a loss that may threaten its solvency. In addition, Joe and Mary may have financed their home purchase with an ARM so they may have seen their mortgage interest costs explode from an initial teaser rate of 2% or 3% to say 8% or 10% annually and their income just can't cover this level of interest expense.

Assume the Treasury steps in and offers Joe and Mary a refinancing deal in which they pay only a 3% fixed interest cost on a new, no closing costs $400,000 loan. There is now no risk to the homeowner that this rate may increase in the future. Joe and Mary can stop worrying about making their mortgage payments and go back to focusing on their real jobs which would have to help the overall economy. The plan should limit the refinancing to the currently amortized amount of the original loan and avoid any increases to the original principal amount the bank may have added on to cover penalty fees, delinquency charges, missed interest payments, deferred rate increases, etc.

Think of the benefits of such a deal to everyone involved.

• The homeowner is given comfort that his rate will be fixed at a low affordable rate and not be subject to any future increases thus decreasing the likelihood of a possible default in the future.
• The homeowner avoids a default which can damage his or her credit rating and avoids the trauma of possibly having to claim personal bankruptcy.
• The banks and investors who hold the mortgage get out without taking a capital loss so the financial system is not further compromised. Banks, insurance companies and pension funds who hold this mortgage paper can all breathe easier.
• The government has no additional annual cost to carrying these mortgages as the 3% interest they receive on the mortgage more than adequately covers their 3% cost of borrowing. There is no increase in the current government deficit as a result of this plan.
• There is no loan forgiveness for the overaggressive homebuyer. He or she still needs to pay off the full amount of his or her original loan so other homeowners who were more conservative in their borrowing will not feel like this is a unfair giveaway to aggressive homebuyers.
• Entire neighborhoods should improve as a large number of underwater mortgages are refinanced and many foreclosed properties find new owners.
• The economy should improve as debt burdens on consumers ease substantially, the housing price decline moderates and the financial sector is strengthened as it finally deals with its bad loan exposure.

Of course, all risk has not been completely eliminated. There is still a risk that Joe and Mary may default on the new loan. This is problematic because the face value of the loan, $400,000, is still greater than the current market value of the home, $300,000. But this risk is minimized because the carrying cost to Joe and Mary has been so reduced and fixed as to make it very desirable for them to want to stay in their home. They aren't going to get this low of rate if they decide to sell the house and move.
You could lower this default risk even further by making the new loan clearly recourse to Joe and Mary's other assets in case of default or by making the new loan an interest only loan. By going the interest only route, the $400,000 repayment becomes a balloon payment due in thirty years further lowering Joe and Mary's carrying costs thus increasing its affordability and reducing the risk of default. Given any reasonable forecast of future inflation, such a repayment amount should be easily covered by the home value at that time in the future. As a matter of fact, in this example, if general inflation averages anything more than 1% a year for the next thirty years the home value catches up to the loan balance.

Qualified homebuyers with good credit who wish to buy foreclosed properties directly from the banks should be offered similar payment terms as this would help clean up the overhang of unsold and foreclosed properties on the market. Also, if Joe and Mary wanted to just get out and sell their home for less than the mortgage balance, the prospective home purchaser could be offered these attractive financing terms so long as he or she met all other credit and down payment requirements. Here, the transactions should occur at the fair market value of the home so the banks would have to recognize some loss, but much less than they otherwise would have without this plan.

This economy is not going to bounce back. We had too big a bubble in too big a sector of our economy to ever bounce back to the high prices, crazy borrowing and wild consumption that existed before the crisis. But if Obama doesn't do something to address the debt problems homeowners and the financial system face, the housing market will lie dormant for years, the economy will crawl along anemically for decades and Obama himself may join the ranks of the unemployed in 2012.

