Musing's musings

Madness

Just before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Dick Cheney went on Press the Meat and pooh-poohed Tim Russert's estimates of how much the war would cost:

MR. RUSSERT: Every analysis said this war itself would cost about $80 billion, recovery of Baghdad, perhaps of Iraq, about $10 billion per year. We should expect as American citizens that this would cost at least $100 billion for a two-year involvement.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I can’t say that, Tim. There are estimates out there. It’s important, though, to recognize that we’ve got a different set of circumstances than we’ve had in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan you’ve got a nation without significant resources. In Iraq you’ve got a nation that’s got the second-largest oil reserves in the world, second only to Saudi Arabia. It will generate billions of dollars a year in cash flow if they get back to their production of roughly three million barrels of oil a day, in the relatively near future. And that flow of resources, obviously, belongs to the Iraqi people, needs to be put to use by the Iraqi people for the Iraqi people and that will be one of our major objectives.

As it turns out, Russert's estimate was pretty egregiously lowball. As of the time of this posting, the Iraq war has cost us more than $720 billion (at a rough estimate). The Afghanistan war that President Obama is ratcheting up in the latest of a long line of futile attempts by western colonial powers to control that particular neck of the woods, has cost us on the order of $270 billion. Total spending on those two wars since 2001 (including enforcement, logistics, etc.) is already more than $1 trillion.

According to the National Priorities Project, if we hadn't flushed that $1.05 trillion down the toilet, here are some of the things we could have gotten for the same amount of money:

• health care for 308,396,946 people for one year
• 22,599,968 public safety officers for one year
• 17,944,326 music and arts teachers for one year
• 132,716,897 one-year scholarships for university students
• Pell Grants ($5,550 each) for 188,536,667 university students
• 8,139,680 affordable housing units
• health care for one year for 461,193,337 children
• Head Start placements for 143,595,239 children for one year
• 17,188,969 elementary school teachers for one year
• 1,083,271,391 homes with renewable electricity for one year

(Note that each of those items costs around $1.05 trillion; unfortunately, we couldn't get all of them for that same amount.)

A few other things we could have gotten for $1.05 trillion, off the top of my head:

• a balanced budget;
• 105 years' worth of funding for basic research at the National Science Foundation at $10 billion per year, the level NSF's budget is projected to reach at the end of the current doubling process--in 2017;
• 33 years' worth of funding for health research at the National Institutes of Health, at current funding levels;
• 52.5 years' worth of NASA funding at its projected FY2011 level of $20 billion;
• 6 months' worth of free health care for everyone in the United States, assuming no economies of scale or other savings would be realized from a single-payer system, based on total costs in 2008;
• a year's worth of HIV medication for two-thirds of the approximately 30 million people infected with HIV worldwide, assuming $50,000 per person per year

It's long past time to end these senseless wastes of our national time, talent, and treasure. If for no other reason than that we can no longer afford them.

ARRA: #GOPFail

Pardon me for lapsing into what I understand to be Twitter-speak in the post title. As I was waiting to pay my bill yesterday at lunch, I caught a glimpse of some blowhard on Fixed Noise bloviating about how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, better known as the stimulus package) was "full of waste."

The bloviating blowhard even had a few examples. I couldn't write fast enough to get them down, but I did jot down the total. According to this pundit, there's $5.5 billion in "waste" in the ARRA. Oh, noez! Five and a half billion dollars, down the drain! Wow, that's really wasteful!

I'm sure that's the reaction the Republicans and their bought-and-paid-for propaganda outlet were going for. But let's put those numbers into some context. According to Recovery.gov (where anybody who's interested can go and see exactly how much money is being spent on what, in which places: it even has a handy-dandy link where you can report suspected waste or fraud involving ARRA funds--which I suspect might be where the bloviating blowhard got at least some of his numbers), total ARRA funding amounted to $787 billion. According to my back-of-envelope calculations, that means less than 1 percent of the money invested has been pegged as "waste." By Fixed Noise, so take that with a grain of salt, please. (And if it really turns out to be waste, I have little doubt that the federal government will demand that the money be given back, so they can put it to better use somewhere else. I know for a fact that's what the federal granting agencies are telling people--spend it, and spend it wisely, or we'll make you give it back.)

