This morning, after the obligatory sideswipe at the Tea Party movement, Tom Friedman gets to the meat of his column:

We need to raise gasoline and carbon taxes to discourage their use and drive the creation of a new clean energy industry, while we cut payroll and corporate taxes to encourage employment and domestic investment. We need to cut Medicare and Social Security entitlements at the same time as we make new investments in infrastructure, schools and government-financed research programs that will spawn the next Google and Intel. We need to finish our work in Iraq, which still has the potential to be a long-term game-changer in the Arab-Muslim world, but we need to get out of Afghanistan — even if it entails risks — because we can’t afford to spend $190 million a day to bring its corrupt warlords from the 15th to the 19th century.

The emphasis is mine. I agree with a lot of that but let’s focus on the highlighted part.

Tom Friedman has made it pretty clear what sort of infrastructure work he favors: he’s written repeatedly with effusive praise of China’s gleaming brand new airports and Beijing’s highspeed rail. I have no way of knowing for certain but I strongly suspect that the airports he’s so fond of are used mostly by foreigners and wealthy Chinese. According to Gallup in a given year about 44% of Americans fly somewhere. What percentage of Chinese fly in a given year? At least a sixth of Chinese people are living on $1.25 a day. Not likely air passengers. My suspicion would that that the number of Chinese who fly in a given year amount to percentages in the single digits.

At least one Chinese scholar considers Beijing’s highspeed rail system an expensive boondoggle. 94% of Chinese people live on about a third of China’s land area (the area on the coast). Highspeed rail might make sense in a densely populated area like that but makes a lot less sense for tying the coastal areas to China’s mostly uninhabited (and uninhabitable) interior or to tie New York to Los Angeles.

I’m concerned that what Mr. Friedman esteems is something more akin to the old Orient Express where royalty and the ultra-wealthy rubbed elbows in luxurious comfort. Its modern re-imagining is pictured above. What ordinary people experience is something much closer to an old Greyhound Bus terminal so we shouldn’t be particularly surprised, as flying has become more ordinary for ordinary Americans, that our airports have come more to resemble those terminals than the bright shiny monuments to official excess that China’s new airports do. Not to mention the entire cities without residents.

Unless he means something very different than what one would typically understand by “new investments…in schools”, e.g. spending more money on education, I think there’s very little evidence that the problems we face can be addressed by doing that. According to UNESCO the U. S. ranks second (to Norway) in per capita spending on education and has an average 12 years of education per student, the highest in the world (I’m still trying to uncover the median years of education per student). Our per capita spending is larger than Germany’s, France’s, or Japan’s, and it’s nearly an order of magnitude greater than China’s. Is our problem that we’re not spending enough or that we’re not getting value for our money? If it’s the latter “new investments” won’t address the problem.

How will additional spending on education reach the 40% of students in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles who either fail to graduate from high school or don’t graduate on time?

“Government-financed research programs” didn’t spawn the current Google or Intel; defense spending with very specific, concrete objectives did. This is not to say that I don’t think that government can play a valuable role in fostering the technologies that will midwife the next big thing. I see very little evidence that research programs have returned much but I think the evidence that we’ve reaped enormous rewards from mass engineering programs, e.g. the space program, the Internet, is undeniable.

Where Mr. Friedman sees necessary infrastructure investment and vital research I see porkbarrel politics and grants for the politically connected. My idea of how we should be spending our infrastructure dollars is on 21st century telecommunications and energy infrastructure, the things that will make the technologies and industries of the 21st century possible.

Which brings us to an important question: who decides what sort of nation we will be building? Technocratic planning will inevitably transmogrify into Lysenkoism and doubling down on existing industries and technologies for reasons of political expediency.

The old, antique, obsolete form of government we had until 70 or 80 years ago here in the United States wasn’t intended to make us the wealthiest or most powerful nation in the world. Its intent was to make us the freest one. Wealth and power have been the byproducts of that objective.

Over the period of the last fifty or sixty years we’ve made enormous strides in extending the blessings of that liberty to all of our citizens. That simply wouldn’t have happened without the intervention of the federal government. In my view the political struggle in which we are now engaged is a struggle to determine whether more intervention from the federal government will bring us even greater prosperity with still more freedom or kill the goose that has laid the golden eggs and make us both poorer and less free than we have been. There’s a genuine difference of opinion on this question and the facts of the matter remain in dispute.

This is Connecticut Gov. Wilbur Cross’s Thanksgiving Proclamation, issued in 1936:

Proclamation

Time out of mind at this turn of the seasons when the hardy oak leaves rustle in the wind and the frost gives a tang to the air and the dusk falls early and the friendly evenings lengthen under the heel of Orion, it has seemed good to our people to join together in praising the Creator and Preserver, who has brought us by a way that we did not know to the end of another year. In observance of this custom, I appoint Thursday, the twenty-sixth of November, as a day of

Public Thanksgiving

for the blessings that have been our common lot and have placed our beloved State with the favored regions of earth — for all the creature comforts: the yield of the soil that has fed us and the richer yield from labor of every kind that has sustained our lives — and for all those things, as dear as breath to the body, that quicken man’s faith in his manhood, that nourish and strengthen his spirit to do the great work still before him: for the brotherly word and act; for honor held above price; for steadfast courage and zeal in the long, long search after truth; for liberty and for justice freely granted by each to his fellow and so as freely enjoyed; and for the crowning glory and mercy of peace upon our land; — that we may humbly take heart of these blessings as we gather once again with solemn and festive rites to keep our Harvest Home.

Commentary by Lincoln Caplan at The New York Times.

One of the things that I didn’t realize when I started blogging was that it would garner rewards that I couldn’t then even anticipate. Yesterday the following comment was left on something I posted long ago, a recipe for Pumpkin Chiffon Pie:

thank you so much for putting this online! My mother gave me a Better Homes cookbook for my highschool graduation in 1970, and many of my favorite pages are stained and worn. This pumpkin pie recipe has been my tradition for 37 years of marriage, and somehow the page for this must have fallen out of my poor worn cookbook this past year or so! I thought I had it memorized, but am so glad I thought to google it! Thank you again!! I forwarded it to both my daughters, and my son!

I’ve been told that recipe isn’t in the later editions of the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. Each year at Thanksgiving time I get a rush of hits on that post and a number of comments very much like the one above. It’s gratifying.

Something to be thankful for. Thank you, Julie. And have a happy Thanksgiving!

I’ve just published a foreign policy-related post at Outside the Beltway:

“Potential Responses to North Korean Provocations”

In this post I consider several possible responses to North Korea’s ratcheting up of tensions on the Korean Peninsula:

• Ignoring them
• Offer them another payoff
• Offensive military response
• Encouraging the stakeholders on the peninsula to work things out for themselves

I think it’s time for us to go; at this point we’re merely enabling everybody else’s bad behavior.

This post takes as its point of departure a remark in comments:

If it boils down to a simple question, then that can be recast as having to convince the elderly of a simple proposition: Their quantum of suffering will have to increase.

I think this observation relies on an over-simplified view of the aged. As you can see in the chart above, according to the Social Security Administration more than 25% of those aged 65 and older have incomes above the median income. When you consider native-born Americans alone, the percentage is even higher but that’s a subject for another post.

Is it unreasonable to reform our system away from first dollar coverage under Medicare for all of those over 65? I don’t think so. I would rephrase the proposition above that the elderly be convinced that they must be willing to pay more of their own costs to the extent that they are able.

Would a few hundred or a few thousand dollars for those in the top income deciles mark the difference between a comfortable old age and living in squalor and eating cat food, as implied by the Left Blogosphere where the Deficit Reduction Committee has been disdainfully dubbed the “Cat Food Commission”? To the extent that there is excess utilization of medical care by the elderly, it might reduce it and by doing so moderate the rise in healthcare costs (if high costs are caused by excess utilization).

This morning Robert Samuelson has a scathing column in the Washington Post that I urge you to read. It begins with a succinct summary of the predicament in which we find ourselves:

America’s budget problem boils down to a simple question: How much will we let programs for the elderly displace other government functions – national defense, education, transportation and many others – and raise taxes to levels that would, almost certainly, reduce economic growth? What’s depressing is that this question has been obvious for decades, but our political leaders have consistently evaded it.

That’s the beginning. It goes on from there.

The key problem is that one faction is ignorant or disdainful of the economic consequences and the other faction is ignorant or disdainful of the social and political consequences. The effect of reducing Medicare expenses by reducing services will be to consign the elderly to the ranks of the poor where, far from removing them from the cow with 300 million teats, will merely move them from being concerns of the federal government to being concerns of state and local governments which are, if anything, in worse fiscal shape than the federal government.

The effect of increasing taxes will be to slow economic growth. If we had the prospect of 6 or 8% growth per year, that wouldn’t be particularly troubling. With the prospect of 2% or lower economic growth extending indefinitely into the future reduced growth could reduce any budget cuts to impotence.

Yesterday my wife, niece, and I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1. I doubt that anything I could say or do would discourage anybody who’s inclined to see it from doing so or encourage anybody who’s not inclined to see it to do so. Consequently, I won’t attempt to review it but just make a few brief comments.

This film is essentially two hours of exquisitely crafted exposition. It is much darker than the other movies, more mature, and less magical. A good deal of the picture consists of main characters standing in magnificently bleak locations in England, Wales, and Scotland talking.