[READ THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE]

What They Don't Know About the Deficit

   From CQ.com:

CQ WEEKLY – COVER STORY
June 11, 2011 – 10:32 a.m.
What They Don't Know About the Deficit
By Fred Barbash, CQ Staff

With Washington tied in knots over the budget deficit, pollsters lately have been trying to get a sense of exactly where voters stand on the issue. What they’re finding would not be terribly helpful to those trying to solve the problem.

That’s because many Americans’ perception of how federal spending is divvied up is just plain wrong. In fact, if their answers about the federal budget were even close to correct, slashing the deficit would be a breeze.

In a recent CNN-Opinion Research survey, 30 percent of the respondents guessed that a fifth or more of the budget goes for foreign humanitarian and development aid. The real figure is closer to six-tenths of 1 percent.

In a Bloomberg survey, 70 percent said cutting foreign aid would make a large dent in the deficit. Fewer than half said the same about cutting Medicare.

About 22 percent of the respondents, when surveyed, thought the Corporation for Public Broadcasting consumes more than a tenth of the budget. The reality is closer to a hundredth of a percent.

And about a quarter of those in the survey believed that more than 10 percent of taxpayer money pays for housing assistance for the poor. The real figure is about 1.2 percent.

At a time when the deficit is driving every debate in Washington, the fiscal intelligence of the citizenry is troubling but not surprising to experts on public opinion. Mostly, pollsters say, people are in a state of confusion on a broad variety of issues.

It isn’t that they don’t care. Between 80 percent and 90 percent of those responding in most surveys see the deficit as a “major problem.” It’s that they don’t know. Not knowing in America is an old habit that should have faded over the years, given Americans’ educational opportunities and access to information, but hasn’t, according to those who study public opinion.

Failed quizzes about the budget only scratch the surface. Research demonstrates fundamental misunderstandings across the spectrum about government, about which level of government does what and which official is accountable for what. Presidents get blamed for local problems, mayors for national problems. Incumbent office holders can even get a boost on voting day if their local team wins a major championship just prior to an election.

This ignorance creates a vacuum that politicians and activists are all too happy to fill — with their own spin.

Multiple versions of reality or wishful thinking distort the debate, particularly on issues such as government spending. “It explains why people say, ‘We don’t like deficits,’ and on the other hand say, ‘Don’t cut anything and don’t raise taxes,’” said Bryan Caplan, a George Mason University scholar and author of an oft-cited book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.”

It explains why many think that “raising taxes on rich people will do it” on the deficit, says Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. “Some knowledge about wealth might change that attitude.”

The fact that there’s so little understanding of the basic facts means there’s little agreement on what is actually being debated, complicating matters further. “The lack of an agreed-upon playing field makes the deficit debate a disaster,” says Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who studies public opinion. “People are talking past each other.”

Confusion is the norm for many Americans, and every month brings another illustration in the form of surveys showing just what Americans don’t know. One of the most jaw-dropping recent results came from a Kaiser Family Foundation survey in which nearly half the respondents could not say whether the Obama administration’s health care law was still law. A quarter thought it had been repealed. Another didn’t know whether it existed or not.

A trove of data just before and after the 2010 midterm election showed serious misunderstandings among voters about virtually every issue they claimed to care about, from the economy to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the economic stimulus bill and the 2008 financial industry bailout.

On the economy, almost two-thirds of voters surveyed in a Bloomberg poll believed incorrectly that the economy hadn’t grown during 2010, when, in fact, it grew all that fiscal year.

In the immediate wake of the 2010 election, fewer than half of Americans, according to a Pew poll, didn’t know exactly how it came out, whether Republicans had won the House, the House and the Senate, or neither.

The more systemic problem, and one that disturbs academics and others who study this phenomenon, is the gap demonstrated by a series of studies of what citizens need to know to hold officials accountable: What level of government is responsible for what; who has control over certain events, and who does not.

This vacuum in understanding, say public opinion experts, lets officials off the hook and also licenses their finger-pointing exercises as they try to shift responsibility elsewhere.

