My favorite columnist, TMQ's Gregg Easterbrook, writes about health care reform in this week's column. Check it out! Here's a sample:

I don't really understand what's in the congressional health care plan at the moment -- and since it changes daily, I bet most members of the House and Senate don't really understand either. Health care is only the single largest segment of the U.S. economy, so surely there is no risk in passing a 1,000-page health care bill no one understands!

Meanwhile, William Galston identifies the central paradox of the moment:

On the one hand, survey after survey testifies to the rock-bottom standing of the Republican Party. Fewer Americans identify with the party than in the past, and fewer trust it to deal with the country’s problems. On the other hand, there are hard-to-ignore signs of a conservative resurgence. A 15,000 person Gallup survey out today shows that 40 percent of Americans now identify themselves as conservative (up from 37 percent at the time of Obama’s election), while only 20 percent regard themselves as liberal (down from 22 percent). Far more independents (35 percent) consider themselves conservative than was the case a year ago (only 29 percent).

Galston notes that this shift toward conservatism is also apparent when you look at specific issues such as the right to life, gun rights, and global warming.

"The Clinton administration (in which I served) was derailed by the results of its first midterm election," Galston concludes, "and it took Democrats a decade to recover. While there are reasons to believe that Republicans won’t do as well this time, Democratic leaders should take seriously the possibility of a significant electoral reverse and act strategically to make it less likely." Something tells me that's not likely to happen.

Tyler Cowen has a wonderful piece in the Wilson Quarterly on what the Web means for culture. An excerpt:

The arrival of virtually every new cultural medium has been greeted with the charge that it truncates attention spans and represents the beginning of cultural collapse—the novel (in the 18th century), the comic book, rock ‘n’ roll, television, and now the Web. In fact, there has never been a golden age of all-wise, all-attentive readers. But that’s not to say that nothing has changed. The mass migration of intellectual activity from print to the Web has brought one important development: We have begun paying more attention to information. Overall, that’s a big plus for the new world order.

It is easy to dismiss this cornucopia as information overload. We’ve all seen people scrolling with one hand through a BlackBerry while pecking out instant messages (IMs) on a laptop with the other and eyeing a television (I won’t say “watching”). But even though it is easy to see signs of overload in our busy lives, the reality is that most of us carefully regulate this massive inflow of information to create something uniquely suited to our particular interests and needs—a rich and highly personalized blend of cultural gleanings.

A caveat: Cowen definitely focuses more on the benefits of the new cultural landscape than the costs. Nevertheless, you really ought to read the whole thing.

Yesterday was Margaret Thatcher's eighty-fourth birthday. Let's all have a pint to celebrate.

Hat Tip: Sarah Palin.

You can read the magazine's excellent appreciation here.

Do not miss Charles Krauthammer's appreciation of Irving Kristol in his syndicated column today.

There have been plenty of generous, heartfelt, and insightful reminiscences of Irving Kristol published since Friday. I've collected the ones that I thought might interest you the most, along with links to some of Kristol's uncollected writing online. Together you can develop your own sense of his life and work. (And don't forget to read the books!)

Let's start with with some of the commentary.

The New York Times and Washington Post obituaries were comprehensive and well written.

On the Manhattan Institute website, Myron Magnet remembers his friend Irving.

In Monday's Wall Street Journal, James Q. Wilson reflects on how Irving Kristol changed his life.

Here's the Wall Street Journal's editorial board on the "man who put 'neo' into conservatism."

On her website, the author Diana West recalls working for Irving at The Public Interest.

At Forbes, Steven Menashi focuses on Irving Kristol's moral criticism.

AEI collected toasts and remarks from Irving Kristol's seventy-fifth birthday in 1995.

Now on to some of Kristol's writing. Here are links to the full archives of his work in The Public Interest and Commentary.

On the AEI website, Charles Murray recommended that people read Kristol's 1991 lecture on "The Capitalist Future."

In Saturday's paper, the Journal published a selection of highlights from Kristol's columns.

And the American Spectator has made available this interesting interview with The Alternative from 1969.

Put together, these links make for an excellent reading list on the foundations of the neoconservative persuasion.

Anthony Flint's new book Wrestling with Moses has led to some great journalism on social critic Jane Jacobs, New York master builder Robert Moses, and urban life in general.

Jacobs's most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is required reading for anybody who has the nagging sense that powerful men with grand plans for improving the world don't often have the peoples' best interests in mind. Hers is a deeply conservative book, in that it argues against the technocratic social engineering of "urban renewal" in favor of common-sense and mixed-use neighborhoods. Everyone should read it.

What I learned from the journalism occasioned by Flint's book is how important activism was to Jacobs. She was not a disengaged critic. She fought the Power Broker himself, Robert Moses, whenever he got the feeling - and he got it often - that what New York really needed was to raze a neighborhood to make room for a super-highway. Robert Caro's incredible biography of Moses, The Power Broker, can be found here.

Jacobs was a strange hybrid of right and left. She married her advocacy of localism and critique of technocracy to a passion for organizing and direct action. So it seems appropriate that Flint's book should arrive now, at a time when a mass portion of the right is adopting political tactics (rallies, marches) more commonly associated with the left.

Edward Glaeser's review of Flint's book is here.

Dwight Garner's review is here.

Jason Epstein's (password protected) review is here.

(1) Like the Washington Post / ABC News poll, USA Today / Gallup finds that Obama's speech last week hardly changed support for health care reform.

