There’s an excellent post at Of Two Minds chock-full of nice charts and graphs (for those of you who like nice charts and graphs) in a similar vein to my earlier post this morning. Here’s the 30 second summary:

1. GDP growth has averaged about 2% since 2000.
2. GDP growth has been flat since 2007.
3. GDP growth since 2007 would have declined 11% without massive federal spending.
4. Public employee healthcare costs in many jurisdictions have grown by 11% per year since 2000.
5. Adjusted for inflation stock gains since 2000 have been negative.
6. Public employee pension promises assumed annual gains in the vicinity of 8%.

These charts make it clear where we’re going in terms of public pension and healthcare costs. The real economy isn’t growing at all, or is actively shrinking if we remove massive Federal stimulus, and long-term returns in stocks are negative.

But let’s make the happy-story assumption the U.S. economy is about to resume its long-term GDP growth rate of abour 2% per annum.

A 2% (inflation-adjusted) growth rate in the real economy compounds to a 24% increase over 11 years, while an 11% annual increase in pension and public employee healthcare costs compounds into a 315% increase.

Is that disparity sustainable? Clearly, it is not.

You can’t fix that with tax increases, unless you’re planning on increasing taxes every year. The best you can do with that strategy is divvy up the ever-decreasing pie. This is no way to run a railroad.

Doug Mataconis posts at OTB on a chart from Henry Blodget I’d planned to comment on, too:

The take-away? If we’re going to fix this problem, most of the work is going to have to be done on the spending side of the ledger.

I won’t bother posting the chart. Cruise on over to one of the links above to take a gander at it. It illustrates, depressingly, the discrepancy between federal income and outlays and the scope of the outlays for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

I made a comment over there that I’ll repeat here.

Arithmetically you cannot balance the budget simply by cutting defense spending. Strategically it would be ill-advised. Arithmetically, you can balance the budget simply by cutting discretionary spending—barely (if you include military spending). Strategically it would be ill-advised and operationally nightmarish. Do we really want to eliminate funding for courts, the FBI, food inspections, and so on? That doesn’t mean that defense or discretionary spending must be absolved from cuts, merely that we can’t achieve fiscal sanity just by cutting defense and other discretionary spending.

Although arithmetically we can bring the budget into balance by increasing taxes practically I think the idea is suspect. Two reasons: deadweight loss and it does nothing to control the growth in spending. That doesn’t mean that tax increases must be off the table, merely that it’s pretty unlikely we’ll be able to balance the budget simply through tax increases.

Theoretically we could achieve something resembling fiscal sanity through economic growth. Practically I think it’s extremely unlikely. Consider this chart of year-on-year GDP growth. Over the period of the last 25 years we haven’t even netted 3% growth in GDP per year. If we were growing like China, maybe. 3%? Not a chance. If you think we’ll grow our way out of our fiscal problems without raising taxes or cutting spending, I welcome your demonstration of how that will be accomplished. A hint: it won’t be accomplished by insulating buildings as the governor of Colorado recently suggested.

Practically I don’t believe it’s possible to arrive at anything resembling fiscal sanity without cutting healthcare costs (particularly at the state and local level). In order to cut healthcare costs while preserving some reasonable level of public health all of the stakeholders will suffer: insurance companies, hospitals, physicians, Medicare beneficiaries, and on and on to include nearly all Americans. Proposing suffering is never popular and, generally speaking, not a good way to get elected or re-elected.

Politically arrving at anything resembling fiscal sanity will require tax increases, defense cuts, cuts to discretionary spending, and cuts in entitlements, particularly Medicare. The formula proposed by Simpson-Bowles was probably about right although I’m not as convinced about the details.

Today neither political party is convinced of that.

The domestic policy story of the day continues to be the demonstration going on in Madison, Wisconsin by members of public employees’ unions and their supporters:

MADISON, Wis., Feb. 28 (UPI) — Police said they would not eject or arrest people encamped overnight in the Wisconsin Capitol to protest the governor’s budget repair bill.

Officials said Sunday they would allow them to remain in the Capitol in Madison because they were peacefully protesting, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

“The people who are in the building will be allowed to stay,” Capitol Police Chief Charles Tubbs said Sunday. “There will be no arrests unless people violate the law.”

Ezra Klein continues the persistent conflation of private sector unions and public sector unions. I won’t fight the strawman: I agree that we still need unions. Young Mr. Klein fails to distinguish between private sector unions and public sector unions but makes no case whatever to support the continued existence of public sector employees’ unions. I think that private sector unions continue to be important, particularly in defending working conditions. Would public sector working conditions really deteriorate to unsafe levels in the absence of unions? I don’t see it.

Mark McKinnon, writing at the Daily Beast presents four reasons to end public sector employees’ unions:

1. Public unions are big money, a lot of which goes to support Democratic candidates, in essence forcing taxpayers to fund the Democratic Party or, worse, borrowing to do it.
2. Public unions redistribute wealth. I think the more serious charge is economic inefficiency.
3. Public unions silence the voters’ voice.
4. Public unions are unnecessary.

Economist Robert Barro argues in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that collective bargaining is not a right:

Labor unions like to portray collective bargaining as a basic civil liberty, akin to the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion. For a teachers union, collective bargaining means that suppliers of teacher services to all public school systems in a state—or even across states—can collude with regard to acceptable wages, benefits and working conditions. An analogy for business would be for all providers of airline transportation to assemble to fix ticket prices, capacity and so on. From this perspective, collective bargaining on a broad scale is more similar to an antitrust violation than to a civil liberty.

In fact, labor unions were subject to U.S. antitrust laws in the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which was first applied in 1894 to the American Railway Union. However, organized labor managed to obtain exemption from federal antitrust laws in subsequent legislation, notably the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

Remarkably, labor unions are not only immune from antitrust laws but can also negotiate a “union shop,” which requires nonunion employees to join the union or pay nearly equivalent dues.

I think he’s right but the reason he gives is wrong. I think that collective bargaining is better understood as a power than a right. It is the power to coerce all workers to accept the instrument favored by some workers as their point of negotiation with management. Under certain conditions allowing that power is useful and necessary, among those conditions large corporations and monopoly power. I see the argument as markedly different for public employees’ unions.

In the comments thread of a post at OTB I was taken to task for having the temerity to suggest that union leaders might actually have made mistakes and contributed to the decline of private sector trade unionism. I’ll repeat my argument here. I think that management, union leaders, and government officials have different fiduciary responsibilities. Top management’s primary responsibilities are to present and future stockholders. This distinction is important: without it shouldn’t top management’s sole chore be to liquidate the company?

Similarly, union leaders have a responsibility not only to the present union membership but to its future membership. Surely it goes without saying that I believe that both top management and union leaders have been mortally guilty of failing in their responsibilities through short-sighted leadership.

Most importantly, elected officials have greater responsibilities than just getting re-elected. Unless we find a way to hold them to those responsibilities we’re in a world of trouble.

I was taken aback by Robert Samuelson’s claim in his most recent column:

Labor’s fall has been stunning. In 2010, unions represented 6.9 percent of private-sector workers. That’s lower than the 12 percent in 1929, before passage of the 1935 Wagner Act – the National Labor Relations Act – which gave workers the right to organize and required employers to recognize unions that won a secret ballot.

Many theories explain this collapse: greater management pushback and intimidation; business expansion in anti-union regions, the South and West; more white-collar office workers and fewer blue-collar factory workers. All these theories contain some truth, but unions’ downfall mainly reflected their inability to adapt to change.

the emphasis is mine. As a matter of logic for “management pushback and intimidation” to be a significant cause of the reduction in union membership today relative to 1929 wouldn’t there need to be more of such pushback and intimidation during the periods of union decline than there was during the period of union growth?

I have wracked my brain for evidence of greater pushback and intimidation in the 1970s and 1980s, the period of private sector unionization’s greatest decline, than there was in the 1920s or 1930s, the period of its greatest increase, but to no avail. I just can’t find incidents like the Columbine Mine Massacre of 1927 during which unarmed striking miners were gunned down with machine guns by mine guards, the Ford Hunger March of 1932 (not technically a strike, I confess) in which four demonstrators were killed and 22 wounded by the gunfire of the Dearborn police and Ford security guards (after they’d been attacked with tear gas), or the 1934 West Coast longshoremen’s strike in which two were killed and more wounded by police gunfire. The closest would be the Hormel meatpackers’ strike of 1985 which, although it was punctuated by picketers rioting against strikebreakers crossing the picket line, concluded after 10 months with the material effect of breaking the union there. Meatpacking in the upper Midwest has gone from being a well-compensated job to a job “Americans won’t do”, with many of the workers new immigrants, some illegal.

I just don’t see the evidence. Contrariwise, I think that private unions have declined due to the other factors mentioned by Mr. Samuelson, to which I would add professional labor leadership (the example of which I would cite would be Lane Kirkland) and the collapse of the economic conditions that allowed private sector union members to be compensated, temporarily, at rates higher than the market clearing price for their labor. This collapse was brought about by the opening of China, globalization, increased immigration, technology, and any number of other factors.

To bring back the glory days of private sector trade unionism in the 1950s and 1960s you’d need to return to the conditions that prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s and it’s hard for me to see a swell of support for that. They really weren’t so glorious.

This is sort of an inside baseball post, mostly just a vent. IMO the ban on the use of the word “Yahweh” in a liturgical setting, in place in the Catholic Church since 2008, is bad history, bad theology, and misdirection. For background, see here. Further, I believe that bowdlerization of the hymns using the word by substituting something else is immoral—it amounts to desecration and is little different from chopping the noses off statues or painting over icons. If they are offensive their use should be banned altogether rather than bowdlerized.

“Yahweh” has been used in papal encyclicals, letters, and homilies for many years. Were popes wrong in using the word? And who is empowered to make such a pronouncement?

Any argument made about use of the word “Yahweh” pertains equally to the word “Jehovah”. The two words differ only in the interpretation of vowel points in Hebrew (the vowel points for Adonai, Lord were written over the letters YHWH to remind readers to say Adonai rather than pronounce the unpronounceable). Modern Hebrew does not include vowel points; the Torah was written without vowel points; ancient Hebrew documents were written without vowel points. Any assertion of the antiquity of vowel points is speculative.

Since the vowel points aren’t actually part of the scripture, words based on their use cannot possibly be offensive. The worst they can be is mistaken. If they’re worried about offending modern Jews, why stop there? Many pious Jews object to the use of the word “God”, preferring “G*d”. If we remove “Yahweh”, “Jehovah”, and “God” from our hymns, our hymnody will become pretty threadbare.

There are attestations of the use of the word “Jehovah” in English hymns, letters, commentaries, and translations of scripture going back more than 700 years. It is used in hymns currently in use that were written 250 years ago. Objecting to the use now is not merely closing the barn door after the horses are already out, it’s closing the barn door after the barn has been razed and a shopping mall built in its place.

Don’t cardinals have anything better to do?

End vent.

There’s an amusing op-ed at the Washington Post on how Hollywood mangles history. A few examples:

• George VI was plain and short (unlike Colin Firth)
• William Wallace was a lowland Scot and didn’t wear a kilt.
• Maria von Trapp didn’t love George when she married him and they married eleven years before the Anschluss
• The Emperor Commodus (Russell Crowe’s antagonist in Gladiator) died in his bath

To these I might add that Lincoln had a high, squeaky or raspy voice (unlike Henry Fonda or Raymond Massey), in Biblical times there probably weren’t a lot of blond, blue-eyed Israelites, Kathryn Hepburn resembles a Chinese woman about as much as I do the Metro-Goldwyn lion, Spencer Tracy’s dialect in Captains Courageous is more Martian than Portuguese fisherman in Nantucket in the early 20th century, and I strongly suspect that Sacagawea looked nothing like Donna Reed. Also, amazing as it may seem, American Indians look quite different from Italians and Jews and Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people don’t all look the same.

