by
Tom Schaller
@
4:14 PM
OK, I know that decades technically begin in years ending with ones, not zeroes. But the convention is so widely accepted now that decades start in years ending zero that we'll just have to accept it.
I didn't do any year-end or decade-end listing, but I wrote my final
Baltimore Sun column of the decade--
The Naughties is my preferred term--about what we learned (if anything) this past decade, to which I wish good riddance.
A small sample:
We learned that American interventionism in the Muslim world in order to eradicate Islamic fundamentalism is going to be a lot more difficult and painful than our 20th century adventures in Latin America and in trying to combat communism. We haven't been attacked on our own soil since, but there have been plenty of terrorist acts elsewhere in the free world - and more bloodshed and human suffering for our troops and natives of Iraq and Afghanistan than we'd care to admit...
On the domestic front, we learned that bubbles inevitably burst - and when they do, a lot of people end up with naught. We discovered that Enron and WorldCom were cooking their books, and that accounting giant Arthur Andersen turned out to be a big fat zero in terms of oversight. In the aftermath, the pensions employees for some of these companies were counting on turned out to be worth nothing...
Our incomes have stagnated - a whole decade's work for naught. Well, that's not entirely correct. Employee compensation actually increased during the Naughties: The problem is that potential wage gains were gobbled up by skyrocketing insurance premiums. This is the decade we finally owned up to the fact that the health of the nation is undermining the health of our individual and national economies...
Reality television was not born this decade, but it became more pervasive and popular. The better shows - like "Project Runway" or "So You Think You Can Dance?" at least require talent of some sort. But the worst shows demand only a talent for naughtiness: gossiping, backstabbing, tantrum-throwing, phoniness, voyeurism and a willingness to shed one's integrity or clothing. Nothing good came of such junk...
As far as I'm concerned, bring on 2010 and the Teens to follow. Hopefully, the coming decade will cause us to become a more humble, more thoughtful and more long-range-thinking nation.
Now, I don't share this to be downer, but rather to encourage a sense of optimism as the next decade opens. Let's hope the next ten are better than the previous ten.
And a Happy New Year to 538 readers. (One very good thing that happened to me this past year/decade is that I started writing for this site.) Anyway, be safe and have fun tonight.
There's More...
Contract Post
by
Nate Silver
@
4:20 AM
Races are ranked
in order of their likelihood of changing parties by November 2010, accounting for all factors such as potential retirements, primary challenges, and so forth.
Likelihood of party switch has increased since
October's rankings.
Likelihood of party switch has decreased since October.
1.
Delaware (D-Open) -- The reason I keep this one in first position is because Beau Biden has yet to declare and there's a small chance he won't run, in which case it's a walk for Mike Castle. If Castle wins close to 100 percent of the time that Biden doesn't run, and 55 percent of the time that he does, then that puts his odds above 60 percent overall.
2.
Connecticut (D-Dodd) -- You probably know how skeptical I tend to be of internal polls. So when an incumbent candidate
publishes an internal poll that shows him
behind his leading Republican opponent, you know that he's in trouble. With that said, this race is a long way from over; Republicans could still wind up nominating a goofy candidate like Linda McMahon, and there likewise remains a chance that Dodd won't be the Democratic nominee.
3. Missouri (R-Open) -- Robin Carnahan's polling has been very stable, continuing to show her with a very slight lead. That's probably because her opponent, Roy Blunt, is a rather vocal member of the sitting Republican Congress, which is losing popularity just as quickly as the Democrats in Congress are. He's the wrong candidate for this type of cycle.
4. Nevada (D-Reid) -- The reasons why Reid could lose are fairly self-evident, both on a polling and a narrative basis. So here's why he could still win: (1) $$$$$$, (2) it'll be harder to brand him as ineffectual if he passes health care, (3) Nevada is a machine state and Democrats control the machine, (4) Republican candidates are untested.
5. Colorado (D-Bennet) -- We need more polling here.
6. Arkansas (D-Lincoln) -- No doubt Blanche Lincoln has the fight of her life on her hands, but perceptions that she's dead meat are formed principally by Rasmussen's polling, whereas most other polls have continued to show her with a slight lead. Following my advice, she also managed to stay out of the spotlight at the end of the health care debate as Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman led the three-ring circus instead.
7. Ohio (R-Open) -- Some of the polling has started to move Rob Portman's way. Fundamentally, though, this will still be about whether Portman is cast as the Responsible Deficit Hawk or the Bushie Cabinet Hack, a dynamic that should keep this one close straight through to November.
8. Kentucky (R-Open) -- Upgraded because it looks like Rand Paul will be the Republican nominee. Kentucky is not a very libertarian-friendly state; it tends, rather, to be in the opposite corner, conservative on social issues but supportive of an economic safety net. So -- although Paul will surely raise millions from activists all over the country -- there's a chance this plays out something like NY-23, where a national message proves to be a bit tone-deaf in an idiosyncratic corner of the country.