Overwhelmed with Information

It isn’t news that the public is badly informed on public affairs. The dark arts practiced by political consultants are predicated on the idea that some proportion of voters will believe almost anything in part because their knowledge is limited. Thus the standard campaign ad can treat opinion as fact just as voters do in surveys: “Republicans voted to end Medicare” is one example; Democrats passing a “government takeover” of health care is another.

Nor is it a revelation that voters often choose “facts” to suit their opinions. The notion that public broadcasting eats up a sizable chunk of the budget gets life from Republican efforts to eliminate appropriations for National Public Radio. “Conservatives have heard a lot about this on Fox and so are very energized about this issue,” says Kohut.

But civic-minded activists, indeed generations of civics teachers, used to hope that as people became better educated and as news became more accessible, America’s political IQ would improve. That does not appear to have happened.

There’s been no formal measure of public ignorance over time since the 1950s. But Kohut said he did a study in the 1990s showing that young people “knew less about what was going on in the world than they had in the ’60s and ’70s. Since then we’ve gone through a coaxial revolution and a digital revolution of news flows, and the levels of information are the same as they were in the early ’90s.”

Indeed, scholars and surveys suggest that the proliferation of new media outlets — cable television news, the Internet, Twitter and all the rest — have become part of the problem.

“The level of information saturation in the highly advanced economies is not all a good thing,” said Clay Ramsay, research director for the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland. “If you have so many choices” of information, “your sorting problem is increased to the point where you don’t have time for it. You have your kids. You have your marriage. And you have your job. And then you have some time left over for the wider world. If you are constantly trying to thrash your way through extravagant competing claims because no one is helping you filter it out, your ability to see the world gets impaired.”

Studies by Pew and others have shown that people increasingly congregate primarily or exclusively at news sources they know will cater to their existing beliefs. Thus, they are less and less likely to hear information that conflicts with their point of view.

Research by Nyhan and others has confirmed empirically that the speed and ubiquity of new media sources, combined with mastery of the field by partisan activists, has brought the level of misinformation in America to new heights.

Nyhan studied the origin and spread of the claim that the Democratic health care bill included “death panels,” which would determine who would get treated and who would not. In the study, titled “Why the ‘Death Panel’ Myth Wouldn’t Die,” he wrote that as politics has become more polarized, “legislators, pundits and interest groups have waged a vicious communications war against each other, making misleading claims about the other side and its policy agenda. These claims are then rapidly disseminated to the public via both the mainstream media, which often reports misleading rhetoric in a ‘he said, she said’ format, and the growing array of talk radio hosts, cable news shows and websites that cater to the demand for preference-consistent news and (mis)information.”

People tend not to engage on issues, if they do at all, unless and until they feel they have a direct stake and a direct impact on the outcome. “To a certain degree, the public has the policy world and politics on a need-to-know basis,” says Kohut. When people have a need to get interested, he says, they get informed.

Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University who has researched voter ignorance extensively, says the voter who chooses not to know is behaving rationally. Individuals will do a lot of research in advance of decisions they really control, such as whether to buy a new car. But they have miniscule control over who gets elected to the presidency or to Congress, and thus choose not to spend a lot of time prepping in advance of election day. There’s no incentive, Somin says, to become informed just to be a “better voter.”

Congress itself hasn’t done anything to improve voter understanding of the issues, particularly when it involves the complexities of the federal budget.

Political stalemate in Washington means that the annual appropriations process has broken down more often than not in the last decade. Lawmakers use continuing resolutions and omnibus spending bills rather than the more painstaking and deliberative process they designed for themselves to use.

So the civics class notion that the “president proposes and Congress disposes” in federal spending is very far from reality. It’s hard enough for close observers of Congress to understand, much less people watching from afar.