Now let's jump into the Wayback Machine, shall we? Set the dial to 2005, when an inspector general's report found a total of $9 billion of U.S. funds unaccounted for under the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. A year later, and another report claimed that as much as $50 billion had been handed out with little or no oversight to various private contractors in Iraq. A year after that, it emerged that our government had flown in nearly $12 billion in cash to Iraq, and could hardly be bothered to keep track of what it then did with those 363 tons of money. (That's how much 281 million greenbacks weigh: almost 400 tons.) Where were the Republicans while all this was happening? Sending college interns, if memory serves, over to Iraq to help hand out that $12 billion--of course making sure that it always went to worthy causes and individuals, naturally.

So the take-home message from the GOP seems to be that anything under $10 billion is "waste," while anything over that amount is "business as usual"--at least as long as it's a Republican in charge of handing it out. As ever, the GOP's rhetoric rings hollow. But I just love it when they make it so easy to fact-check them.

Wingnuttery: The gift that keeps on giving

So I was digging around on Thomas this morning (the Library of Congress's interface where anybody with an internet connection can go to look up what's been going on in the legislative branch), trying to find some summary or, better still, the actual legislative language, of the congressional budget estimates for 2010. I was going through the Congressional Record's daily digest pages for the House of Representatives when I stumbled upon this lovely tidbit:

By Mrs. BACHMANN (for herself, Mr. HENSARLING, Mr. PRICE of Georgia, Mr. SHADEGG, Mr. KIRK, Ms. FOXX, Mr. PITTS, Mr. BARTLETT, Mr. MCCLINTOCK, Mr. GINGREY of Georgia, Mr. WAMP, Ms. FALLIN, Mr. FLEMING, Mrs. BLACKBURN, Mr. BROUN of Georgia, Mr. AKIN, Mr. ISSA, Mr. KING of Iowa, Mr. BURTON of Indiana, Mr. GOHMERT, Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania, Mr. LAMBORN, Mr. PAUL, Mr. CULBERSON, Mrs. BIGGERT, Mr. BROWN of South Carolina, Mr. JONES, Mr. POSEY, Mr. ROE of Tennessee, and Mr. CONAWAY):

H.J. Res. 41. A joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to prohibit the President from entering into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States; to the Committee on the Judiciary.

This, after I lay in bed this morning listening to way too much Republican whining, whinging, and hand-wringing about the budget--this is what our Republican "friends" (to use the appropriate legislative phrase) think it's important for Congress to be spending time on? Making sure we don't inadvertently join the Euro zone?

Never mind that the euro has been outperforming the dollar for most of the ten years since it was first introduced--or that the euro zone, considered as an entity unto itself, is the second largest economy in the world. And never mind that, as is apparent to virtually anyone with a brain over the age of about seven years, the U.S. economy (along with those of most of the rest of the world) is hanging, Wile. E. Coyote-like, in the air after running itself off a cliff. While we're waiting to see if its forward momentum will be enough to carry it more or less safely to the other side of the chasm and back on to safe ground, and while the president and the Democratic majority in Congress are working together to get us out of the tremendous messes left for us by the previous (Republican) administration, all the Republicans in Congress seem to have on offer is a lot of hyper-partisan (and scathingly, blindingly, typically short-sighted and forgetful) carping--and this piece of crap.

To quote Dr. Johnson, that the Republican party is still functioning is much like a dog walking on its hind legs: "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." If they keep this kind of crap up, I think we can reasonably and confidently predict that they will very shortly fall over and be unable to get up again.

Planes, trains, and automobiles

I think we can take it as a given that there are some issues with our current preferred modes of transportation in the United States. First off, obviously, our automobile-conscious (or should I say "automobile-fetishization"?) culture comes at a tremendous penalty to our balance of trade, given the hundreds of billions of dollars each year we send overseas for the sole purpose of buying the oil to turn into the gasoline to fuel those automobiles. Then there's the fact that fewer and fewer of them seem to be built here at home, with concomitant declines in our manufacturing sectors that make the sorts of things car manufacturers need to put into our cars.

There's also, of course, the huge environmental costs--in terms of pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, the amount of space in landfills taken up by junked cars or car components, etc. Those costs are further complicated by the need to transport the raw materials for our fuels (and the fuels themselves, once they're distilled from crude oil) to our shores, and thence from the refineries to where we buy our gasoline and oil and whatnot. For cars that aren't made here, we also have to transport those vehicles to our shores from wherever they were put together.