Susan Page writes: "The president's speech apparently failed to galvanize public opinion in the way the White House had hoped. While it drew a national television audience estimated by Nielsen at more than 32 million people, there's little evidence in the survey that it changed minds."

(2) Niall Ferguson engages in some virtual history:

Not everything in history is inevitable; contingencies abound. Sometimes it is therefore right to say “if only”. But an imagined rescue of Lehman Brothers is the wrong counterfactual. The right one goes like this. If only Lehman’s failure and the passage of Tarp had been followed – not immediately, but after six months – by a clear statement to the surviving banks that none of them was henceforth too big to fail, then we might actually have learnt something from this crisis.

The real tragedy is that the failure of Lehman has left Wall Street’s survivors both bigger in relative terms and more secure politically. As long as the big banks feel confident that they can count on the government to bail them out – for who would now risk “another Lehman”? – they can more or less ignore calls for lower leverage and saner compensation.

If only we had learnt from Lehman that no bank should be “too big to fail”, we might still have a real capitalist system, instead of the state-guaranteed monstrosity that is the real legacy of last year’s crisis. If only.

Ferguson's Ascent of Money is also worth reading.

Josef Joffe has an excellent long essay on the durability of American primacy in the September / October issue of Foreign Affairs. Unfortunately, the piece is subscription-only.

Not to worry, however. Turns out Joffe published a shorter version of his essay in the New York Times last month. The takeaway:

The breathtaking rise of China is at the center of contemporary worries. This argument is not about the absolute decline of the United States now but about its relative loss vis-à-vis China later — the United States is supposedly doomed because China’s economy has been growing at three times the rate of America’s and therefore will surpass the United States in terms of output sometime in the next several decades.

Life, however, is not linear. China’s uninterrupted double-digit growth rates are of a recent vintage, essentially since 2003. Estimates that China’s economy will grow by 6 percent in 2009 are a cautionary tale. China’s growth has dropped by half from a historical high of almost 12 percent in 2007, which serves as a warning that its miraculous growth is foreign made — China is a place where the rest of the world essentially rents workers and workspace at deflated prices. The Chinese economy is extremely dependent on exports — they amount to around two-fifths of G.D.P. — and hence vulnerable to global downturns. In fact, China’s exports have plunged by 26 percent this year.

America will be younger, richer, and more innovative than China as the twenty-first century unfolds, Joffe concludes. True, Chinese infrastructure (where it exists) is brand-spanking new, compared with America's pot-holed highways and airport monstrosities like O'Hare and JFK. But, according to Joffe, America retains (1) "the world’s most sophisticated military panoply," (2) "an unmatched research and higher-education establishment," and (3) a "warrior culture." All of which China lacks.

Declinists talk a lot about the dispersal of global power and the relative decline of American influence vis-a-vis the BRIC powers (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). They have a point. But ask yourself: Do any of these rising powers exercise leadership at the global level? Have any of them taken the initiative in providing global public goods?

Joffe:

The United States is the default power because there is nobody else with the requisite power and purpose. The default power does what others cannot or will not do. It underwrites Europe’s security against a resurgent Russia. It chastises whoever reaches for mastery over the Middle East. Only the default power has the power to harness a coalition against Iran. It guarantees the survival of Israel, but at the same time, the Palestinians and the Saudis look to the United States for leverage against Jerusalem. Is it possible to imagine China, Europe or Russia as a more persuasive mediator? No, because only the United States can insure both the Arabs and the Israelis against the consequences of misplaced credulity.

Critics like to deny or demonize American primacy, but the United States as "default power" is a fact of global life in the twenty-first century. This status has given us a richer, more peaceable world, and has allowed new powers to flourish without challenging (yet!) the international system. Follow-up questions to Joffe's piece: How do we maintain the current arrangement? How best to institutionalize and extend it?

For folks interested in this subject, Joffe's Uberpower is here.

Kagan's Return of History and the End of Dreams is here.

Schmitt's Rise of China is here.

Be sure to check out the inimitable Dorothy Rabinowitz's take on cable-show-of-the-moment Mad Men:

The life force of this period series, it becomes ever clearer, is business—the advertising business, the business of the interconnecting lives of the Sterling Cooper staff, all inextricably fused to the job, the place and career concerns. For, despite the grand dimensions that have been attributed to it as a work of social commentary, the series is at heart the latest addition to an old and honored television genre—the workplace drama. A highly distinguished one, to be sure, and far darker and more complex than, say, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."

This is probably the reason, come to think of it, that the equally good NBC show The Office and Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End are also popular.

From the Times's Caucus blog:

The death of Michael Jackson on Thursday recalled his brush a quarter century ago with an aide to President Ronald Reagan — John G. Roberts Jr., who would go on to become chief justice of the United States. Mr. Roberts, it appears, was not the King of Pop’s biggest fan in the White House.

One of Roberts's duties was to review presidential correspondence. He rejected a couple of attempts to have President Reagan send Michael Jackson fan mail. The rejections were relayed with Roberts's typical wit and polished prose:

"I recognize that I am something of a vox clamans in terris in this area," Roberts wrote to White House counsel Fred Fielding, "but enough is enough. The Office of Presidential Correspondence is not yet an adjunct of Michael Jackson’s PR firm. “Billboard” can quite adequately cover the event by reproducing the award citation and/or reporting the President’s remarks. (As you know, there is very little to report about Mr. Jackson’s remarks.) There is absolutely no need for an additional presidential message. A memorandum for Presidential Correspondence objecting to the letter is attached for your review and signature."