Another distortion comes from the fact that much of the debate over the budget and spending happens around the edges. Two-thirds of all spending is mandatory — meaning interest payments on the debt and entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security — while only a third is spending that can be readily adjusted up or down on a yearly basis. Lawmakers are starting to talk about the need to get Medicare costs under control, but until now much of the noise in budget debates has been over a small slice of the pie. So that small slice takes on outsized importance in the minds of voters. Earmarks are a more minuscule sliver, and they have generated some of the loudest fights.

Another reason the voter may be confused is the sheer complexity of the issues at hand. If Congress decides not to raise the debt ceiling, the perception that the United States is in imminent danger of default might cause a spike in interest rates and do real harm to the economy. On the other hand, no one really knows what would happen, because the government has never before defaulted.

Studying the Ignorant Voter

The study of voter ignorance, which began in the 1940s, has become a modest industry in the academic world. Conservatives over the years associated the “ignorant voter” idea with supposedly elitist and paternalistic liberals. But libertarians such as Caplan and Somin have taken up the subject eagerly.

“Before you study public opinion, you ask why things aren’t better,” says Caplan. “After you study public opinion, you ask why things aren’t worse.”

Somin writes in the draft of his forthcoming book, “Democracy and Political Ignorance,” that the “sheer depth of most individual voters’ ignorance is shocking to many observers not familiar with the research.” He sees public ignorance as “a type of pollution that infects the political system rather than our physical environment.”

Much of the recent research by Somin, Caplan and others does indeed go to the heart of the political system, shedding light on why political professionals do what they do and why it so often works.

Nyhan and Jason Reifler of Georgia State University showed in an ambitious experiment how resistant voters can be to adjusting their version of reality even when presented with the corrective facts. Non-truth sticks, especially when it reinforces an existing bias.

That’s why misleading ads, Nyhan said in an interview, are so popular with consultants — and even more so when such ads create a controversy, which serves to reinforce the falsehood. The consultants’ position “may take a negative hit,” he says, “but they know that once these things are out there, they’re hard to walk back.”

As proof, he says the “death panel” myth persists to this day.

While voter biases reinforce misinformation, voter ignorance is what licenses politicians and their operatives to dish it out. “People who are insiders understand what they can get away with,” says Caplan.

The frailties of homo Americanus are on wider display than they have ever been, thanks to frequency and repetitiveness of polls in recent years. The Pew Research Center’s regular surveys of political knowledge has become a standard index on the subject.

The last one, in March, showed that:

• 43 percent of the public didn’t know the unemployment rate.

• 57 percent didn’t know the name of the Speaker of the House.

• 60 percent didn’t know that most U.S. electricity comes from coal.

• 62 percent didn’t know that Republicans had a majority in the House.

• 71 percent didn’t know that the single program on which the government spends the most money is Medicare.

WorldPublicOpinion.org, a project based at the University of Maryland, conducted a similar study in December 2010. It found “strong evidence that voters were substantially misinformed on many of the issues prominent in the election campaign,” including the economic stimulus law, the health care overhaul, the state of the economy, climate change, campaign contributions and President Obama’s birthplace.

Voters uniformly misattributed the origins of both the financial and auto bailouts, saying Obama started both, when in fact both began under President George W. Bush.

Only 10 percent of the voters knew that their taxes had gone down in recent years. About 38 percent of them believed they had gone up during Obama’s presidency.

The Larger Problem

More revealing is the accountability gap that researchers documented most recently in an unpublished paper titled, “Systematically Biased Beliefs about Political Influence,” by Caplan, Somin, Eric Cramton of the University of Canterbury and Wayne A. Grove of Lemoyne College in Syracuse.

What we found,” said Grove, an economist, “is that if you look item by item at the budget, the economy, and so on, you see that the public does not distinguish the role of Congress from the role of the president from the role of state and local officials.” As a result, he said, “it’s hard to hold politicians accountable,” and the politicians know it, he added.

In addition to being wrong about who does what, voters tend to be wrong about the capacity of officials to influence events over which they have little or no control.

