Greg Sargent’s The Plum Line blog is quickly becoming my favorite Washington Post reading, which is to say I turn to it more often than Ezra Klein’s excellent Wonk Blog. Sargent just seems to write more about the stuff I’m interested in. Klein writes a lot more about economics, but I’m afraid i read a good deal too much economics elsewhere. Anyway. This morning Sargent is focused on gun control.

He notes a couple of articles about where the White House is regarding an assault weapons ban. The New York Times claims that they are planning to dump it and focus on background checks and high capacity magazines. But Sam Stein claims they are still pushing the ban on these guns.

I think the focus on assault weapons is misplaced. I understand that they look scary. On a recent trip to Mexico, seeing all the military with these kinds of guns was intimidating. But like syringes with drug addiction, they are just provocative and indicative, not the problem itself. To me, the thing that I most associate with assault rifles are the 30-round banana clips.

Sure, assault rifles tend to shoot huge rounds with enormous amounts of gun powder. But I think we can all agree that the main problem is the bullet itself. A handgun with a 30-round clip would have done a similar amount of damage. The biggest problem is that a shooter can continue to shoot—30 times!—without reloading or grabbing another gun.

There is also the issue that “assault weapon” is not the most well defined a term. It’s not that I think these are great guns that we ought to promote. In fact, they are designed to appeal to a certain kind of thinking. We don’t need more people thinking we are on the verge of revolution. But the design of these guns is essentially a cosmetic issue.

Given that we will be limited in what we can do about guns in this country, I think we need to first determine what will be the most effective measures. If I had to pick one change, I would require a two week waiting period for guns—especially handguns—at the national level. Currently, very few states require any waiting period at all. Gun suicides are still the number one problem and waiting periods help reduce these because, as they say, “Suicide is a long term solution to a short term problem.”[1]

Additionally, I do not see any need for large-capacity magazines. Most often, a limit of ten rounds is proposed. I think we ought to take this down further, but I don’t claim to be an expert. I’d also like to see something done about handguns. But I’m not suggesting banning them. I just don’t think we could get such a thing through Congress, much less the courts.[2] But I do think that public education campaigns could convince a lot of people that their handguns are more likely to harm them than save them. Again: my concern is overwhelmingly suicide but also accidents.

We can ban assault weapons. I’m not against it. But doing so is like getting China to more rigorously enforce our intellectual property laws: it makes more effective policies less likely. Let’s face it: all options are most definitely not on the table. I haven’t heard any discussion of handguns, which are responsible for most gun homicides and suicides. Instead, it is all about assault rifles, which are actually a fairly minor problem. And that’s fine: death is death. But I also haven’t heard much talk of waiting periods. And that’s criminal.

Afterword

One of the main writers on The Plum Line blog is Jonathan Bernstein. But I found out yesterday that all the links to his personal page go instead to Robert Samuelson’s page. People may know the foolish and evil Mr. Samuelson from his repeated apologia for conservative efforts to screw the poor. I alerted Sargent to this fact and he is working on it. But it will be a big job; I don’t envy his website tech!

[1] I don’t mean to suggest that suicide is always irrational or that it ought to be criminalized. I do think, however, that the vast majority of suicides are mistakes and that as a society, we should do everything we can to help those unfortunates who are driven to it.

[2] It is not true that the Second Amendment only applies to militias. Since around the time of the Civil War, the courts have interpreted the Constitution to mean that individuals have a right to own guns. This right is not going to change unless we change the Constitution. Thus: this right is not going to change.

[Update: see my article Creepy Christian Mingle Girl Not So Creepy. It turns out that this model is actually a reasonably attractive young woman. I still don’t understand why the company went with that image. The best looking people in the world look creepy if you photograph them wrong. I thought that professional advertisers understood that. -FM]

This image is from a major ad campaign for the Christian dating service Christian Mingle. That’s great. I actually think that religious compatibility is important, although it can be a problem with raising children. (I don’t think that children should be forced into a religion when they are too young to know what is going on.) But this ad? Really?!