And later:

"I hate to sound like one of Mr. Jackson’s records, constantly repeating the same refrain, but I recommend that we not approve this letter. Sometimes people need to be reminded of the obvious: whatever its status as a cultural phenomenon, the Jackson concert tour is a massive commercial undertaking. The tour will do quite well financially by coming to Washington, and there is no need for the President to applaud such enlightened self-interest. Frankly, I find the obsequious attitude of some members of the White House staff toward Mr. Jackson’s attendants, and the fawning posture they would have the President of the United States adopt, more than a little embarrassing."

Classic.

Matthias Kuntzel provided the necessary background in 2006.

From Daniel Henniger:

Medicaid alone didn't put California and New York on the brink. Add in spending on public education and you've accounted for about 60% of their budgets. This drives the deficits and gets all the ink, but not least among the casualties of bigness is the idea of governance.

The elected legislatures of California, which holds 36.7 million American citizens, and New York, with 20 million, are essentially falling apart as governing bodies. The whole country has witnessed the spectacle of the comic "coup" in New York's Senate in Albany the past two weeks.

With collapse comes a truth: The bigger the government, the smaller the politicians. As mandated entitlements grow, the spending "crowds out" the need or obligation to think or to govern. Legislators with nothing very real to do become lazy, slack and corrupt. They become Albany. Or Sacramento. Or Trenton.

Or Washington.

Be sure to check out Brink Lindsey's new essay in Reason, entitled "Nostalgianomics." It's the best critique I've read of Paul Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal. Lindsey writes:

There is good evidence that changes in economic policies and social norms have indeed contributed to a widening of the income distribution since the 1970s. But Krugman and other practitioners of nostalgianomics are presenting a highly selective account of what the relevant policies and norms were and how they changed.

The Treaty of Detroit was built on extensive cartelization of markets, limiting competition to favor producers over consumers. The restrictions on competition were buttressed by racial prejudice, sexual discrimination, and postwar conformism, which combined to limit the choices available to workers and potential workers alike. Those illiberal social norms were finally swept aside in the cultural tumults of the 1960s and ’70s. And then, in the 1970s and ’80s, restraints on competition were substantially reduced as well, to the applause of economists across the ideological spectrum. At least until now.

Can you have the economics of the 1950s without the society of the 1950s? Lindsey's answer is no.

That's the name of Reihan Salam's new blog on National Review Online. Check it out. For starters, here's Reihan on Mitch Daniels's greatness, and on "American socialism."

Bob Woodward's book The Agenda, about the Clinton administration's economic plan in 1993, is also good.

Mike Murphy worries that it might be, pointing to recent Democratic gains among Latinos and under-30 voters. Murphy's analysis jibes with the latest Pew study on political trends, which I recently wrote about here.

Jay Cost takes issue with Murphy here.

I think we can say three things: (1) Once a group chooses a party, it tends to stick with it for a long time, (2) "a long time" is not the same as "forever," and (3) rapid swings in party strength aren't unusual in American politics--as we saw in the period from 2005 to 2009 and, decades ago, from 1975 to 1981.

The former Bush White House economist has an excellent, extremely disturbing run-down on the Kennedy-Dodd health care bill.

Kim Strassel reports that Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty took on his Democratic legislature over spending and tax hikes. And amazingly, Pawlenty won. Strassel:

Upon receiving the last spending bill, [Pawlenty] announced that he would exercise the power of "unallotment," which has been on the books since 1939 and which has been used four times. Under it, the governor is allowed to "unallot" (take away) any state spending for which there is no money to pay. Panicked, the DFL passed tax legislation to cover its blowout spending bills, 10 minutes before the session's end. Too late. The governor said he'd veto the bill and would not be calling back the legislature to do any more mischief.

Mr. Pawlenty is now free to strip $2.7 billion from state spending to balance the budget. Tax hikes are dead. He tells me this will be one of the first times in modern Minnesota history that the state will reduce the size of government in real terms, not just slow its rate of growth. "The correlation in recent history has been between job growth and states that have reasonable government cost structures," he says. These cuts, he says, will position Minnesota to take advantage of the recovery when it comes.

The governor's "unallotment" power was central to Minnesota avoiding California's fate. But having a governor committed to low taxes and balanced budgets helped, too.

(1) Michael Barone analyzes Arlen Specter's defection to the Democratic party and concludes: "When [Winston] Churchill left the Liberals, they had led governments for 16 of the preceding 18 years. They never did so again. A party in decline should adapt its basic philosophy to new policies and positions in order to win over voters, rather than stand on principle and expel heretics."

(2) According to the pool report, the vice president of the United States, Joseph Biden, visited Texas yesterday and concluded: "You Texas guys are ugly as hell, but your women are beautiful."

(Incidentally, according to the Houston Chronicle, Biden also remarked that, since his audience included some Pakistani Americans, he'd have to answer their questions or "there'll be a Pakistani revolution." Stay classy, Joe.)

(1) Pew poll master Andrew Kohut studies the commonalities between Ronald Reagan's and Barack Obama's approval ratings and concludes: "[T]he most important lesson for Barack Obama is that the public will be patient with their new leader in his dealing with an inherited problem — as long as things do not get substantially worse on his watch."

(2) Henry Kissinger looks at our inability to change North Korea's behavior and concludes: "In a world of multiplying nuclear weapons states, it would be unreasonable to expect that those arsenals will never be used or never fall into the hands of rogue organizations. A new, less universal approach to world order would be needed. The next (literally) few years will be the last opportunity to achieve an enforceable restraint. If the United States, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia cannot achieve this vis-à-vis a country with next to no impact on international trade and no resources needed by anyone, the phrase "world community" will become empty."