9. Pennsylvania (D-Specter) -- Democrats are going to want to make this one about Pat Toomey, who in an ordinary cycle would meet Rick Santorum's fate. But 2010 may not be an ordinary cycle -- the larger the national "wave" the less the particulars of the candidates may matter (this was how Santorum got elected in the first place). And Arlen Specter's flip-floppin' gives Toomey plenty of ammunition and might allow Toomey to control the tempo of the campaign. So, upon further reflection, I've become a bit more inclined to believe the polling here, which shows the race to be a toss-up. But the polling also shows that more voters move into the undecided camp in the event that Joe Sestak is the nominee, in which case the strategy of attacking Toomey could be more effectual.
10. New Hampshire (R-Open) -- New Hampshire tends to be a very good bellwether for national trends, perhaps because it's a well-educated state where people watch a lot of news and really enjoy the sport of politics. And since the national momentum is likely to favor the Republicans in November, that means Paul Hodes is running into a bit of a headwind.
11. Illinois (D-Burris) -- Rasmussen actually shows a tiny bit of momentum toward the Democrat Giannoulias. Mark Kirk is in a somewhat awkward position; he was elected repeatedly in Democratic-leaning IL-10 by running unashamedly as a moderate, but that's not where the GOP zeitgeist is this year and he's accumulated a more conservative voting record. I don't care how bad the national environment is -- I'm not sure you can win by reflexively opposing Barack Obama's agenda in Barack Obama's home state.
12. North Carolina (R-Burr) -- If there's one thing I'm certain of it's that North Carolina belongs in the #12 position; it marks the dividing line between those races that can basically be considered to be toss-ups and those that clearly lean toward the incumbent party.
13. Florida (R-Open) -- I'm pretty sure that Marco Rubio now has to be considered the favorite in the Republican primary. I'm not a huge believer in "trends" -- meaning, I don't think you should necessarily assume that just because a candidate has been gaining ground means that he'll continue to do so. But in this case, the trends have been pretty bleepin' overwhelming and have been accompanied by a disastrous narrative that has developed around Crist. In any event, whether it's Rubio who emerges or a wounded Crist, this race has come somewhat back on the radar screen as an opportunity for Democrats.
14. North Dakota (D-Dorgan) -- There are several polls showing John Hoeven with a huge lead over Byron Dorgan if he decides to enter, but all were conducted by Republican-leaning outfits. I'm a little bit suspicious of this sort of polling when the national party is trying to recruit a candidate into the race. Also, as a sitting governor whose term doesn't expire until 2012, Hoeven would have to explain to the electorate why he quit the governorship to challenge a fairly popular incumbent, which could instantly take a bite out of his numbers. So, I'm upgrading this race slightly on upside potential for the Republicans, but Hoeven remains an underdog to enter (having already blown through his self-imposed deadline of September) and is hardly a shoo-in if he does.
15. Louisiana (R-Vitter) -- Nothing in the way of new polling here. Vitter's failings are personal rather than political and are somewhat old news. I'm just not sure this is a winnable seat for Democrats in a state that has gone very red very quickly.
16. Iowa (R-Grassley) -- Democrats have gotten a semi-interesting candidate in the form of Roxanne Conlin, who has 73 percent name recognition in Iowa. Although Grassley, who had built up a large reservoir of goodwill, has probably not hurt himself quite enough to lose, the health care fight undermined his brand as a bipartisan dealmaker. This race deserves more polling.
17. New York (D-Gillibrand) -- Would Rudy have made the same decision not to run for national office if the Eunuch Bomber had struck on Thanksgiving rather than Christmas?
18. Wisconsin (D-Feingold) -- The buzz that Tommy Thompson might run seems to have died down. Nor do I know why Thompson would challenge a fairly popular incumbent for the Senate when there's an open seat in the governor's mansion instead.
19. California (D-Boxer)
20. Indiana (D-Bayh) -- Republicans have gotten themselves a candidate here in the form of six-term Congressman John Hostettler. Although Hostettler is a notoriously weak campaigner and Bayh has historically won by huge margins, this race could conceivably become interesting at the upper bound conditions of Republican momentum.
21. Arizona (R-McCain) -- It's getting a bit late for J.D. Hayworth to primary John McCain and Democrats would have to scramble to find their own candidate even if he did. But one contrary indicator: a Republican poll sponsored by a McCain-backing group tested negative messages about Hayworth, which suggests that somebody is at least a little bit nervous.
22. Texas (R-Open?) -- Bill White will run for governor rather than Senate, which robs Democrats of most of their opportunity -- especially since it has become less clear that Kay Bailey Hutchison will resign her seat in the first place.
23. South Carolina (R-DeMint) -- A PPP poll shows that Jim DeMint could potentially be vulnerable. But Democrats have almost no infrastructure in the Palmetto State, which probably makes this an academic question.
24. Georgia (R-Isakson) -- I'm going to start to downgrade some of these races where there's no fresh polling and no credible opponent.
25. Hawaii (D-Inouye) -- Ditto.
26. Massachusetts (D-Open) -- It's worth polling the special general, which will occur in just three weeks, but I'm pretty sure that Massachusetts will soon have a Senator Coakley.