For historical inaccuracy it’s pretty hard to beat what is arguably Spencer Tracy’s worst movie, Plymouth Adventure. Don’t even bother watching it. It’s unbearable.

All of this would just be production values or good, clean fun if people weren’t getting most of their knowledge of history these days from television, movies, and, I guess, videogames. If, as George Santayana famously wrote, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, to what are those who only know the past as seen through the prism of Hollywood condemned?

The interrelations between history, fiction, myth, entertainment, and storytelling are complex and emotional. I would have no complaints about myth-making or storytelling if we learned more history not as dragged through mass market entertainment or through the works of people with axes to grind but from original sources on their own terms. What we have now is where reenactments of the inauguration of Jefferson Davis come from.

It’s unfair of me, I suppose, but my immediate reaction to the NYT op-ed, What We Learned in the Statehouse: Four departing governors single out key difficulties facing the states, was to write a satirical article What We Learned in the Big House: Four former Illinois governors reflect on their terms in office and in prison.

The NYT forum, a collection of brief op-eds from four former governors, is mostly harmless and meaningless pap. I note that they’re all safely out of office. Couldn’t they have come up with something more serious, more specific, more intense? I think you’d get more firebrand advocacy from an address to a Kiwanis club.

The Emanuel Administration hasn’t even taken office in City Hall yet and already they’re facing ethics violation charges:

A veteran politician Rahm Emanuel named to his mayoral transition team resigned her high-level state job last summer and paid a fine for conducting political business on state time, according to a newly filed ethics report.

Judy Erwin, a co-chair of Emanuel’s mayoral campaign, said late Friday night that she would resign her new post on his transition team after the Tribune contacted her and the campaign. She said she hadn’t informed Emanuel of the ethics violation.

Erwin, the former executive director of the Illinois Board of Higher Education, admitted using her office e-mail and phone while working on a campaign committee for presidential candidate Barack Obama, using staff resources to plan her trip to the 2008 Democratic National Convention and engaging in campaign fundraising activity while on the job, the state’s Executive Ethics Commission ruled in a decision filed Feb. 16.

The ethics commission said she cooperated with the investigation by the executive inspector general, reimbursed the state, agreed to pay a $4,000 fine and promised to never work for the state again. She resigned Aug. 15.

Good to see a smooth transition from the Daley Administration.

Note that this is not merely the appearance of wrong-doing but actual wrong-doing. I guess I shouldn’t be too tough on Mayor-Elect Emanuel about this. I suspect it’s impossible to assemble a blue ribbon team in Chicago that includes people who’ve held jobs with the state, county, of city governments in the past without running into ethics violations.

Is it too early to speculate that he won’t govern as a reform mayor?

While I’m on the subject of all-time favorite movies here are mine. Many I would argue are among the best movies ever made but some I just like and I’m not even sure why. More or less in order:

1. The 39 Steps (1935)
2. 49th Parallel (1941)
3. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
4. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
5. The Quiet Man (1952)
6. A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
7. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)
8. The Searchers (1956)
9. Rear Window (1954)
10. Strictly Ballroom (1992)

There are others that come a little lower down in the list e.g. Seven Samurai, Casablanca, Random Harvest, The Maltese Falcon (I like the earlier version, too), The Prisoner of Zenda, Key Largo, The Band Wagon. And some I really like but they are too heartrending for me to watch over and over again back to back as I could those in my top ten, e.g. Broken Blossoms, He Who Gets Slapped.