(3) Vice President Joseph Biden watches students perform the roles of "Dirt," "Rain," "Roots," and "Trees" at a tree-planting ceremony and concludes: ""Great job, trees. Dirt, you did a good job."

Demographics might not be destiny, but it does make for great dinner-party chatter. More babies were born in the United States in 2007 than in any previous year, the Census Bureau reports. The nation's fertility level is at 2.1 percent - the replacement rate. The population won't be shrinking anytime soon.

There are some disturbing trends in the census data, however. The rate of teen pregnancy has risen for the second straight year, and even though the rate of increase was small, it's a trend worth following.

Also, more than 40 percent of women who had children in 2007 were unmarried. This is the highest level recorded yet, and may spell trouble for the futures of some of those kids. The latest upward trend in unmarried births started in 2002 and doesn't show signs of abating.

In other demographic news, Americans stayed put from mid-2007 to mid-2008. Internal migration declined considerably. There was less moving around. And there were fewer immigrants.

Put it all together, and the picture we get is of a growing country, but also a relatively stable one. People seem to be hunkering down and waiting for the financial storm to pass. And the two-parent family of married mother and father continues its transformation into something ... else.

Last week Charles Murray delivered the 2009 Irving Kristol Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute's annual dinner. His lecture, entitled "The Happiness of the People," is filled with insight. (Here is Peter Wehner's celebration of Murray.)

Murray's argument is that America is moving toward a European vision of the polity, but that scientific discoveries in biology and neuroscience will upend our confidence in European-style public policies. Like Ross Douthat, I'm a little skeptical towards the second idea. Ideology has never let "science" get in the way of its own policy agenda. The egalitarian idea is powerful. It will likely withstand the latest findings of sociobiology.

What ideas have more trouble dealing with is other ideas. To confront the ideology of egalitarianism, you have to put forward an ideology of individualism. Social science might help to fight inappropriate interventions in the market. But a set of ideas preferring a society shaped by individual consumer preferences rather than government social planners helps, too. And to fight a dimunition of virtue, you have to hold up a positive conception of virtue.

Here is my favorite part of Murray's lecture:

Drive through rural Sweden, as I did a few years ago. In every town was a beautiful Lutheran church, freshly painted, on meticulously tended grounds, all subsidized by the Swedish government. And the churches are empty. Including on Sundays. Scandinavia and Western Europe pride themselves on their “child-friendly” policies, providing generous child allowances, free day-care centers, and long maternity leaves. Those same countries have fertility rates far below replacement and plunging marriage rates. Those same countries are ones in which jobs are most carefully protected by government regulation and mandated benefits are most lavish. And they, with only a few exceptions, are countries where work is most often seen as a necessary evil, least often seen as a vocation, and where the proportions of people who say they love their jobs are the lowest.

What’s happening? Call it the Europe syndrome. Last April I had occasion to speak in Zurich, where I made some of these same points. After the speech, a few of the twenty-something members of the audience approached and said plainly that the phrase “a life well-lived” did not have meaning for them. They were having a great time with their current sex partner and new BMW and the vacation home in Majorca, and saw no voids in their lives that needed filling.

It was fascinating to hear it said to my face, but not surprising. It conformed to both journalistic and scholarly accounts of a spreading European mentality. Let me emphasize “spreading.” I’m not talking about all Europeans, by any means. That mentality goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible.

Will people give this life up because they read Steven Pinker? Probably not! But they may think twice if they encounter books containing ideas that suggest that there is more to life than your BMW and "current sex partner."

Mark Shields helps you fill your bracket. Among his tips:

[M]ake your picks (guesses) based upon the originality, appeal or humor of the schools' basketball mascot.

If this were the sole, determining criterion, a number of teams that will not be asked to the tournament would be the overwhelming favorites, beginning with my personal pet mascot, the University of California at Santa Cruz's banana slug.

Nothing racially or ethnically offensive. No gratuitous violence. The banana slug was chosen, let it be noted, in a campus-wide referendum at the university and succeeded the sea lion.

For a real team mascot brimming with energy and enthusiasm, none can really compete with the Hawk of St. Joseph University in Philadelphia. It's not the outfit, which is fine. It is that the St. Joe's Hawk NEVER stops flapping its wings, or arms, from the beginning of the game until the end. Literally the Hawk's wings are flapped thousands of times in a two-hour game.

One of Shields's favorites: "Otto the Orange of Syracuse University. Literally a round orange — with human legs and a little Syracuse cap on top. A more chunky earlier model basically covered the legs with his costume, creating a striking resemblance to the huge fruit. In defiance of mascots and cheerleaders who perform cartwheels or make human pyramids, the laid-back orange often just rolls on the floor." Who can't relate to that?

Daniel Henninger has been on a roll lately. His column today continues to deliver:

Today, frontline Democrats see the private sector as doing two things: It produces tax revenue for $3.9 trillion federal budgets, and it shafts workers. The private sector in the Democratic worldview is necessary but nasty. Their leadership gives the impression of not having the simplest understanding of how an employer's life unfolds day to day.

A potential solution?

If the Democrats are willing to bet the entire U.S. economy on a 1931 theory known as the Keynesian multiplier, surely Republicans can excavate and relearn the core idea handed down to them by Ronald Reagan. That idea was known as economic growth.