Those salient facts are complicated, however, by the fact that we've more or less engineered ourselves into a corner on this issue. Beginning after the Second World War, the phenomenon of suburban sprawl has reigned unchecked for the better part of three full generations, as more and more people moved farther and farther away from city centers in search of a nice home with good schools and low taxes. (I won't bother to do more than point out the obvious inconsistency of such criteria here; that can be another post, someday when I have more time.) Even as we moved out into the sticks and started to pave them over to make them car-friendly, we started tearing up our rail lines and cutting back on passenger rail service. Why take the train, we seem to have thought, when it's so much more convenient to drive?

Except that it isn't, always. Case in point: when I was a sophomore in college, one of my cousins got married back home in the Chicago suburbs. She asked me to be in the wedding, which meant that I had to be there for the rehearsal, a day ahead of the actual ceremony (which, if memory serves, was to be on a Saturday, with the rehearsal on a Friday). I didn't have a car of my own at the time, and my alma mater really didn't encourage students to bring their cars onto campus even if they had them, and the folks couldn't come and get me. Ergo, I had to find another means of getting home.

My first thought was that I'd take the bus back. It was only about 120 miles from school back home, so that shouldn't have been an onerous trip, and a bus ticket should be affordable even for a starving undergraduate's bank account. Just one tiny fly in that ointment: Galesburg was served by Trailways; DeKalb was served by Greyhound. There was no direct bus from where I was to where I wanted to be. Still not too much of an issue, I thought: until I looked at the schedules. I had to be in Elmhurst for the wedding rehearsal by 5:30 p.m. on Friday (if memory serves; this is 25 years ago now!). The Trailways bus left Galesburg early-ish in the morning, made the short hop to Rock Island--where I would then have to wait three hours to catch a Greyhound to DeKalb, which would get in at just about 5 p.m.--not nearly enough time to get me to the church on time, as 'twere. It would only cost me around $12--but instead of having to miss just one day of classes to go, I'd have to skip two.

Time for Plan B. Fortunately, Galesburg is a railroad town. Originally served by both Burlington Northern and Santa Fe, it's now a one-line town since the two lines merged in 1996. It's also still an Amtrak stop, with two trains a day heading for Chicago, and two coming back. Fortunately for me, there was an intermediate stop at a suburban station (I want to say it was in Aurora or thereabouts) that was reasonably convenient both to my home at the time and to the place I needed to be--and the train trip only took a couple of hours. The ticket cost about twice what I would have paid for the bus--but I didn't even have to miss a full day of classes. I paid the fee, happily--and grew to like traveling by train. For the remainder of my time in school, whenever I needed to go back home and didn't have the opportunity to wait around for someone to pick me up, I took the train.

Small wonder

Future historians of American politics in the early twenty-first century who are hunting for the causes of the utter collapse of the Republican Party need look no farther, I think, than that party's colossal (and growing) disconnect from reality, as evidenced by the California assemblyman I heard on NPR yesterday morning. I was getting ready for work at the time, so I was unable to hear all of his remarks clearly, but the gist of them was that since businesses throughout the private sector were having to lay off thousands and thousands of workers, how dare the state of California not offer to lay off even one in the face of a $42 billion budget deficit?

Excuse me? Perhaps I was wrong, but I was under the impression that we wanted people to keep their jobs. The point isn't just to spread the misery around so it affects everyone more or less equally; the point is to keep as many people working as possible, and to put as many of them who are now out of work back into jobs, so that they will then be able to spend some of their wages to support the rest of the economy, thereby putting even more people back to work and enabling more people to keep their jobs. A rising tide floats all boats, whereas an ebbing tide leaves all boats stranded in the muck at the bottom of the harbor, going nowhere. I may not be clairvoyant, but I think I can safely state that I'm on firm ground in believing that most normal and rational people think the latter example is something to be avoided, not hoped for.

But you'd never be able to tell that from the present-day Republican Party. What's important to them, it seems, isn't jobs--unless it's their own, that is. What's important is that the Republican Party hews to its ideological line firmly, come hell or high water, and never mind the consequences. In fairness to them, I will say that I think they've been very effective at that particular strategy--though I can't say that I believe it's done them all that much good or that it will enable them to perform any better in next year's elections than it did in those we had last year. But then again, silly me, I actually thought the point of having an election was to be the party that won the most seats in it. Apparently the Republicans are working from a different playbook, given that they've lost positions in both of the last two election cycles--and that those losses are largely attributable to their dogged unwillingness (or inability) to interact constructively with reality.