27. Oklahoma (R-Coburn)
28. Alaska (R-Murkowski)
29. Kansas (R-Open)
30. Maryland (D-Mikulski)
31. Washington (D-Murray)
32. Alabama (R-Shelby)
33. South Dakota (R-Thune)
34. Vermont (D-Leahy)
35. Oregon (D-Wyden)
36. Utah (R-Bennett)
37. New York (Sr.) (D-Schumer)
38. Idaho (R-Crapo)
There's More...
Contract Post
by
Tom Schaller
@
2:08 PM
Nate is going to be writing a post at some point about the risks facing Republicans for their general tendency toward nay-voting and, in particular, their opposition to healthcare reform. The Democrats have been peddling hard a "Party of No" narrative--I get what seems like an email a day from the Democratic National Committee with some update or twist on this theme--though I have no idea whether this meme about the GOP is resonating or not with the broader public.
In any case, I think it is actually wise--as a general rule, and specifically to healthcare--for the GOP to vote against reform. Mind you, this has nothing to do with my opinions about the bill or its significance; I'm speaking here solely about political calculus. To demonstrate my point, consider the opposition party's situation as a simple game with two possibilities for the quality of legislation the majority passes--a generally "popular" bill or a generally "unpopular" one--and two options for how minority party members can vote on those bills, either voting with the majority or against. Presumably, legislators have some notion of how popular the legislation will be, but their information is incomplete.
In the first scenario, let's assume that will be a small penalty to pay by minority party caucus members for having voted against a popular bill passed by the majority (-1), and some reward for voting along with the majority for it (+1). To be clear, these are solely the payoffs for voting for good policies and against bad ones--not the political benefits or costs of voting with/against the majority party, which I address in a moment. I presume the size of the payouts, positive or negative, is small because minority party members gain/lose more by virtue of being in control, whereas minority members (especially in the House) wield little control beyond their votes at roll call. This is what the "freedom" of being an opposition party means--the risks and rewards of actions taken are smaller.
Meanwhile, the other component of that freedom is the license it gives one to oppose--and the concomitant expectation that you will in fact stand in opposition, especially when the majority makes bad decisions. And thus, compared to the cells directly above in the top row, the payoffs in the two cells of the bottom row are, first, far worse for minority legislators who voted along with the majority on an unpopular bill (-5), and second, far greater for them if they voted against an unpopular bill (+5)*
We could argue about just how big the disparity in the 5:1 magnitude of the payouts between top and bottom rows should be, but I don't think there's an argument to be made that the top payouts should be larger than the bottom. Surely a minority party legislator who played a unique, key role in shepherding the bill to passage may merit a higher individual payout. But I'm thinking in general terms about a random member of the minority caucus, and it seems reasonable to me to presume that there is generally more for minority members to be won (or lost) by voting against (or for) an unpopular piece of legislation for which the majority will be held responsible than voting for (or against) a popular one. This is an arguable assumption, but one I believe is essentially correct--and much of the analysis to follow stems from it.
Anyway, looking down the columns of version 1 (V1) of this game, there is no dominant strategy for minority party members: voting with the majority yields a better payoff if the bill turns out to be popular, but voting against yields the better payoff if the bill turns out to be unpopular. Such situations call for a mixed strategy: That is, sometimes you vote along with the majority and other times not.
But is it really the case that the minority party member receives the full payout in the top-left box for voting with the majority on popular legislation? I would argue they do not. After all, there is some added, perhaps universal value for being a party loyalist and thus opposing the majority--as well as some potential cost for defecting from the minority caucus to provide aid and the ever-important cover of "bi-partisanship" to your majority party opponents.
So let's say that, regardless of the policy merits or popularity of the bill in question, any defection (voting with the majority) subtracts one point from the payouts, while remaining loyal (voting against the majority) adds one point. In the second scenario, below, that changes the payouts in the top two cells to zero. Because they have the same value, the game "reduces" to a choice based on the bottom two cells, and thus a clearly dominant strategy emerges: vote against the majority.
The votes that come to mind when I think about this simplified game are the 1993 budget bill and the October 2002 Iraq War resolution vote. In the former case, Republicans voted uniformly against the Clinton-Gore budget plan, which later came to be regarded as sound and sensible fiscal policy. Republicans won big a year later, and though the "Revolution" of 1994 was the result of other factors, it is difficult to see how the GOP paid any price for voting against sound fiscal policy just a year earlier.
Fast forward nine years to the 2002 Iraq vote, and what happened? Dozens of Democrats in both chambers voted along with Bush and the GOP-controlled Congress to authorize the Iraq invasion. Did John Kerry and others really benefit politically from this vote? Even before public support for the war plummeted, I submit that they did not. And once public support did tank, Republicans pointed out those Democrats to share the blame and provide themselves political cover. That said, it is probably not the case that the added benefit for minority members of voting with the majority on a popular bill is equal in magnitude to the cost of voting with them on an unpopular bill. In other words, in the original matrix the payoff in the left column boxes would probably have to be reduced somewhat even prior to making an adjustment for party disloyalty, yielding something like this:
There's still not a dominant strategy in V3, but without going into the calculus for how often one votes "nay" v. "aye," suffice to say one mixes in fewer "aye" votes as a result.