Freed to choose between these two competing ideas, I'm guessing many voters would go for growth. All that's needed is just one Republican who can explain this idea halfway as well as Ronald Reagan.

In order to recover this lost ideology of growth, Henninger recommends reading Reagan's Letters, Milton Friedman's Free to Choose, and Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. Good advice! Ideas don't die. They are just forgotten.

Still, I'd add one caveat to Henninger's column. Economic growth is a public good, but it also causes social distortions and resentment among those who do not feel that they are getting their due. Certainly intellectuals, who want to see society ordered according to their own preferences, feel left behind by a culture that takes shape according to consumer tastes expressed in the marketplace.

Reagan's talent was that he combined growth economics with a sense of civic pride. He restored the sense of American exceptionalism and grandeur that had been battered by Vietnam and the Iranian revolution. This wasn't enough to correct the various moral deficiencies afflicting American culture. But it did give people something more than growth for growth's sake.

Some recommended reading:

Daniel Gross on how to stop the next bubble.

Bret Stephens on Mexico's drug war.

Jim Antle on Michael Steele.

Enjoy!

Be sure to read Rove today.

Daniel Gross is making sense:

Things have been going downhill in America since the very beginning: Imagine the economic forecasts made in Plymouth in the bitter winter of 1619. In the early 1990s, a recession lengthened, executives took huge paychecks while firing thousands of workers, and Americans began to lose faith in the capitalist systems. No economist or historian stood up and predicted that globalization, intelligent fiscal and monetary policy, and this thing called the Internet would launch the United States into an unprecedented era of growth, prosperity, and rising asset prices.

Every mutual fund or investment product comes with the caveat that past performance is no guarantee of future performance. But when it comes to the economy at large, nearly 400 years of American history have shown that it can be a pretty good guide.

An adage in politics is that things are never as good or as bad as they seem. That applies to geoeconomics and geopolitics as well. America isn't going anywhere.

Will Obama let this aggression stand?

Bill Kristol's first contribution to the Washington Post "Post Partisan" group blog is on the GOP's stimulus opportunity. A taste:

Republicans should stop trying to improve the unimproveable with small-bore amendments to the current legislative package. Instead, they can point out that Obama is supporting under the guise of emergency legislation a bloated catch-all of stimulus, pork and (often bad) policy. They can make clear that Republicans will support a real short-term stimulus (pro-growth tax cuts, housing measures and a few targeted spending provisions unemployment and COBRA extensions) that meets Larry Summers’s criteria of being targeted, timely and temporary. They should introduce such a measure as a substitute -- “The Emergency Economic Growth Bill of 2009” -- and trumpet their vigorous support of it. And they should insist that all the “energy, health care and education” proposals be debated in an orderly and serious way in the regular legislative process -- not jammed through as part of an emergency “stimulus.”

Read the whole thing, as they say. And be sure to bookmark Post Partisan.

Automakers concerned that Obama's decision to allow stricter emissions standards will harm business.

Joe Biden says he doesn't see himself as "deputy president." Thanks for the clarification, Joe.

Limbaugh responds to Obama.

Citigroup takes bailout money, buys $50 million corporate jet.

Nancy Pelosi doesn't want to send Gitmo detainees to Alcatraz.

Kentucky Senate rematch in 2010.

Sebastian Mallaby writes that China's manipulation of its currency "is arguably the most important cause of the financial crisis."

This provocative blog from Harvard economist Edward Glaeser will be the most interesting thing you read all day. A taste:

[S]kepticism about vast public works does not necessarily lead towards Alf Landon-like antipathy towards stimulus, or towards tax cuts for big businesses and the wealthy. A quite plausible alternative, which is partially present in the president-elect’s proposal, is for the fiscal stimulus to primarily take the form of payroll tax cuts for poor and middle-income Americans. Those are, after all, the people who are most likely to spend the money quickly.

Targeted tax aid for poorer Americans would be far more egalitarian than most kinds of infrastructure spending, like broadband technology. Sensible infrastructure projects wouldn’t disproportionately employ the least-skilled Americans. Forgoing the payroll tax for households earning less than $75,000 a year is surer progressivism than bridge-building.

A payroll tax cut would be, in effect, an instant raise for millions of Americans. And since the cut would not be a one-time rebate - let's hope it would be permanent - it is more likely to change behavior and encourage folks to spend and thus increase demand. What's not to like?

(A tip of the hat to Ross Douthat.)

That's one of several interesting ideas outlined in this Washington Post op-ed by Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, who cofounded the KIPP charter schools. They write:

[W]e should assess teachers on their demonstrated impact on student learning, not whether they hold a traditional teacher certifications. At KIPP, we have the ability to hire, fire and reward principals and teachers based on their students' progress and achievement. If we are going to hold all public schools accountable for their results -- and we should -- we need to grant this same power to all public schools. Otherwise, public schools will not meet the goal of providing a world-class education to every child.

We already test the students, and it works. Let's test the teachers too. I think we'd be shocked at the results.

... Just not in the United States. David Kenner has a useful list of this year's upcoming elections. Somehow he left out the two most interesting. First, there are the summer elections in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim democracy. (And, according to David Brooks, perhaps the location of one of Obama's first state visits.) Then, second, there are the provincial and national elections scheduled in Iraq.

... At least when building new roads, bridges, and runways is the issue. Brookings scholar Clifford Winston:

One of the biggest killers of all is that states insist on allocating federal transportation funds through a politically devised formula. The result? Smooth, well-paved rural highways and worn-out urban roadways that are paved with a layer of asphalt too thin to withstand heavy use and are therefore in need of excessive, costly maintenance.

