The editors of the Washington Post characterize the president’s foot-dragging on approval of the Keystone XL pipeline as “absurd”:

At this point, there is little doubt about the big picture. After two thorough environmental analyses, State Department experts determined that the pipeline’s impact probably would be minimal, even on climate change-inducing carbon dioxide emissions. The economic rewards of extracting Canadian oil are too attractive and the options for getting it out of the country are too numerous. We would rather see Canadian crude traveling a well-built, well-regulated pipeline in the United States than on the rail cars, barges and ocean tankers that will move it until cheaper options inevitably come online.

Let’s consider possible reasons for the president’s opposition to the pipeline. One possibility, frequently mentioned, is that his actions are being dictated by major donors.

Another possibility is that the president has a deep, visceral, unreasoning distaste for the dirty. Without delving too deeply into amateur psychology at a distance that would explain a lot including the administration’s war on coal and its relative disinterest in more dirty jobs which, sadly, are what many people actually do.

It is possible that the pipeline would produce profits for people he doesn’t like and that might be used against Democrats.

It is possible that the president is right and everybody else including me, the editors of the Washington Post, and all of the experts who’ve reported otherwise are wrong.

It is also possible that the president is invincibly ignorant.

Have I missed anything?

I certainly hope there’s some investigative follow-up to this claim from a conversation between a constituent and New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, reported by James Taranto and originally caught by Jason Pye:

The caller told Shaheen that “President Obama’s health care is not affordable.”
“It’s cost me more, my deductible has more than tripled and my monthly premium has doubled, so it’s not affordable,” he said. “And so, I’d rather have my old healthcare, my old system back.”
Shaheen dismissed his concerns out of hand, telling him to leave his name with the host so her office could call him back “because that doesn’t sound right to me.” She chalked the caller’s complaints up to “misinformation.”

When we have discounted the uncomfortable, we may also have rejected the truth. Or not. That’s what investigation is for.

The phrase “anecdotal evidence” is in research to describe reports of incidents, often from untrained observers. The characterization is sometimes used to discredit evidence that contradicts the preconceived notions of the individual making the characterization.

Here’s the problem: the anecdotal evidence may be correct. Or it may be wrong. The only way to make that determination is by thorough investigation that includes review of even reports that contradict previous findings.

Could someone give me a hand? I’m trying to reconcile this statement by Lanhee J. Chen And James C. Capretta from an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

According to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, Medicare Advantage’s HMOs provided patients with covered services for 92% of the cost of the traditional fee-for-service program in 2013.

with this statement from MedPac, the “independent advisory board” that advises Congress on Medicare and Medicaid:

We estimate that 2014 MA benchmarks, bids, and payments (including the quality bonuses) will average 112 percent, 98 percent, and 106 percent of FFS spending, respectively.

My recollection is that MedPac’s statement is consistent with past experience. I don’t see how both statements can be right.

I suppose the howls of outrage at the Supreme Court’s decision in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action yesterday should have been expected. For a good plain English of the decision see here. I think that James Taranto’s summary of the four contrasting positions taken by members of the court is interesting.

My own view is that Justice Breyer has it pretty much right. In cases in which affirmative action is being taken neither by the voters nor state’s legislators nor the courts but by unelected school administrators the voters of the state have the power to reverse those administrators’ actions.

The editors of the New York Times take a somewhat different view:

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a three-member plurality, sided with the voters, who he said had undertaken “a basic exercise of their democratic power” in approving the amendment. He cautioned that the ruling took no position on the constitutionality of race-conscious admissions policies themselves. “This case is not about how the debate about racial preferences should be resolved. It is about who may resolve it.”

Not so, Justice Sonia Sotomayor responded, in a stinging 58-page dissent. “Our Constitution places limits on what a majority of the people may do,” she wrote, such as when they pass laws that oppress minorities.

That’s what the affirmative action ban does, by altering the political process to single out race and sex as the only factors that may not be considered in university admissions.