I’m usually very open minded about attractiveness. In general, I think all young people look attractive. But this woman? She looks like she is either the unfortunate victim of an evil plastic surgeon or the resident of a galaxy far far away. She also has so much make-up on, I’m sure anyone who kissed her would choke on the dust.

Speaking of creepy Christians, have you seen the Tim Tebow TiVo commercials? There is one where the kids talk about how their mother gets all hot and bothered regarding Tebow. What’s more, their father is jealous. Is that really in keeping with Christianity? I mean, you know: the tenth commandment and all? Don’t covet your neighbors pig or ass or abs?

The truth is that when Christians enters the marketplace, they tend to make a mess of it. Either because they think creepy blond girls are attractive or because they show that their religion doesn’t mean much to them. Regardless, I hope they pair up and don’t procreate.

John Nichols gives us twelve reasons to pause over the Jack Lew nomination for Treasury Secretary, in his The Nation column yesterday. I’ve already said that I’m fine with the Lew nomination, although I haven’t looked into it that much. But my thinking is generally that the president should be able to have the cabinet that he wants. In fact, I would go further. After listen to all of the Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination hearings, I concluded that as much as I hated the man, I thought he should be confirmed. We get a choice when we elect the president. If we are stupid enough to vote in Reagan, we deserve what we get. And if we elect a spineless promoter of the status quo, then we should not complain when he surrounds himself with the more reasonable members of the Washington establishment.

I think that Nichols’ problem with Lew is the same as his problem with the Clinton administration. And I agree with him! Two major mistakes of that time were NAFTA and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. But there are two big problems with laying this on Lew. First, Lew wasn’t that big a player in the Clinton administration, and anyway, the policies were Clinton’s, not Lew’s. Second, Obama is no more liberal on these policies than Clinton was. The truth is that the Democrats have been unable to elect even a marginally liberal president since Johnson, and I would argue all the way back to Roosevelt.

But that doesn’t mean I think we should just (as Nichols says) “rubber stamp” Lew. I would really like to hear him answer all of Nichols’ questions. Nichols pulls no punches:

If I thought that any Democrats might ask questions like these, I’d be glued to C-SPAN. But alas, I think it will not be so. Instead, we’re likely to get a lot of conservative questions about whether Lew is now or has ever been a member of the human race. That alone would disqualify him in the eyes of most Republicans.

Any concerns I may have about Lew as a liberal are trumped by this one fact: he can’t possibly be worse than Tim Geithner.

You have probably seen the commercial below for Merit Gold. I am not putting this ad here because I think you should invest in gold. For the normal investor, gold is always a stupid investment. It is just one bubble after another. You would be as smart to invest in some ponzi scheme. It isn’t because gold is necessarily a bad investment. The problem is all the nutjobs who invest in it. You start with really ignorant but popular people like Glenn Beck and Ron Paul and you end up with a lot of irrational exuberance.

This ad is interesting in a couple of ways. The first is how it pushes fear. It seems like a trailer for a disaster film. “What’s a billion dollars look lie? What about a trillion? What about our national debt? It’s massive!” This is especially funny if you have seen the skit from That Mitchell & Webb Look about the guys giving away massive yachts. But even still, it is completely over the top. We see the stacks of money piling up until they overwhelm us. Run!

The second part is the false but common belief that government debt causes inflation. “Whereas the national debt has tripled in the last ten years, gold has gone up more than 600%.” The implication is that if the national debt has tripled, the value of the dollar must have gone down. This isn’t the case, but even more so, it doesn’t really make sense as a blanket concept. The value of the dollar is only relative to other currencies. The dollar is up compared to the Euro, for example. But more than this, one could have made similar claims about real estate in 2006. If gold has gone up more than 600% in the last decade, we know one thing: now is not the time to buy it.

But this is a perfect ad for the kind of people who buy gold. It cleverly feeds the conceits and exploits the ignorance of the Tea Party crowd. And you can hardly blame these people for falling for the line. Stacks of gold look so much more impressive in your bomb shelter than piles of cash.