But don't blame the states for all the inefficient use of highway dollars. Federal regulations have also inflated the cost of providing roads, trains and so much more for a public on the move.

It takes the nation's busiest airports decades and billions of dollars to build new runways, for example, because of onerous regulations imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. Davis-Bacon mandates, which effectively require that "prevailing" union wages (often much higher than the actually prevailing market wage) be paid to workers on any construction project receiving federal funds, also drive up the costs of roads and other federal transport projects. The Federal Transit Act also makes it extremely expensive to lay off transit employees.

Will reforming Davis-Bacon solve America's infrastructure problems? Not entirely! It's also incredibly unlikely that such a reform will happen anytime soon, given the current power configuration in Washington. Outside Washington, however, there is a large group of people -- commuters -- who want to see more roads and runways built. And they are likely to rally behind a political figure who confronts those interests, like greens and NIMBY activists, that stand in the way of pavement.

From earlier this year, Ken Levine reviews mega-blockbuster The Dark Knight:

"Why would anyone live in Gotham City? Jesus! You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting six mob bosses. And then there’s the town’s super psycho villain -- they couldn’t find someone a little more aesthetically pleasing? Children watch those televised truck chases too, y’know. And Juneau appears to have more daytime in the winter than Gotham City. Does it get dark everyday at noon?

"The skyline is harsh and impersonal. All that’s missing are smokestacks and an American Girl Place Experience."

Rep. Bob Inglis and tax cut guru Arthur Laffer must be reading the Standard -- their call for a carbon tax offset by reductions "in income or payroll taxes" dovetails nicely with our cover story this week. It's an idea worth considering, especially if the offset is a reduction in the regressive and burdensome payroll tax.

Two points. First, Krauthammer, Inglis, and Laffer advocate exactly the sort of taxation economists say is the most optimal. They want to decrease taxation on goods our society ought to favor, like work, and increase taxation on goods our society doesn't like, namely, carbon. Say the revenue from the new consumption tax on carbon went directly into Social Security. This would broaden the tax base for America's most popular entitlement program, which relies solely on the payroll tax for revenue at the moment (and faces a dwindling number of workers paying into the system). It would add some life to the program, in other words. It would be a de facto Social Security reform -- though only one of many necessary to secure the program's future.

Second, you hear a lot these days about how conservatives need new ideas. And what do you know? The new ideas are all over the place! Meanwhile, what are liberals calling for? Let's see ... universal health care, deficit spending to fight recession, subsidies for alternative fuels, and income tax hikes in the near future. Hmm. As Robert Samuelson points out today, the past year has upended a lot of our expectations about how the economy, government, and society ought to behave. But one thing's for sure. It's still hard to argue that the Democrats are the party of new ideas.

New Year's is just a few days away, which means it's time for Dave Barry's annual Year in Review column. Here's a taste, from the July 2008 news summary:

"Barack Obama, having secured North and South America, flies to Germany without using an airplane and gives a major speech -- speaking English and German simultaneously -- to 200,000 mesmerized Germans, who immediately elect him chancellor, prompting France to surrender.

"Meanwhile, John McCain, at a strategy session at a golf resort, tells his top aides to prepare a list of potential running mates, stressing that he wants somebody 'who is completely, brutally honest.' Unfortunately, because of noise from a lawnmower, the aides think McCain said he wants somebody 'who has competed in a beauty contest.' This will lead to trouble down the road."

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Make sure you read Mark Shields's column this week on the D.C. Council's decision to keep the bars open an extra hour during Barack Obama's inauguration celebration.

It's Christmas time, when we like to recommend the best books we read over the last year. Here are mine:

Novels

There are two. Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End is one of the best books I've read, period, which is saying something as it's only two years old. Highly recommended.

The other good novel I read this year was Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang. The book is an achievement, as it's told in the voice of a barely literate Australian outlaw and is written without using commas. It's a gripping postmodern novel -- and one doesn't normally use the words "gripping" and "postmodern" in the same sentence.

Nonfiction

Robert Kagan's Return of History and the End of Dreams.

Robert Cooper's The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-first Century.

Paul Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics (2008 Edition).

Jack Germond's Fat Man in the Middle Seat: Forty Years of Covering Politics.

Humor

Simon Rich is twenty-three years old, but don't hold that against him. His Ant Farm: And Other Desperate Situations and Free-Range Chickens had me in stitches.

L'affaire Plaxico inspires Ken Levine to name some of his "other favorite stupid professional sports injuries."

Among them: "Atlanta Braves' pitcher/genius John Smoltz once burned himself while ironing a shirt. He was wearing the shirt at the time. I wish I making that up."

... about Iraqi approval of a Status of Forces Agreement with the United States (Krauthammer).

... about Obama's worrying flirtation with the teachers' unions (Brooks).

... about the next president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank (the Wall Street Journal editorial page).

It's subscriber-only, but Edward Luttwak's critique of the American declinists is worth your time. Cliff's Notes version:

The future of both the United States and Europe will be shaped by their true strengths - private innovation on one side of the Atlantic, local and regional authenticity on the other - rather than the weaknesses of each that now generate fears of decline. The things that count in the race to the future are human capital, social trust and institutional coherence. The first requires not only excellence and innovation in education, but also openness in learning from others and in absorbing others into our own fold. The second requires balancing that openness with stability and community integration. And the third requires a dynamic combination of resilient federalism and subsidiarity - the shock absorbers needed to navigate safely a fast-paced globalized world. The United States and Europe are in a far better position in regard to all three assets than is any other society on the planet.