I don't suggest that this game and my hypothetical payouts apply at all times and everywhere. But I do think as a general rule, or at least the default strategy, minority parties should vote unanimously in opposition to majorities. Why? Because if you vote along with them, you get little credit and are used for political cover when things go wrong, making it a break-even/lose situation. And if you vote against you usually pay little to no price if things go well, but stand to reap huge windfalls if things go awry, making that a break-even/win situation.
Applying all of this specifically to the healthcare legislation, there really is no reason for any Republican to vote for it. There are a lot of specific reasons why this is so: the GOP coalition is older and whiter and thus will benefit less; conservative voters reflexively oppose expansions of government of any type; etc. But even if the ideological and demographic reasons are held aside, it makes sense to vote "nay." Just ask 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry.
*Games typically show payoffs for both row-wise and column-wise players, separated by commas, but here I'm only interested in payouts for the minority legislators (i.e., column-wise players), hence a single entry, or payout, is provided for each cell.
There's More...
Contract Post
by
Nate Silver
@
6:54 PM
Over at Firedoglake, Marcy has
questioned some of my assumptions regarding the financial situation of her hypothesized family of four making $66,370 per year and trying to purchase health insurance under the Senate's bill. That's only fair, since I
questioned some of her assumptions. So let's go line by line through her budget, and try to reach some consensus as to what this family is in fact likely to be spending in health care and other areas.
Taxes: Marcy doesn't get into the details here, but her 13% estimate is still too high. This family is going to get a bonanza of tax credits: $2,000 in tax credits for having children, about 20% off their cost of child care, deductions for mortgage, health care, and probably other expenses -- particularly if one or more members of the family is self-employed, as will frequently be the case for those on the individual market. While some of those credits will be accounted for in the average tax burden she draws from per the Urban/Brookings data -- meaning, it's not as straightforward as just deducting those figures from her totals -- this family is liable to receive an appreciably above-average number of tax breaks. Also, although this is a minor point, she's exrapolating a 13% marginal tax rate from the table for a family making $78,767; for a family making $66,370, the average effective federal tax rate should be closer to 12%. But since this particular family should be paying a below-average marginal tax rate relative to their income bracket, we'll assume that federal taxes will in fact total 10% of their income. We'll keep state taxes the same since Michigan is reasonably forgiving for a family in this income tier.
Food: Marcy suggests her initial estimates may have been too low and I agree -- let's up the family's food budget to $9,000.
Housing: This is still the most significant difference -- I had figured housing costs at about $10,000 based on BLS data, versus Marcy's estimate of $19,275. Marcy points out that the a higher propotion of people in the BLS dataset I used will have paid off their mortgage, but that's still just one-fifth of the BLS's sample, so it's not going to make a huge difference. But let's bump up my estimate to $12,000 -- or an even $1,000 per month -- to account for this, as well as for the fact that a family with two children might want some extra square footage.
Transportation: Marcy's per-mile estimates are fairly reasonable, although note that both her and my estimates were from 2008, a year in which gas prices were especially high. But most families won't drive quite this much. Let's simply split the difference between the BLS's $9,359 estimate and Marcy's $13,200, which yields $11,280.
Utilities: Marcy suggests her initial estimates may have been too low and I agree -- let's up the family's utility budget to $3,000, slightly above the BLS estimate of $2,823 since a family with two children will likely consume a somewhat above-average amount of electricity.
Telecom: Marcy's initial estimate was $1,200; the BLS data suggests the costs would in fact be somewhere between $1,253 and $2,394, depending on how much of the costs of cable television are included in the category "audio and visual equipment and service". On the other hand, cable is a fairly discretionary expense -- especially in the age of Hulu -- so I'm not sure it belongs in the "above the line" estimate. In any event, let's bump our estimate up slightly to $1,500 per year.
Child Care: Marcy's data says that pre-school care costs $6,216 per year, and infant and toddler care costs $7,936 per year. Assume that each child needs three years of infant care and three years of pre-school care out of an 18-year childhood. If that's the case, the family will spend $2,358.50 per year per child on average, or $4,717 on average for two children. Also, while Marcy asserts that her estimates are high, not all families will have to pay for day care. Even if both parents are working, some families may be fortunate enough to have a free or discounted child care program available to them via a church, employer, or municipality, or may have older relatives living nearby to take care of the children during the daytime. Or, if one or more of the parents works from home -- which will be the case fairly often for someone in the individual market -- they may be able to take care of the toddlers themselves and still earn a paycheck.
Health Care: We're both assuming $5,243, or 7.9% of income, which is the highest amount this family would have to pay for premiums under the Senate's bill before the individual mandate penalty would be waived.
So, this is how I come to the conclusion that Marcy's expenditure estimates are about $10,000 too high: I have this family spending $54,682 per year, including taxes and their health insurance premiums, versus $64,279 per Marcy's numbers. Therefore, I have this family having $11,689 left over whereas Marcy has them with $2,091.
Then there's something strange that Marcy does, which is to use the BLS estimates for health care expenditures. The reason you can't do this is because overwhelming majority of people in this income tier will have the cost of insurance paid for by their employers and some others are on Medicare -- neither of those things will show up in the BLS data. Also, as Marcy has pointed out, the average family in the BLS dataset has 2.7 members whereas our hypotheized family has 4.0, which further lowers the cost. These factors obscure the BLS estimates profoundly to the point that they're simply noninformative.
I've searched high and dry for empirical data on what families in the individual market are actually paying for health care -- both out-of-pocket expenditures and insurance premiums -- and I can't find it. But Kaiser estimates that the cost of family coverage in employer-based settings is already about $12,680 per year. Coverage in the individual market may actually be slightly cheaper, but for substantially less robust coverage -- the CBO estimates that the scope of coverage in the individual market will improve by 30% under the Senate's bill.
And without stringent out-of-pocket caps, as would be implemented under the Senate's bill, the downside risk remains very high to this family. Or, they may not be purchasing health insurance at all, in which case they'll save a little bit of money in some years but lose a lot of money -- and perhaps their livelihood -- in years where a member of the family gets sick.
I don't want to get drawn into a sematic debate about what is "affordable" -- particularly when I agree with Marcy that the health insurance for working families should be made more affordable before President Obama signs this bill. Certainly, if you use my estimates for this family's expenditures, most people would define the coverage as being "affordable" -- it fits into their budget and leaves them with some money left over, even after a significant allowance for out-of-pocket expenditures. Marcy's initial estimates would obviously put "affordability" strongly into question -- but they're significantly too pessimistic. The areas where she was leaning high, especially housing, significantly outweigh those where she was leaning low, like food and utilities.
And what's unambiguous is that the Senate's bill makes the coverage much more affordable than the status quo. If we were to accept Marcy's estimates, and this family had to pay $12,680 for family coverage on the individual market, they'd run a deficit of $5,346 per year -- before out of pocket expenditures. That's not affordable. Or, more likely, they'll choose not to provide coverage for their families at all, with all the financial and physical risk that entails.
There's simply no way that you can provide $6,000 or $7,000 per year in subidies to a family like this one, for insurance that has an actuarial value of 80-85%, and leave them worse off -- not unless the family has better genes than Brett Favre. For a family that's already purchasing health insurance, this is literally free money. For one that isn't, it's substantially reducing their long-run health care expenditures while also evening out their risk.
There's More...
Contract Post
by
Nate Silver
@
7:13 AM
Let me advance a proposition for you. It's going to be a controversial one. Ready?
The proposition is this: the Internet is really important!
OK, so I'm joking -- sort of. That tagline sounds so ... 2006. But I think people may nevertheless be overlooking the importance of the Internet in shaping the political landscape that we have today. In other words, a lot of the things that feel "new" about politics circa 2009
are in fact new, but have a lot more to do with information technology than is generally acknowledged.
Take, for example, the manifestations of quote-unquote extremism that we've seen recently on both the right and the left. To be somewhat reductionist here, perhaps the Tea Party movement, the Ron Paul movement, and the kill-bill movement qualify as the more benign, constructive forms of "extremism", and things like the birther "movement" or the PUMA "movement" the more destructive, virulent ones. There's a very alluring narrative to be had here -- one which the mainstream media finds particularly charming -- which is that
The country is coming apart at the seams! The center is dying! The natives are restless! But is there actually much evidence of this?
Actually, the evidence is pretty mixed. We can look, for example, the General Social Survey, which has been conducted annually or biannually since 1972. One question on this survey, which has been posed in identical fashion since 1974, asks the respondent to identify their ideology on a 1 to 7 scale, where 1 means "extremely liberal" (that's the survey's terminology, not mine) and 7 means "extremely conservative".
In the last incarnation of the survey in 2008, only 2.9 percent of people termed themselves as "extremely liberal" while 3.9 percent described themselves as "extremely conservative". These numbers aren't really any different from the period between, say, 1974 and 1989, during which time 2.2 percent called themselves "extremely liberal" and 2.9 percent "extremely conservative".
We can also look at the standard deviation in these responses; the more polarized/ideological that the country is becoming, the higher this number should be:
If polarization has increased, it's been very, very marginal. The standard deviation of these responses on the 7-point scale was about 1.3 in the 1970s and is about 1.4 now. Americans have never liked to think of themselves as holding extreme viewpoints and that hasn't really changed.
Of course, what it means to be "extremely conservative" and "extremely liberal" is ambiguous -- and to some extent these terms are relative. My aunt and uncle, for instance, who are sort of old-school Olympia-Snowe-lovin' Rockefeller Republicans, would probably have happily defined themselves as "conservative" in the 1980s but would probably gravitate more toward the "moderate" label now -- because they don't like Sarah Palin or gay-bashing or the Tea Party movement and they think that's now what defines being "conservative". To their thinking, their viewpoint hasn't changed very much -- the world around them has.
However, more robust survey questions also do not show an increase in "extreme" ideologies. Take, for example, the Harris Poll, which since 1966 has calculated something called the "Alienation Index". The Alienation Index poses the following five questions to people, and then simply averages the number of people who respond affirmatively to each of them:
1. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
2. What you think doesn't count very much anymore.
3. Most people with power try to take advantage of people like yourself.
4. The people running the country don't really care what happens to you.
5. You're left out of things going on around you.
Although alienation is not precisely the same thing as "extremism", they measure in effect the same thing: the extent to which people feel disenfranchised by the mainstream. And it ought to be a relatively good measure of what might be thought of as "populist" sentiment, which has historically operated on a discourse of the powerful elite versus the disenfranchised masses; populism thrives on feelings of alienation.
But the Alienation Index has not increased, either over the near term or the medium term. In spite of all the trauma that the country went through during the 'aughts, it's actually a bit lower now than it during most of the 1980s and 1990s, although higher than it was during the pre-Watergate Era. The Alienation Index also decreased slightly from 2008 to 2009 (although alienation among Republicans increased, this was more than made up for by a decrease among Democrats). This year's survey was conducted rather recently -- back in November -- so it should fully incorporate all the Tea Party angst, etc.
We live in a complex world and I don't mean to oversimplify this too much. But it seems to me that, rather than a change in underlying sentiments -- that is, more prevalence of quote-unquote extreme, alienated, nonmainstream, populist, pox-on-both-their-houses viewpoints -- what has instead changed is that these viewpoints have become much more visible. And the reason has to do with technology -- to some extent cable news but to a much greater extent the Internet.
Take the Tea Parties, for example. Liberals don't give nearly enough credit to the technological sophistication of the Tea Partiers. Back in the old days -- you know, like 2005 or so -- getting several hundred people together at several hundred different locations would have required months of planning. But thanks to the Tea Partiers' ability to find one another on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and so forth -- and to some extent the megaphone of Fox News -- these protests can come together fairly spontaneously. The left's use of the Internet has been much more heralded, but obviously has been exceptionally impressive too, particularly the extent to which the most listened-to people on the left (think Markos Moulitsas or Jane Hamsher) tend to come from nonpolitical backgrounds. Then there are things like the Ron Paul movement, which would have gotten absolutely no traction without the Internet.
(Of course, the Internet may also foster some of the less reality-based "nontraditional" viewpoints -- like birtherism, PUMAism, and probably Islamic extremism. Cass Sunstein has written several books on how, by allowing people to filter their news sources, the Internet may enable people to live in their own virtual bubbles.)
To be clear, I am not suggesting that the changes we're observing in the political discourse are illusory. Left, right, and "radical" center, activists really are getting together in ways that they couldn't have before, and really are shaping everything from the lead story on Hardball to the outcomes of entire elections. So too, their expectations are changing (i.e. increasing). This stuff is real, and both the Republicans and (somewhat astonishingly) the White House have often been caught flat-footed in trying to grapple with it.
What I am suggesting, however, is that the fact that "nonmainstream", "nontraditional" viewpoints are becoming more visible and more activated does not necessarily mean that they're becoming more prevalent. On the one hand, it's wonderful that the political discourse is becoming more democratized and less homogenized; that people other than traditional centrist party hacks are becoming empowered. On the other hand, there is probably some tendency to conflate the most extreme viewpoints with those of the respective party "bases", particularly since -- and I've been a partial exception to this rule -- the squeakiest wheel gets the TV booking. The left and right political blogospheres, the door-knocking activist community, and the base voters in each party are all separate and distinct things. They certainly overlap, but by less than you might think. For example, as much importance as the public option was assigned by online communities, it is regarded as one of the least important aspects of health care reform by Americans on average, and particularly by swing voters.
The Internet is still very, very new! Google didn't exist when Bill Clinton won his second term; now it's a $200 billion company, and pervades our day-to-day existence as much as any company has perhaps ever. Meanwhile, there's been very little in the way of what Tim Berners-Lee calls "Web Science" -- the systematic study of the Internet and its impact upon society. Not only did the Internet get a head start on us, but it's probably changing and expanding faster than our understanding of it is catching up.
What I'm saying, I suppose, is that if the Internet had come along 20 years earlier, the politics of 1989 might have borne a fairly strong resemblance to the politics of 2009. But since the Internet is in fact a relatively new invention -- still, really, in its nascent stages -- that doesn't help us to predict the way it might affect politics in the coming years. There's a tendency to neglect those things we don't understand and can't predict -- but there needs to be more awareness of the way that the Internet is impacting politics. The change we are seeing is perhaps principally a technological one.
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by
Nate Silver
@
11:56 AM
It goes without saying that I've started to clash with a couple of the writers at
FireDogLake. But there are a couple of people I really like over there. One of them is Spencer Ackerman, whose
terrific piece on Al Qaeda you should read. Another is Marcy Wheeler, a fellow Michigander, who has
this piece placing into context the cost of health insurance under the Senate's bill for a family of four making $66,000 (301% of poverty).
I like Marcy's analysis, among other reasons, because it's data and fact-driven. Nevertheless, it's painting an incomplete picture -- and somewhat missing the forest for the trees.