Afterword

I have some advice for those survivalists out there. If you’re serious, don’t stockpile gold; it will be worthless in the post-society dystopia. Stockpile drugs: opioids and antibiotics. Those will be worth a fortune.

MSN Money sends us to an article telling us about 5 Beers Americans Aren’t Drinking. That’s the kind of title that is hard to resist—at least if you are a beer drinker, or even more, a beer snob. Which I am.

According to the article, sales of “traditional, full-calorie beers” are declining. A lot. In 5 years, Budweiser has sold 7 million barrels less per year in the United States. How much is that? Anheuser-Busch (the brewer of Budweiser) produced 125 million barrels in 2007—that is all brands for all the world.

Why would these beers be dropping in sales? The article doesn’t actually say. But I think I know. People who want to drink a real beer have decided to, you know, drink a real beer. Budweiser is about as expensive as good beer. So there really is no reason to drink a watery, high calorie beer when you could drink a beer you can sink your teeth into. Maybe Pete’s Wicked Ale or Arrogant Bastard. Or if you are on the other side of the divide, you could drink Bud Light or whatever.

You can see this in the top five beers Americans no longer drink:

1. Michelob
2. Michelob Light
3. Budweiser Select
4. Milwaukee’s Best
5. Old Milwaukee

I know, two of those are light beers, which kind of goes again the narative of the article. I assume it is because there are just too many light beer brands on the market. Of the remaining beers, one isn’t bad: Michelob. I actually used to buy Michelob Dark. But I haven’t drunk even it since I was in graduate school.

Anyway, I think this shows that the beer market has divided itself between people who want to drink beer and people who are just too embarrassed to order a wine cooler. But I’m feeling generous tonight. Mr. President, if you’re reading this, it’s okay to ask for what you really want. That Bud Light isn’t fooling anyone.

Afterword

I’m not to fond of cops, but at that beer summit, the only one who had a decent beer was Crowley, who had a Blue Moon.

Also: Lowenbrau is a decent beer and they had a great ad campaign long before I knew that:

Let us give a little thought to Jack Lew. Obama has nominated him to replace Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary. The Republicans are afraid—very afraid. How can Obama choose Jack Lew?!

And he is a scary guy, I can tell you that. Last year, Eric Cantor told Politico, “No one was more prepared and more in tune with the numbers than Jack Lew.” This was in an article titled, Jack Lew: A Liberal GOP Says It Trusts. So you know: this is Freddy Krueger scary. No. Wait. Not Freddy Krueger scary; Kermit the Frog scary. When it comes to Obama nominees, it doesn’t take much to scare the Republicans.

Jonathan Bernstein over at The Plum Line tells us that Jeff Sessions (Fucktard from Alabama) is against Lew becoming Treasury Secretary. But not because Lew is a drunk or a philanderer. No, Sessions thinks he doesn’t have the “gavitas” for the job. What this means is just that he’s against him because that’s what you do to all the nominations of a Democratic president—especialla un oo’s a colored. Bernstein is nicer, “Or, as Kevin Drum figures, it’s just that Lew insists on using real math during budget negotiations.” That’s even worse: a edacated colored nominee.

Bernstein argues that the real problem is that congressional Republicans have abandoned norms. Until Obama we elected, it was accepted that the president should be allowed to have the cabinet that he chose. But no longer. This is what I call the Republicans becoming a revolutionary party. As I wrote before:

I’m not sure what we are to do about this other than try to get out the vote and generally make these people pay for their reactionary governing. For the time being we pretty much have to accept this madness and the fact that it is based on nothing except obstruction for the sake of obstruction.

Massimo Calabresi over at Time has a different take. His article is chalked full of apologetics, but he does paint a compelling picture of Lew. I don’t think the right’s opposition to him is based upon facts, but Lew is a progressive. I think that conservatives could find anyone this side of Hitler and Stalin’s satanic love child wanting. But you can see how a man like this would be poison to them:

Bottom line: we should support Lew for Treasury Secretary.