What he said

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, who was announced this morning as the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature, was interviewed by Le Monde (link is in French) in a story which was headlined:

Il faut continuer de lire des romans

("You have to keep reading novels." He continued, "...as that's a good way of understanding the world of today.")

I think I'd have finished that sentence, especially given the economic news that he was asked about in the very next question according to the linked story:

...parce que les nouvelles sont trop déprimantes.

(...because the news is too depressing.)

Things that did not surprise me today

• Clay Aiken is gay. (Not that I particularly care, though I hope he lives up to what he says he wants to do about teaching his child to tell the truth and not to hide. This is, after all, the twenty-first century.)
• John McCain tries to chicken out of Friday's scheduled presidential debate. Given the way his poll numbers have been going lately, I can certainly understand his not wanting to do anything to raise his own visibility.
• George W. Bush decided (a week and a half after the "crisis" started) that it might be a good idea to talk to the nation about it. (And for the record, neither will I be surprised to learn, tomorrow, that hardly anybody bothered to tune in and listen to what The Boy Who Won't Be King Much Longer had to say.)
• Congress allowed the 25-year-old moratorium on offshore drilling to expire at the end of this month. (Somehow I doubt that the ban will stay dead past the end of this year. Nor do I expect that any of the oil companies, despite all their whining and posturing on this issue, are going to be in any big hurry to start exploring drilling on any of the lands that will soon be open to them.)
• Faced with a looming economic crisis, the start of a recession, and a federal budget deficit that's already projected to hit half a trillion dollars next year before taking the Wall Street bailout into consideration, the Republicans propose cutting taxes yet again.

No, no, no, a trillion times no!

So the talking heads were out in force this morning. All over the media, I'm sure, but I heard more than my fair share on NPR as I was getting ready for work. And most of them were all hyping some variation on the same theme: "We've got to fix this thing right this instant or all hell will break loose."

To which I say, get real.

If we don't take our time and get this right, we won't get a second chance to fix it. There's no way on earth we'd be able to find anybody stupid enough to lend us another trillion dollars to throw after the first one we pissed away.

Yes, I saw the stock market took another tumble today. And that the price of U.S. crude had its biggest-ever single-day jump as well. Bound to happen.

But the simple and sad fact of the matter is, this mess took a generation to get into. It isn't going to be anything we can reasonably expect to fix in a week. And certainly not this week, when Congress will be busy trying to write up either an omnibus funding bill or a batch of continuing resolutions to keep the government running until after the elections. (Here's a thought: how about instead of coming home to kiss babies for the next month and a half, y'all stay in Washington and do what we sent you there to do, but do it properly this time?)

If we've learned anything from the Bush administration, it should be that it's always in a hurry when it thinks it can pull a fast one. At all other times, "glacially slow" is too fast a speed for them, but when they see a chance to push another unpopular item from their agenda over on an unsuspecting public, watch out--they'll make the Blitzkrieg look like the proverbial molasses in January.

So I'm absolutely not buying this "the sky is falling" hype. At this point, we don't even know what the true magnitude of the problem is. Shouldn't we be figuring that out before we try and find a solution for it? Today it's $700 billion; tomorrow it could be twice that. Or half. And do we really think the idea of handing over Phenomenal Cosmic Power (untroubled by pesky things like oversight, rules, courts, public scrutiny, transparency, etc.) to a guy who's going to be out of a job in five months' time is a good one? I'm leery about it--and I'm betting that the next treasury secretary is going to be a Democrat. I still don't think s/he should have that kind of power.

Before we bail out Wall Street, perhaps we ought to pay a little more attention to Main Street, just like Obama said over the weekend. In the meantime, let's let the dust settle a bit, take our time, and do this right. Or else we're really going to have a problem.

Not in my name, nor with my money

Not even the fertile brain of Samuel Beckett could have imagined the course of events that have transpired over the past week. (Or if it could have, I suspect it would only have been while under the influence of psychotropic substances.)

In the space of a single week, the Republicans have thrown away every last fiscal principle they ever even claimed to stand for. (Never mind that they actually stopped standing for them--or applying them--at least a decade ago.) Any Republican who claims to represent the party of fiscal discipline should hereafter be laughed out of the room--and preferably pelted with rotten vegetables to hasten his exit. Any Republican (or so-called conservative) who has the temerity to refer to a "free market" should be beaten about the head and shoulders with a copy of The Wealth of Nations until he can no longer utter the phrase "invisible hand" without cringing.