While the decision expressly did not declare affirmative action unconstitutional, it may have dealt a severe blow to something called “political process doctrine” and that’s what I think the editors are alluding to. If the dissent had prevailed it would have meant that once affirmative action had been put in place for whatever reason, there would be no way to remove it except, possibly, by court order.

Intervening in a similarly predictably heated comment thread in a post on the decision, James Joyner remarks:

The lack of social mobility for poor and otherwise disadvantaged students, who are disproportionately black and Hispanic, is a real problem that should concern Americans of all races and political ideologies. I’m an opponent of state institutions giving preferential treatment on the basis of race alone for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that it’s increasingly anachronistic nearly seven decades after Brown vs. Board of Education and nearly half a century after the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

I don’t think it’s quite right that “we spend more money on the education of well off white kids.” Rather, we spend more money on the education of well off kids, who are disproportionately white. Nowadays, while race of course remains an issue, it’s quite possible that parental and community social class is a bigger issue in terms of children’s achievement. Indeed, while race per se is undeniably much less of a barrier to success than it was half a century—or, indeed, a quarter century—ago, we’re seeing a steady decline in social mobility. Increasingly, demography is destiny.

I would go farther than that. I think we should be able to devote the resources necessary to helping students both on the basis of family income and race. And we still can. Advocates for such intervention need to persuade their legislators or a majority the voters rather than just a few school administrators and trustees.

I would also add that higher education is a lousy place on which to focus our attention. We would be much better off concentrating resources on K-12.

While I would never claim that money is the sole solution to the problems of our public education system, I think it does make some difference. Consider the variations in per pupil spending here in Illinois. The lion’s share of funds for public education comes from local governments here in Illinois rather than the state (Illinois is 50th among the 50 states in the state’s contribution to public education) and most of those funds come from property tax revenues. Consequently, the value of property has an enormous influence on how much is available to fund public education. That means that per pupil public school spending is effectively proportional to family income.

Adjoining Evanston spends roughly 50% more per elementary school student than Chicago’s District 299 does. That means that Evanston can attract better teacher and administrators and afford to maintain its facilities better than Chicago can. That Chicago could offset Evanston’s spending by increasing its sales or property taxes is a blithe assertion that I do not believe stands up to scrutiny. Chicago already has the highest sales taxes in the state and raising Chicago’s property tax rate would be as likely to drive people and businesses out of Chicago as it would raise revenue.

What, then, should be done? The solution must come from the state and heretofore the state has refused to act.

Update

Ilya Shapiro summarizes the decision:

But really Schuette is a much easier case than the above description might indicate. Indeed, it’s no surprise that six justices found that a state constitutional provision prohibiting racial discrimination complies with the federal constitutional provision that prohibits state racial discrimination. To hold otherwise would be to torture the English language to the point where constitutional text is absolutely meaningless. The only surprise – or, rather, the lamentable pity – is that Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg somehow agreed with the lower court’s confused determination that the Constitution requires what it barely tolerates (racial preferences in university admissions).

I received this joke from one of my fellow Watcher’s Council members, a Russian now living in Israel. A traveller has arrived in the United States.

U. S. Customs agent: Nationality?

Traveller: Russian

U. S. Customs agent: Occupation?

Traveller: No, just visiting.

The other day I watched a short subject from the 1940s on TCM that consisted largely of some sanitized history (with Craig Stevens who would later be TV’s Peter Gunn portraying Sephen Foster) and a sing-a-long of Stephen Foster songs. I suspect that the short was largely nostalgic to that audience of 70 years ago. I found the lyrics cringe-worthy.

I did learn one thing from the short: Foster probably earned a good deal of his money writing songs for minstrel shows (he was the first American to get rich writing popular songs). Many of his songs were written for and popularized by the Christy Minstrels, that most famous of all blackface groups, started in the 1840s by Edwin Pearce Christy.

In other words we’ve gone from something being the heart of mainstream popular culture 170 years ago to being nostalgic a century later to being horrid seventy years later.