Afterword

It is widely know by people who really need to get a hobby that Jack Lew has an unusual signature made up primarily of circles. Yahoo! was nice enough to create an app that signs any name like he would. Here are a few that I did.

Okay. Okay. So Lew is a little weird…

Update (12 January 2012 7:53 am)

For a more critical take on Lew, see 12 Questions for Mr. Lew.

Eduardo Porter is an economics writer for the New York Times. He wrote an amazing article on Tuesday, Health Care and Profits, a Poor Mix. Despite the title, it is not only about healthcare. It is more about how the United States has embraced the idea that markets work “magic” and if you want to reduce the cost of a government service: privatize it!

This is a religious believe on the right. And it isn’t confined to the supposed free market. Paul Ryan’s big idea for Medicaid is to “block grant” it. What this means is just to shove some money at the states and let them deal with it. Now I want to be clear: the intention is to destroy such programs. But the argument that is made (because “fuck the poor” is not a very compelling argument) is that the states will “experiment” and find innovative ways to make healthcare (or whatever) cheaper. It doesn’t work. Not only is there no evidence that states are more effective than the the federal government, business is also not more effective.

What Porter shows is our experience over the last 25 years has shown just the opposite:

Indeed, the use of HMOs and other private care for Medicare has only increased costs. But it is even worse than the costs would indicate. Porter describes a study of tranquilizer use at for-profit and nonprofit hospitals. Doses given at the for-profit hospitals were four times as high. This was because the for-profit hospitals cut staff to the bone and it is easiest to manage patients who are asleep most of the time.

Let’s think about this. We get worse healthcare for more money via the private healthcare systems. We get corruption and abuse of the poor with our private bail bond system. We get an unstable economic system and higher income inequality because of our under-regulated banks. Yet conservatives are taken seriously everywhere spouting policies that have clearly failed. In fact, much of the “liberal” Democratic Party is devoted to these same failed policies.

To do a riff on Brad DeLong’s line: why oh why can’t we have a better government?

H/T Dean Baker

There is a lot of talk about minting platinum coins. And an increasing amount of talk about the Treasury issuing IOUs (Krugman calls them Moral Obligation Coupons). Jonathan Chait gives a good overview of these ideas. He notes that the coin option solves the debt ceiling issue forever, but it will surely cause the Republicans to react in an even crazier way. (I’m not sure we would notice—they’re already negligibly close to the asymptote.) The IOUs only solve the problem temporarily, but they have advantages like not seeming like such an outrageous thing as the coin and putting pressure on the Republicans from the business community.

I haven’t written at all about these potential solutions to the Debt Ceiling crisis because I can’t get beyond the fact that this is a non-issue and should be treated as such. Obama’s initial plan that he laid out in early December at the Business Roundtable is what we should be doing. We don’t negotiate with terrorist and they are a hell of a lot more rational than the Republican Party. Why are we negotiating with the House Republicans? Unfortunately, since those fine words at the Roundtable, Obama has shown that he is still 50 shades of weakness.

Noam Scheiber provides more evidence of this in The New Republic, writing, “It suggested that even if Obama plays his cards exceedingly well in the run-up to the debt-limit showdown, he could still come away with a worse deal than he deserves because of his willingness to make concessions in the closing moments.” He explains how the White House got a worse Fiscal Cliff deal by screwing Harry Reid. Read the article for the whole story—it is really interesting. Scheiber sums up:

And that leads us to today where the Republicans have every reason in the world to think that Obama will blink. And that leads either to an economic catastrophe or Obama taking a bad deal. Well, bad for the American people. Based on the last four years, I would say that Obama is itching to cut Social Security and Medicare. That would cement him legacy as a Very Serious Person. And you know the definition of a VSP: someone who does no good at all by inflicting large amounts of pain on the poor. You know: a dick.

But whether Obama is a dick or just an incompetent (or both), it is all the same in the end. Right now, the American economy is on the verge of a decent recovery. This stuff—the Republican hostage taking and Obama’s anemic response to it—really does hurt us.