First of all, several of of Marcy's cost estimates are on the high side. In particular:
-- Spending 30% of income on one's rent/mortage as Marcy's assumes -- that's $19,275 per year or $1,600 per month -- is an aggressive assumption. The Department of Commerce estimates that people in this income bracket spend more like $10,000 per year on shelter, before utilities (which Marcy breaks out separately). In most parts of the country, $1,600 per month is going to buy you a very nice home, even if you have two rugrats to worry about.
-- The transporation figure -- $13,200 -- may also be aggressive. The Commerce Department puts the average fully-loaded cost of transportation for this income tier at $9,359. I don't doubt that if the family did need two cars and both parents lived fairly far from work, the cost could meet or exceed Marcy's number -- but not all families will fall into this category.
-- I don't know whether the cost of daycare, which Marcy estimates at $6,216 per year, is high -- but not all families will have a pre-school aged child. The typical child spends 3-4 years in pre-school, but then 12-13 years in the public school system.
-- The taxes are probably high, because of the various tax credits that would be available to this family. Firstly, this family should be able to take advantage of the Child Tax Credit at $1,000 per child. Secondly, there's a separate tax credit for child care that is worth 20% of day care expenses. Thirdly, depending on various factors, their health care costs should be tax deductible. And fourthly, if they own rather than rent their home, some of their mortgage costs will be tax deductable.
As Marcy points out, her assumptions may be favorable to this family in other ways -- her family doesn't have any debt, for example. Nor do I doubt that there are some families who would fit Marcy's template almost perfectly (although they should still be able to take advantage of the significant tax breaks that Marcy hasn't accounted for). But in general, this is significantly more than most two-child families will be spending on these services -- probably by a margin of $10,000 or so.
Nevertheless, that's not really the most important point. Rather, what is this family spending on health care now? If they're buying insurance on the individual market, they're probably paying something like $12,000 per year for their premiums -- and paying it for worse insurance than they'd get under the Senate's bill. So for these families, the $6,000 or $7,000 per year that the Senate's bill would save them is money to spend toward a bigger home, toward paying off debt, toward enrolling their children in day care, toward letting one of the parents stay home with a young child, toward entertainment, vacations or meals out.
And if the family isn't buying insurance, their health care costs certainly shouldn't be figured as zero. Even in a "good" year, more often than not there will be the need for the occasional doctor's or emegency room visit, medications, and so forth -- few families of four make it the whole year without any medical problems. Without insurance, it's easy to imagine these costs adding up into the low four figures.
And what about when the family has a more serious medical complication? They're totally and completely screwed. They'll either have to forgo care, radically cut their standard of living, or endure a bankruptcy.
Marcy is basically treating the $5,243 per year as though it's a tax hike. That's not what it is -- at all. It's a deeply discounted -- albeit mandatory -- service that they're purchasing. And it's saving them a lot of money: it either saves them a lot of money every year if they're already buying insurance, or a lot of money on average if they're not buying insurance.
And in either case, because of the caps in out-of-pocket expenditures -- it also provides them with a lot more certainty in forecasting their income stream. It allows them to come up with a reasonable gameplan.
Frankly, unless they're living in New York or the San Francisco Bay or some other place where the cost of housing is very high, the family that Marcy draws from -- one which pays $1,600 per month for rent but does not buy health insurance for themselves or for their children -- does not have a reasonable and responsible gameplan to begin with. If they can't figure out how to squeeze out $430 per month in insurance premiums, what are they supposed to do in the status quo when somebody actually gets sick? You can object to the Senate's health care bill on libertarian/paternalism grounds, but it will leave the overwhelming majority of low- and middle-income families better off.
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by
Tom Schaller
@
10:27 AM
With the healthcare reform debate (presumably, momentarily) behind us, it’s worth pausing a moment to reflect on the significance of the New Left as a political and governing force. Cutting to the chase, let me start with the main point I hope to convey: Although it is perfectly reasonable to question the Left’s methods and its ability to forge policy consensus, it is becoming comfortable once again to incorrectly depict policy victories not merely as happening despite meaningful contribution from liberals and liberal policymakers but even as somehow having benefited from liberal consternation. This view is wrong—on the merits and as a long-term form of political posture.
Here’s a fairly typical example, from an AP wire story, of how the mainstream media covered liberals’ objections to the healthcare reform bill as it worked its way through the Senate during the late stages of the legislative process:
Obama resists as liberals attack health care bill
Washington--The White House and its allies scrambled Thursday to quash a growing liberal assault on a much-compromised health care proposal, hoping to keep President Barack Obama's top domestic priority from being crushed between the political left and right.
In Senate speeches, TV appearances, blogs and other outlets, Obama's supporters said the latest attacks are exaggerated and troubling, because Senate Democratic leaders can't spare a single vote in trying to overcome fierce GOP opposition.
But some prominent liberals, led by former presidential candidate Howard Dean, say the Senate bill is so diluted that it's worse than nothing at all. Powerful labor unions were equally disenchanted but urged lawmakers to press on, hoping to improve the bill in House-Senate negotiations…
Top White House adviser David Axelrod disputed Dean's claims and urged party activists to embrace an important if imperfect bill.