For further reading on the myth of American decline, be sure to check out Robert Kagan and Robert J. Lieber.

The great Ken Levine reveals a long-kept secret:

This is very hard so I hope you’ll allow me a stumble or two. I’ve never actually admitted this in public. Deep breath. Okay. Here I go.

I can’t see 3-D.

It doesn’t work on me. Jesus, it’s terrifying seeing that in print. My astigmatisms combined with my far sidedness and depth perception issues prevent me from experiencing the full three-dimensional effect.

I was first stricken with this insidious misfortune as a child. Imagine, a mere lad, way too young to have developed coping mechanisms. Blissful and without a care in the world, I skipped into my local theater (Grauman’s Chinese), donned these nifty disposable anaglyph glasses and prepared to have the shit scared out of me by HOUSE OF WAX. But alas, my horror was not at the lifelike images popping off the screen, it was that images were so blurry I couldn’t distinguish Vincent Price from Phyllis Kirk.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Mario Cuomo, one of America's most entertaining political figures, has refused to sit for his official portrait ever since leaving his post as New York governor in 1995. "“I went to electric razors so I would not have to look at myself in the morning," Cuomo tells the Times. Fair enough. Lucky for us, illustrator Thomas Fuchs has made his own portraits of Cuomo, in the syle of some famous artists. My favorite is the Mondrian Mario.

Washington Post: "Survey Finds Growing Deceit Among Teens."

It's time to play Spot the Policy!

The game is simple. First, read Fareed Zakaria's Newsweek cover story this week (guess who's on the cover?).

Next, be impressed by sentences like "[Obama] must have his administration build a broader framework through which to view the world and America's relations with it" and "the objective of the United States should be to stabilize the current global order and to create mechanisms through which change - the rise of new powers, economic turmoil, the challenge of subnational groups like al Qaeda - can be accomodated without overturning the international order."

Finally, try to identify a single concrete policy of Zakaria's that would help Obama fashion America's "new grand strategy." There are hints of policies - Zakaria seems to want more G20 meetings, and says, "Were [Obama] to go to Tehran ... he would probably draw a crowd of millions, far larger than any mullah could ever dream of" - but even these aren't enough to forge a "new set of ideas and institutions - an architecture of peace for the 21st century that would bring stability, prosperity and dignity to the lives of billions of people." Let me know what you come up with.

Elizabeth Economy writes in today's Washington Post that China should wait before "extend[ing] itself globally." Good advice! Here's Economy:

Above all, China's leaders need to sort out where they are going politically. It is hard to lead globally when your domestic political system is in massive transition - or, worse, turmoil. Beijing faces more than 90,000 protests annually as a result of endemic corruption and ongoing crises in public health and the environment. Exports, the lifeblood of the Chinese economy, are falling; layoffs are already in the tens of thousands, and China's stock market has lost two-thirds of its value over the past year. Chinese media report daily on a stream of new regulations - to limit the ability of factories to fire workers, to manage state-run reporting or to restructure the public health bureaucracy. Yet all this tinkering at the margins has failed to reassure the Chinese people, or many outside the country, that the government has a clear plan for its political and economic future.

The bargain the Chinese government has had with its people for 30 years has been that the government would provide economic growth, and the people would accept the authoritarian political order. That bargain is breaking down. And news like this makes matters worse.

Wise words from David Brooks today on the problems with "economic stimulus packages":

The Federal Reserve can effectively stimulate the economy. There are certain automatic government programs, like unemployment insurance, which also do it. But the history of the past century suggests that politically designed, ad hoc stimulus packages rarely work.

Often they get the timing wrong; they come too late to do any real good. Often they get the pressure points wrong; the economy is simply too complicated for lawmakers to know where to apply the stimulus patch. Almost always, they get psychology wrong. When you give people a chunk of money in the midst of economic turmoil, they don’t spend most of it. They save it.

Even so, Brooks argues in favor of "a long-term investment in the country’s infrastructure":

Create a base-closings-like commission to organize federal priorities (Congress has forfeited its right to micromanage). Streamline the regulations that can now delay project approval by five years. Explore all the new ideas that are burgeoning in the transportation world — congestion pricing, smart highways, rescue plans for shrinking Midwestern cities, new rail and airplane technologies. When you look into this sector, you see we are on the cusp of another transportation revolution.

Sign me up! Small problem, though: What guarantee is there that federal spending on infrastructure will actually be spent on new roads and highways? Isn't it just as likely that the folks in charge of Brooks's commission, or Obama's national infrastructure bank, will funnel the money to "light rail" and other transportation projects that nobody uses? Environmentalists and NIMBY activists will oppose government spending on pavement. But they'll support additional spending on mass transit systems that will do little to lighten the burden on suburban and exurban commuters. The pro-pavement constituency is, sadly, small in comparison.

Congress could write-in guarantees to spend the money on new road construction and bring in private companies to build new toll roads and highways. But if you think that's likely to happen without a major fight, I have a bridge I'd like you to help me build in Brooklyn.

Robert Kagan on American declinism:

[T]he evidence of American decline is weak. Yes, as Zakaria notes, the world's largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore and the largest casino in Macau. But by more serious measures of power, the United States is not in decline, not even relative to other powers. Its share of the global economy last year was about 21 percent, compared with about 23 percent in 1990, 22 percent in 1980 and 24 percent in 1960. Although the United States is suffering through a financial crisis, so is every other major economy. If the past is any guide, the adaptable American economy will be the first to come out of recession and may actually find its position in the global economy enhanced.