Politicians, political operatives, campaign advertising gurus and pollsters have operated for decades on this very assumption: that the electorate indiscriminately hands out blame and credit. Grove believes this phenomenon bears some responsibility for the deficit, for the intense focus now on spending and taxes, and for the deadlock as Republicans and the White House grapple with the debt ceiling.

Grove credits tea party activists with breaking the accountability code by focusing so much attention on the deficit, and by pointing directly at Congress, which is responsible for the red ink.

Grover Norquist, president of the anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform, also illustrates how a single savvy activist, who understands government, can effectively use that knowledge to inform and mobilize voters who otherwise might stay on the sidelines.

Since Ronald Reagan was president, Norquist has made his organization a powerful force in Republican politics largely by eliciting from candidates signed pledges not to support any measure that looks like a tax increase, whatever it is called. Although the average American might not understand the intricacies of the tax code, they do understand a simple statement like that.

All but 14 sitting Republicans in the House and Senate have signed Norquist’s pledge, and he has a proven track record of mobilizing voters against anyone who breaks it. Among those he is credited with helping to defeat was President George Bush in 1992, who famously broke his “read my lips” pledge against a tax increase.

In recent months, Norquist has figured prominently in the deficit debate, feuding with some GOP senators who think he’s getting in the way of a possible compromise that would bring Republicans on board to raise the debt ceiling by Aug. 2 to avoid what Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner says would be catastrophic consequences.

GOP leaders are demanding significant spending cuts as a condition of support for the debt limit increase, and most say they’re unwilling to make revenue measures, or tax increases, part of the mix. Democrats say they’ll talk about cuts if Republicans show more flexibility on revenue.

But when some Senate Republicans, including Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn, signaled flexibility on taxes, saying they would consider eliminating some tax deductions and credits as a way to simplify the code and rid it of what they call unneeded “tax expenditures,” Norquist said he would treat those as pledge violations. He certainly isn’t the primary cause of the budget deadlock, but some argue that he contributes to it.

“Simplification of the tax code was something Republicans have talked about for a long time,” says Maryland’s Ramsay. “But Grover Norquist says ‘no.’ The question is why is that so potent. . . . Where does this depth of perception that he has this power come from? The biggest political decision was Grover Norquist sitting alone and deciding that reforming the tax code consisted of a tax increase. Had he decided the other way, the road might have been open” to agreement.

Norquist, in an interview, counters that he isn’t standing in the way of a deal, only of a deal that includes tax increases. “There will be a deal,” he said. “There just won’t be tax increases.” And he took issue with the suggestion that he personally is such a “potent” force. The power comes from the pledge, he says. “If I said tomorrow that we should raise taxes, it wouldn’t matter” because the pledges would still be in effect.

What the pledge does, he says, is to save voters time and effort they would have to expend studying issues to determine what a candidate stands for. “The pledge reduces the cost of being an informed citizen,” he says. Taxation “is an issue that tells you everything else you need to know about the person. If a candidate won’t raise taxes, he won’t be a spender either.”

Activists such as Norquist may be simplifying things for voters. But some believe that the black-and-white inflexible distinctions they draw discourage political deal-making in Congress, Grove said. Meanwhile, citizens who might support compromise largely remain in the dark and on the sidelines. Recent polls do in fact show the public to be more receptive than Congress to a compromise of tax measures and spending cuts.

Kohut says, in his experience, voters ultimately catch up. But it can take time. He cites George W. Bush’s proposal when he first ran for president to create personal accounts under Social Security. “When we started testing the idea of privatizing Social Security, the Bush initiative, we were getting 70 percent of the public saying they liked the idea. Once Bush wins and begins to talk about it, that 70 goes down to a 40. So you have to be very leery about asking questions about things people haven’t thought about,” Kohut says.

“Opinions do change when people get information,” he says, “and they will get the information on things they’ve not thought about when they see an opportunity, or when they feel threatened.”

[READ THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE]