The editors of the Washington Post provide a list of alternatives for reducing the federal deficit and a handy questionnaire for evaluating your own preferences. They write:
They characterized my responses as “Pragmatic Balancer”:
You cut spending and you raised taxes, spreading the adjustment widely enough that no single group carries it alone. It’s an approach designed to be politically possible while getting the situation under control.
I think they omitted a number of key points. First, there is empirical evidence that a large public debt overhang impedes economic growth. That rules out the easy approach: just outgrow the debt. We cannot safely assume growth will rescue us, especially when accumulated debt may itself weaken growth.
The second is that the graph they display overstates how frequently we have balanced the budget. It conceals how dependent those results were on a temporary demographic advantage. In only one year did the Clinton Administration produce a substantial budget surplus without counting Social Security’s surplus. That should give us pause. The opposite is the case now.
I certainly hope that Donna Brazile is right in her evaluation of the impact of prospective Democratic Socialist members of the Democratic caucus in the next Congress as she wrote in her op-ed in the Washington Post:
Contrary to ridiculous fearmongering by President Donald Trump, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) will not let democratic socialists turn America into a communist nation if he becomes speaker. And he won’t let them control the House, either.
Here are the DSA policies she points to in the op-ed:
The DSA has drawn outsize media attention because its platform is so extreme. It calls for “public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries,” defunding the Defense Department, “fully abolishing the police and prison system,” abolishing the Senate, “Housing For All,” “universal healthcare at no cost to individuals,” “a federal jobs guarantee” and “amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status,” among other demands. Trump and Republicans are trying to convince voters that most Democrats agree with these radical views. Democrats must show that they don’t. Jeffries has already said that he doesn’t support the DSA agenda.
and concludes:
Once serving in Congress, democratic socialists will realize that advocating for pie-in-the-sky proposals accomplishes nothing. They will instead need to work with their fellow Democrats to make less radical change.
I hope she’s right. I’m concerned that she may be surprised at how the party has changed since she was Chair of the Democratic National Committee. At least one of the measures she points to, “Medicare for All”, has the support of the majority of Democratic House members. Others of those measures or incremental steps in their direction may have more support than she recognizes.
As we have learned in recent years having a relatively small number of members does not mean that their proposals won’t hold an outsize influence on the caucus as a whole. The threat of primary challenges does wonders to focus the mind.
After cruising the Inland Passage for several days our ship docked at Whittier and we disembarked for good. We tipped our cabin steward well for taking such good care of us (and under the assumption that much of what he earned was from tips).
Then began what was the most memorable part of our trip—staying with friends in Wasilla, outside Anchorage. I don’t believe I’ve mentioned that we were traveling with a party of eight. We were traveling with our dog breeders and others my wife had made friends with attending Jack’s shows. One of the great things about “the fancy” (that’s what those who are serious about dogs is called in aggregate) is that you encounter and make friends with people from all over the country. Among those were people in Wasilla.
Over the next several days I will post on our experiences there.
Wild video shows a cow being airlifted to safety after getting stranded on a French mountain.
Vahine the bovine got stuck in the mud while grazing in the Pyrenees on Sept. 11 and couldn’t make her way down the steep terrain, which also couldn’t be accessed by car.
I can’t link to the video or otherwise I’d embed it—it’s embedded in the story.
It’s quite gratifying to see the argument I’ve been making for years gradually start seeping into common recognition. In this case it’s that LLM AI service providers (and their stockholders) should bear strict liability. Gabriel Rauterberg and Sarath Sanga remark in an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal:
The heads of frontier labs have said their companies could be responsible for such a mass tort, or worse. They’ve made the case against limited liability.
That case, as we argue in a recent paper, is strongest when a corporation’s profits and the risks it poses rise together, and when those risks are extreme and unbounded. That’s exactly the situation AI executives describe. Customers demand the capabilities that make the product so dangerous. The more successful the product, the more risk likely lands on the public.
Building more-capable models without these risks is the engineering problem that labs say they need more time to solve. Congress isn’t about to solve it. But Congress doesn’t have to. It can establish a liability rule and let incentives do the work.
In the 19th century, locomotives threw off hot embers that set nearby fields and barns ablaze. Lawmakers didn’t engineer a technical solution. They an
That should be easy for Congress to achieve even in a divided Congress.
Building better models is only one of the engineering problems AI service providers face. They must also find ways to deploy them safely. Strict liability for harms their services cause would give them a powerful incentive to do so. And if the potential harm exceeds what the company can pay, limiting the loss to the company’s assets leaves the public bearing the risk while shareholders retain the upside. That is the part of the authors’ argument Congress should take seriously and the sooner the better.
It used no moving or still images of Garbo: it was created solely by providing prompts to AI models.
Hence the title of this post. Why “cast” a completely fictional AI-generated actress when you can “cast” an actress who was once alive and has a fanbase?
I’ve been predicting this since 2004 when I saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow which used the image of the deceased Laurence Olivier (with the permission of his estate). I expected it to be created by fans, recasting classic movies with other performers that had been suggested, e.g. Ronald Reagan instead of Humphrey Bogart as Rick in Casablanca. I certainly didn’t expect to see Greta Garbo hawking ball bearings. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.
Engaging with the printed word in book form, Marriott writes, “changed how people thought.” Long-form prose strengthened the mental muscles necessary for prolonged concentration on arguments and complexities: Readers, Marriott says, began to question received ideas: “Where does power come from? How should we classify whales? How do we know the Bible is true?”
Today, numerous literature professors report that they formerly expected students to read a novel a week, but no longer assign such masterpieces as George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” or James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Students are not just unwilling, they are unable to comprehend sophisticated, nuanced narratives. As deep reading becomes, Marriott says, a “rare, even esoteric accomplishment,” our culture becomes unmoored “from its foundations in the written word.”
I wish I could say “Welcome to the fight” but I’m afraid that “the fight” is already over and we lost. You can see it all around you in our political discourse: the agonistic modes of expression, absence of logical arguments, division into tribes.
He’s actually understating the matter. It’s more than “strengthening a muscle”. There are actual, physical differences between the brains of the literate and the post-literate, as I have documented in my many posts over the last 20 years on what I’ve deemed “visualcy”.
Learning to read changes the brain, and sustained reading gives us repeated practice in following arguments that unfold beyond the length of a clip or a slogan. We know much less about what happens when a literate society stops making that practice commonplace. The question is no longer simply whether people can read the words. It is whether they can derive meaning from an extended written argument.
We left Skagway and spent the next day or so at sea, sailing north through the Inland Passage. We viewed the fjords and glaciers, watching for ocean wildlife.
Consistent with its present policies the editors of the Washington Post argue against trying to reduce the gap between federal spending and revenue and thereby the growth in the burgeoning debt by increasing taxes:
Budget reforms must be based primarily on spending constraints, not tax hikes. While some moderate tax increases could help reduce the deficit, it is not feasible to structure a tax system in which revenue grows faster than the economy every year, which is what would be necessary given current spending projections.
Even boosting revenue as a share of GDP to the highest levels in American history would close less than half of this year’s deficit, and such a large tax hike would destroy economic growth. No major tax proposal on its own, except perhaps a national value-added tax, comes anywhere near closing the deficit when the effect on economic growth is properly accounted for.
The graph at the top of the page illustrates their depiction of the limited effects of various tax increases.
More specifically taking all of the steps they list in raising taxes, e.g. increasing the personal income tax, a higher rate on the richest earners, a wealth tax, a higher corporate income tax, and a value-added tax, together would still not be enough to close the gap.
Even treating the chart’s revenue estimates as additive, and making no allowance for adverse effects on growth, the listed tax increases would not close the deficit. But closing it is not the editors’ stated goal nor mine. The aim is to slow the growth of debt relative to the economy. That still requires choices on both sides of the ledger: more revenue and slower growth in spending, particularly health care spending.
That leaves reducing spending.
I’ve already mentioned some of my preferred actions: restoring the income assumptions of the 1983 Social Security reform by raising FICA max, a prebated VAT, and changing out health care system to a capitation system. That last I presume would be anathema to the editors. The bottom line is that both tax increases and spending reductions will be necessary to put our fiscal house in order after years of irresponsibility.
Two more points. The editors’ argument highlights the irony of the Democrats’ “affordability” campaign plank. History tells us their first line of attack in making things more affordable will be to give people more money and that will have nearly the opposite effect they assume. And that our huge debt overhang impedes economic growth will render the Republicans’ preferred strategy, tax reductions, unable to produce enough growth to make the debt less dire is an empirical reality.
As you presumably know five men were arrested outside RAF Fairford in the United Kingdom on charges of offenses under the explosives act and terrorism and later released on bail. It may be that is all, indeed, that is known about the incident or the authorities are merely being circumspect.
That hasn’t stopped all sorts of speculations about the incident being made including the men being affiliated with Iran or, as Secretary of State Rubio put it, “a foreign actor”, a training exercise, or some sort of cover-up. Perhaps the authorities are trying to prevent an overreaction.
The difficulty is that silence can have the opposite effect. Once officials publicly invoke terrorism but leave the central facts unexplained, the public may decide which rumors fill the gap. They may be trying to lower the temperature while inadvertently making speculation more attractive.
As Jonathan Swift put it nearly 300 years ago, a lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is putting its boots on.