You know, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s 50 year old predictions of the future have made out pretty darned well.

There’s an interesting post at Minyanville suggesting that Russian actions in response to U. S. sanctions may have produced a decline in the dollar:

I calculated the expected return on the yen for that week’s market movements. It was for a gain of 0.90%; the actual gain was 0.82%, well within reason. The dollar behaved much differently than expected; it declined 1.00% when it should have rallied close to 3.10%.

Why the discrepancy? One reason proffered is markets expected the Federal Reserve to reverse its tapering policy. That seems unlikely as that move would put its already wishy-washy reputation one step closer toward a complete lack of policy continuity. I think the real reason is a tad more sinister and even a little juicy for those into the cloak-and-dagger stuff.

Please recall a massive decline in custody holdings at the Federal Reserve at the start of the Ukrainian situation. Apparently someone in Moscow thought leaving Russian funds in the custody of the US central bank might be seen as a little careless among an unforgiving audience. What if the same thing happened with stocks as things started to heat up in eastern Ukraine? A motivated seller of US stocks liquidated, and instead of keeping the funds in greenbacks put them into another currency. This might explain why the dollar declined at a time when it should have increased.

It’s intriguing but I can’t say I’m convinced. You need more than motive and means to prove a crime.

Of all of the thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of words I’ve read about income inequality in the aftermath of French economist Thomas Piketty’s visit to the United States, the article that resonated most with me has been Tyler Cowen’s review in Foreign Affairs of Dr. Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century. While acknowledging the significance of Dr. Piketty’s work:

Every now and then, the field of economics produces an important book; this is one of them. Thomas Piketty’s tome will put capitalist wealth back at the center of public debate, resurrect interest in the subject of wealth distribution, and revolutionize how people view the history of income inequality. On top of that, although the book’s prose (translated from the original French) might not qualify as scintillating, any educated person will be able to understand it — which sets the book apart from the vast majority of works by high-level economic theorists.

he finds it, as many commenters have, uneven. It, apparently, is better in vision than in policy prescriptions, in weaving a narrative that supports his views than fleshing out his ideas from a real world perspective.

Dr. Piketty, apparently, largely ignores the role of risk in capital returns. I think he can be forgiven for this because far too many of today’s risks aren’t risks at all. If you act with the reasonable expectation that the central government will step in to indemnify you against risks should your actions lose money, there is no risk.

Something that appears to have been ignored in the popular press is that Dr. Piketty’s concerns about income inequality aren’t focused solely on the ultra-rich, the Warren Buffetts or Bill Gateses, but also on petits rentiers, which includes most of the American professional class.

As I have emphasized here since the very origins of this blog, my greatest concern on this subject is how rent-seeking drives income inequality rather than on income inequality per se. Michael Jordan’s or Tiger Woods’s wealth do not concern me. The Kennedy family trust does. In a society as complex as ours with a government as pervasive as ours these rents take a vast number of forms—they encompass everything from royalty income to physicians’ wages to the subsidies received by bankers or GM executives and workers in the late recession. When you use the wealth you’ve gained through these rents to promote increases in your rents, as the late Sonny Bono manifestly did, it presents an assault on liberal democracy.

If your prescription for ending income inequality is, as Dr. Piketty’s, increased taxes on income and wealth, I challenge you to outline how this will work, recalling that when the highest marginal tax rate was over 90%, effective tax rates were little higher than they are now, i.e. marginal tax rates are virtually irrelevant to income inequality. Also, consider how many millionaires are sitting in the U. S. Congress. Does it actually seem likely to you that Congress will enact a tax on wealth? IMO a significant number of them are there to ensure that such a tax is never enacted into law.

I would be remiss in concluding this post without re-emphasizing that, at least as regards income inequality within the United States, reversing much of the income inequality that has come to pass over the period of the last forty years can be effected by controlling immigration, underwriting depositors rather than bankers, controlling healthcare costs, and emphasizing more jobs over other policy goals. It’s not your priorities that determine what you believe but your subpriorities.