Meanwhile, American military power is unmatched. While the Chinese and Russian militaries are both growing, America's is growing, too, and continues to outpace them technologically. Russian and Chinese power is growing relative to their neighbors and their regions, which will pose strategic problems, but that is because American allies, especially in Europe, have systematically neglected their defenses.

America's image is certainly damaged, as measured by global polls, but the practical effects of this are far from clear. Is America's image today worse than it was in the 1960s and early 1970s, with the Vietnam War; the Watts riots; the My Lai massacre; the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy; and Watergate? Does anyone recall that millions of anti-American protesters took to the streets in Europe in those years?

Today, despite the polls, President Bush has managed to restore closer relations with allies in Europe and Asia, and the next president will be able to improve them even further. Realist theorists have consistently predicted for the past two decades that the world would "balance" against the United States. But nations such as India are drawing closer to America, and if any balancing is occurring, it is against China, Russia and Iran.

Kagan has been tough on the "realists" lately, in The Return of History and the End of Dreams, and his appraisal of the Bush legacy in Foreign Affairs, and this piece for the Wall Street Journal from a few months back. All this has me thinking that Kagan's next book ought to be a takedown of the new "realism," and an articulation of what a "real realism" looks like.

Good stuff on the Washington Post op-ed page today.

Alan D. Viard, Alex Brill, and Arthur C. Brooks detail the problems in Obama's tax plan:

While a few of Obama's proposals may be sensible, the overall package would be bad for the economy. Unlike rate cuts for high incomes or reductions in investment taxes, most of Obama's proposed tax cuts would do little to reduce the tax penalty on work and saving. For some households, the penalty on work and saving would even increase because the new tax credits would be phased out as income rises. These proposals wouldn't deliver the economic growth that incentive-based tax cuts would.

Furthermore, there is no free lunch. Obama's middle-class tax relief would have to be paid for, either now or later. Middle-class tax cuts might make sense if they were paid for by spending cuts, but that is not Obama's plan. Like his opponent, Obama points to vague savings from reducing waste, the kind of savings that never seem to materialize. He also hopes to reap savings by accelerating our redeployment from Iraq, a project with an uncertain fiscal impact. At the same time, he proposes a wave of new spending on health-care, education, energy and infrastructure programs and declares his opposition to reforms that would reduce the growth of Social Security and other entitlement benefits.

And Robert J. Samuelson offers some no-nonsense suggestions for a long-term economic stimulus plan. Here's one of them:

[W]e should increase the earliest age that workers can qualify for Social Security from 62 to 64. This change (again) should be phased in over four years. When people retire early, they take a cut in their Social Security benefits to reflect the fact that they'll receive benefits longer. At 62, benefits now average about 75 percent of benefits at the normal retirement age (today, 66 years). Many retirees later regret that, by starting benefits so early, they crimp their monthly payments.

Raising the minimum eligibility age wouldn't save the government much, if any, money on the assumption that the monthly payments at 64 would be higher. Although people would work longer, their retirement would ultimately be made easier by higher monthly benefit checks and by delaying by two years the need to rely on savings. This change would also indicate Congress's willingness to tackle the larger problems of Social Security and Medicare.

Both pieces are tightly argued and well-reasoned. They're sensible, too. And this means, obviously, that absolutely no one in power will listen to them.

The great Ken Levine has a collection of notes on the American scene that's well worth your time.

My favorite: "The 82 game NBA pre-season has begun. They play four months to eliminate the Clippers and one other team then start seven rounds of playoffs."

Some of my favorite writers have been hard at work lately. Be sure to check them out:

David Brooks on behavioral economics.

Jack Shafer on the coming Obama rapture.

Mike Murphy on campaign hobgoblins.

Robert Kagan gives a wide-ranging interview to Der Spiegel.

Enjoy.

More evidence why Chief Justice John Roberts is one of the most admirable public servants of our time, courtesy of the Washington Post:

The Supreme Court turns down most cases without comment, but yesterday Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. decided that his colleagues' agreement not to hear a Pennsylvania drug bust case demanded a written dissent.

And not just a routine dissent. Instead of employing the usual staid legal prose, Roberts channeled his inner Mickey Spillane in objecting to his colleagues' decision. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy signed on, as well.

The dissent is here. A taste:

North Philly, May 4, 2001. Officer Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood? Tough as a three­ dollar steak. Devlin knew. Five years on the beat, nine months with the Strike Force. He’d made fifteen, twenty drug busts in the neighborhood.

Devlin spotted him: a lone man on the corner. Another approached. Quick exchange of words. Cash handed over; small objects handed back. Each man then quickly on his own way. Devlin knew the guy wasn’t buying bus tokens. He radioed a description and Officer Stein picked up the buyer. Sure enough: three bags of crack in the guy’s pocket. Head downtown and book him. Just another day at the office.

It gets better from there. Remember: The above passage was written by the chief justice of the United States, not Robert Parker, Elmore Leonard, or Donald Westlake. What a talent.

Naturally, Barack Obama voted against him.

Charles Krauthammer is always good. This is one of his best.

This is the funniest thing I've seen all week.

Also, since it's the Easter season, try some light reading on the science of Peeps.

When I was six, my life's ambition was to be this guy.

Most amazing detail in the post above: The man with the world's largest Star Wars figurine collection ... also has a girlfriend.