I have little doubt that I’ll see Part 2 when it comes out in July but July is a very long time to wait. It may also prove a risky strategy. If the picture is in the can already, as seems likely, won’t it prove difficult to keep it from leaking out?

This weekend my wife was hugged by Temple Grandin. If you’re not aware of her, Temple Grandin is probably one of the most remarkable people in the world today. She was diagnosed with autism early in life, has struggled mightily against her circumstances, and her work both in managing animals and as an advocate for people with autism has been highly influential.

This weekend my wife attended a workshop conducted by Dr. Grandin and was fortunate enough along with a small group of other attendees to be invited to dine with her. She sat across the table from Dr. Grandin during dinner and had an opportunity to get a sense of the great woman.

During the course of the evening Dr. Grandin mentioned that she had abandoned her hug machine in favor of hugging people. As token of this at the end of the evening she hugged each of those who’d gone to dinner with her.

There’s a theme I’ve heard sounded occasionally that I suspect we’re going to hear a lot more of over the period of the next two years. Basically, it’s something to the effect that President Obama has adopted, uncritically, every left-wing idea that was floating around when he was in college. The latest example of this theme is in Jackson Diehl’s column in the Washington Post:

So has nothing changed in the past quarter-century? In fact, almost everything has – especially when it comes to nuclear arms control and Israel’s national objectives. What hasn’t changed, it seems, is Barack Obama – who has led his administration into a foreign policy time warp that is sapping its strength abroad and at home.

Start with the New START treaty that Obama has made a priority for the lame-duck Senate, at a time when Americans don’t yet know what income tax rate they will pay on Jan. 1. The treaty resembles the landmark U.S.-Soviet arms control treaties that were negotiated in the years after Obama wrote his article – and it would perpetuate their important verification measures.

The difference is that no one stages marches today about U.S. and Soviet – now Russian – strategic weapons, and with good reason. The danger of a war between the two states is minuscule; and treaty or no, Russia’s arsenal is very likely to dwindle in the coming years. The threat of nuclear weapons now comes from rogue states such as North Korea, Iran and Syria, and maybe from terrorist organizations. Obama believes that U.S.-Russian treaties will lead to better containment of that threat – but that’s at best an indirect benefit.

He continues by similarly characterizing the Administration’s interests in stopping Israeli construction on the West Bank and Jerusalem:

The same might be said about Obama’s preoccupation with stopping Israel’s settlement expansion in the West Bank and Jerusalem – a campaign that even Palestinian and Arab leaders have watched with bafflement. True, almost everyone outside Israel regards the construction as counterproductive, and only a minority supports it inside Israel.

But that is just the point: The dream of a “greater Israel” died more than 15 years ago. Even the Israeli right now accepts that a Palestinian state will be created in the West Bank. The settlements have become a sideshow; the real issues concern how to create a Palestinian state in a Middle East where the greatest threat is not Israeli but Iranian expansionism. What to do about Hamas and Hezbollah and their Iranian-supplied weapons? How to ensure that the post-occupation West Bank does not become another Iranian base? Those issues did not exist in 1983 – and the Obama administration seems to have no strategy for them.

The reason for the president’s interest in Russian nuclear disarmament and in stopping Israeli construction is because nuclear disarmament and the Israeli-Palestinian problems are persistent problems that continue to present direct national security threats to us right down to this day.

There is no more important bilateral relationship in the world today than that between the United States and Russia. The reason is simple: we are the only two nations with the capability of destroying the world. Neither North Korea nor Syria nor Iran pose nearly as a direct problem to us as the prospect of loose Russian nukes. The surest way of preventing Russian military equipment and materials from falling into the hands of those who would do us harm is for the Russians to dispose of them in a certain, scheduled, verifiable way. To do that the Russians will inevitably demand that we do the same. Hence, START.

Even though the contours of the Israeli-Palestinian problem may have changed over the last 30 years the problem remains, thorny as ever, and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future. I think that the broader security implications are largely a pretext. I don’t believe that the Arab Middle East will love us any better if the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians were magically resolved (presumably by causing one or the other of the parties to vanish from the face of the earth).

But it’s been asserted as a primary cause by everybody from Osama bin Laden to John Kerry. Consequently, the attention isn’t completely unwarranted.

I don’t know whether the rap against the president, that his views were forged during his college days and haven’t changed a good deal since, is a good one or a bad one. I do think that Mr. Diehl’s criticism of the president for appearing to be more interested in intractable foreign policy dilemmas than in (probably similarly intractable) domestic economic ones is a promising avenue of political attack and President Obama.

Is he a prisoner of the 80s? Aren’t we all? Nearly every major problem that faces us today has its roots in the past. We’ve solved the easy ones. It’s the wicked problems that continue to bedevil us.