"We're on the doorstep of doing something really meaningful," Axelrod said in an interview. No one is entirely satisfied with the bill, he said, but it includes long-sought health insurance regulations and other items too important to lose.
Former president Bill Clinton said in a statement it would be "a colossal blunder" to let the measure die. "America can't afford to let the perfect be the enemy of the good," he said…
This storyline is part of a broader narrative about the Democratic Party's cohesiveness and governing skill. There is a long-held and oft-vindicated notion that because the Democratic Party contains a base of liberals who are more unmanageable and assertive than compliant conservatives are within the Republican coalition—itself is a debatable point of party comparison, but one we'll aside—the party struggles to win elections, and has as much or even more trouble governing once it does attain power. Here’s my friend Joe Klein, who always has his fingers on the pulse of Washington wisdom, raising anew a question he’s more or less been posing for a quarter century, this time in context of healthcare reform and upon hearing news of Howard Dean’s opposition to the Senate compromise bill:
[D]eaniacs are now campaigning against the individual mandate, an absolutely central and crucial part of health care reform. This, and assorted nonsense from left-bloggers in high dudgeon, and assorted dilatory narcissism from the likes of Ben Nelson and Roland Burris, calls into question the ability of the Democratic Party to govern this country…
Universal health care is predicated on two mandates: The insurers have to provide it to everyone regardless of a pre-existing conditions….Those who stand against these essential principles because of an ideological conceit--whether it be Joe Lieberman's opposition to a public option, Ben Nelson's opposition to abortion funding or Democracy for America's opposition to an individual mandate--are proving a point that conservatives have long made: that Democrats are too feckless to govern.
Not all commentary revolves around the ideas that liberals were bulwarks and perfectionist enemies of “the good,” to borrow Clinton’s overused phrase. And politicians like Ben Nelson and, especially, Joe Lieberman, were targets of significant scorn. But as healthcare reform moved toward resolution, liberals endured at least their share, if not more than their share, of abuse.
So let's be clear about a few things. First, members of the Progressive Caucus in the House, along with senators boasting very liberal ADA scores, provided more in number and a higher share of votes for reform than the smaller group of centrists in the middle did. Those centrists in the middle also extracted far more concessions and changes. In other words, in the end, at roll call when it matters most, a defecting few won out over the loyalist many in terms of attention but the loyalist many were crucial. Liberals complained and liberal bloggers threatened to kill the bill, yes. But liberals in Congress, whose voices matter most when it comes to legislation, carried this reform to passage. They were its progenitors and protectors. To depict this policy victory as somehow happening despite their views and inputs, or as a the triumph of sensible, reasonable moderates, is to misrepresent what happened here.
Second, as for having those votes in the first place, let's also remember how President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Harry Reid obtained their power, namely, through a surge in support from liberals and the consolidation of power in the Northeast, with growth in the Midwest and especially the libertarian Far West. Not every Democrat is a liberal, but more of them are liberals than in the past Democratic majorities. And although Obama has disappointed liberals on some policies, including healthcare reform, I for one find it hard to imagine that President Hillary Clinton or President John Edwards would have done better. (Though I'm more confident of that statement with Clinton than had a non-scandal-tainted Edwards somehow won the White House.)
I say all of this with the intent of reminding those who are tempted to be cheered by liberals' disappointment with key parts of healthcare reform as well as to those liberals who are disgruntled. This was a liberal victory. A perfect, pure victory? Nope. But a liberal defeat? No way.
All that said, Democrats (including some liberal Democrats) are going to suffer electoral punishment this coming November. But, presuming that will happen, the rebuke will be for something accomplished, rather than nothing accomplished, as was generally the case in 1994. (Clinton's 1993 budget compromise was a major accomplishment, of course; I'm speaking here of healthcare parallels.) In that regard, Democrats have proved they can govern and build consensus around a shared agenda. Whatever one thinks of those policies--on stimulus or cap-n-trade or healthcare--they are policies, not half-formed ideas beached on the shoreline of Democratic dissensus. And that says a lot about the national Democratic Party--and yes, it's New Left backbone--today compared to just 15 or so years ago.
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by
Nate Silver
@
1:58 PM
Not going to do any editorializing here; just going to do some non-fancy math. James Joyner
asks:
There have been precisely three attempts over the last eight years to commit acts of terrorism aboard commercial aircraft. All of them clownishly inept and easily thwarted by the passengers. How many tens of thousands of flights have been incident free?
Let's expand Joyner's scope out to the past decade. Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the
shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas.
The
Bureau of Transportation Statistics provides a wealth of statistical information on air traffic. For this exercise, I will look at both domestic flights within the US, and international flights whose origin or destination was within the United States. I will not look at flights that transported cargo and crew only. I will look at flights spanning the decade from October 1999 through September 2009 inclusive (the BTS does not yet have data available for the past couple of months).
Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get
one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.
These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.
Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.
There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.
Again, no editorializing (for now). These are just the numbers.
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