Update (10 January 2013 11:39 am)

Ezra Klein says we shouldn’t go with the platinum coin option. I agree:

I found this on Joey deVilla. It was reportedly found by a waiter. I’m inclined to think that it is the real deal because it includes the bit about Prop 30 in California.

What I think it most interesting is how petty this is. All those years of reading Shakespeare warped my mind into thinking that the wealthy ought to be above this. Of course, all my experience in life indicates that the rich are fairly miserly. When they do give, they tend to be ostentatious about it.

Think about this for a moment. The federal income tax is only going up 4.6 percentage points on income over $450,000. The Prop 30 tax is going up roughly 1 percentage point on income over a quarter million. This is no justification for not tipping, because a rich person’s income devoted to eating certainly is included in the income that is not taxed more. Additionally, the total tax rate hike on this upper income only goes up by about 6%. This is much less than the 15% minimum expected tip.

There is another side to this, of course. If you really were limiting your expenses, you would not stop tipping. You would eat at cheaper restaurants. Or eat out less. But let us not forget that it is very likely that this card wasn’t left by a rich person at all. It was just as likely left by a conservative trying to make a point. You know the kind: Joe the Plumber, who was so concerned about paying taxes on income he had never come close to making.

Whoever left this card is just being a dick. And I even tend to think that he (You just know it’s a guy, right?) will soon get over it. Then he’ll go back to tipping. But I tend to think he is a pretty bad tipper anyway. Most people tip well because they want to be liked. People who want to be liked try not to be dicks; they don’t go out of their way to be one.

Afterword

Note also the, “I wish it didn’t have to be this way for both of us.” This is definitely a dick way of saying, “I know it is because of poor losers like you that my taxes went up!”

I took my brother to the movies today. Normally, that would lead to another Marxist film review. But because of a scheduling conflict, we were forced to miss Jack Reacher and instead see Parental Guidance. Actually, this is my kind of movie: I really like sentimental comedies. And it was okay—pretty much exactly what you expect of a film like that.

The plot is typical: little known family member comes to babysit. Hilarity ensues. And it ends with everyone learning deep lessons about acceptance and forgiveness and the importance of the shot heard ’round the world. The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!

Two things struck me about the film. The first comes out of my generally mediocre opinion of Billy Crystal. Note: mediocre, not bad. But he is impressive in this film. He has more onscreen charisma than the rest of the cast combined. Without him, the film would be hopeless. And that leads us the second thing that struck me.

Don’t people rewrite scripts anymore?! The first act and even the beginning of the second act are fairly strong. Or at least, strong for this kind of very predicable family fare. But then it wanders off in a sort of dramatic random walk. There is a subplot where Artie (Crystal) is trying to get a new job. It has almost nothing to do with the main plot and it is never resolved. The main plot is no more robust, except that it does manage to provide compelling but much too hasty resolutions. Above all, from the second act on, the film has no dramatic momentum. Nothing pulls the viewer through the film except the thought of another scene with Crystal.

And yet, the film is fairly amusing. It is touching. It has some genuinely moving moments. In other words, it is a typical professionally produced Hollywood film. It just goes to show that if you shove enough talent at a production, you can make it work well enough. But they spent $25 million dollars on this film. They could have divided up that money 50 times, given it to independent filmmakers, and ended up with at least 25 films that were more enjoyable.

Afterword

There are three kids in the film, each with a problem. The youngest is Barker who seems okay to me except that he has an imaginary kangaroo. It is run over by a car. In my experience, imaginary friends fade away. Sudden, violent death probably doesn’t bode well for Barker’s teen years.

The middle child is Turner. He stutters. Somehow he overcomes this by memorizing a speech. Speech therapists are really amazing. Stuttering is not something you get over by becoming and actor. Just ask any actor who stutters, such as Austin Pendleton.

Harper is the oldest. She is too focused on achievement. She is trying to get into a music school with her violin playing. Twelve year olds of any ability whatsoever play the violin very well. So well, in fact, that most listeners could not differentiate them from Itzhak Perlman. Harper plays the violin about as well as I do. And I don’t play the violin. She is probably the least developed character in a movie of stereotypes.