The week started with the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by means of federal loan guarantees. There followed the biggest plunge in global equity indices since the first time the Hedgemony fell asleep at the switch, seven years ago this month. That was followed by John McCain's insistence that "the fundamentals of our economy are still sound." (You couldn't hear the jaws dropping onto tables and floors around the nation over the noise of falling stock prices and the howls of anguish from people who were watching their retirement savings or their children's college tuition being flushed down the toilet.)

And now, at the end of the week, the same people who broke the economy in the first place, who fell asleep at the switch and allowed Osama bin Laden to strike our nation with impunity, who instigated and prosecuted a pointless war that has done nothing to make us any safer than we were before it was started, who have scrapped the very Constitution they all took an oath before God to "preserve, protect, and defend," these same people want us to hand them a blank check. Right now. Or else something really, really bad will happen to us and the terrrists will win.

I have two words for you, Mr. Bush. Fuck, and No.

Could you please make up your mind, John?

The stock market had its worst trading day since September 11, 2001 the other day. Besides making a neat bookend for the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush, the event further demonstrated how radically out of touch with reality (and how egregiously unfit for the presidency) John McCain is. After the announcement early Monday morning that Lehman Brothers had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and that Merrill Lynch had agreed to a buyout offer from Bank of America, and with the Dow Jones Industrial Average already plunging, a bumbling Senator McCain told a paltry crowd of lukewarm supporters that "the fundamentals of our economy are still sound." At the end of that trading day, the Dow had fallen to 10,917. It had closed the previous session at 11,421--or a drop of 504 points in a single day.

Yesterday, in a frantic effort to correct that gaffe, McCain finally admitted that we were in something of an economic crisis, but that he was the man to fix it. This provoked almost as much laughter, among everyone not a member of the Republican Party (and at least some of the smarter Republicans as well), as his ludicrous assertion that he'd been responsible for the invention of the Blackberry. Never mind that the policies that landed us in the frying pan out of which we've just been dumped into the fire are exactly the same policies that John McCain has supported for his entire political life. Never mind that they're the same policies that Phil Gramm, McCain's former Senate crony and current economic adviser, has written into McCain's campaign plan. Never mind that the arch-liberal and quasi-socialist former chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan said that McCain's policies are dangerous, and that one of McCain's major surrogates on economic policy, Carly Fiorina, herself famous for not knowing how to run a Fortune 500 company, said that neither McCain nor his running mate had what it took to run a Fortune 500 company--for which the McCain campaign has now graciously made Ms. Fiorina disappear, at least as far as being a surrogate for the McCain campaign is concerned.

Nevertheless, McCain made the round of the morning talk shows on Tuesday and bragged:

The point is, I was chairman of the commerce committee. Every part of America's economy, I oversighted. I have a long record, certainly far more extensive of being involved in our economy than Senator Obama does.

After a brief and relatively minor uptick yesterday, the Dow took another plunge today, closing at 10,609. That's a 400-point drop from today's open, or another 300 point drop since Monday's disastrous close, and 800 points below where it closed last Friday.

So which is it, John? Are we just a nation of whiners and crybabies who should shut up and let Very Serious People like yourself continue to screw us out of retirement plans, mortgages, and college tuition for our children? Or are we really and truly in an economic crisis that is the natural and inevitable result of the very economic policies you and your party have supported for the last generation? Inquiring minds want to know. You might also want to consider not bragging quite so much about how much responsibility you have for "every part of America's economy." At least as long as your goal is to get more votes than your opponent this November.

And while we're on the subject of the economy and how badly it's doing, perhaps you could answer another puzzler for me. Back in the fall of 2007, when The Boy Who Won't Be King Much Longer (Thanks Be to God!) vetoed the proposed expansion of the federal SCHIP program that provides health insurance to poor children, it was because he thought $60 billion over five years was too much money and would represent the "federalization" of healthcare. So why is it, do you suppose, that ponying up $85 billion that we don't actually have in the Treasury when it's to be used to prevent a large (but not overly large) corporation from succumbing to its own ineptitude, is magically a good idea? Or, to put it more succinctly, why is it that Republicans absolutely hate welfare--except when it's being paid out to corporate executives who, not coincidentally, give substantial sums of money to Republican candidates? How is this not a "federalization" of Wall Street? When did the Republicans decide to embrace socialism?

They're still the party, after all, that thinks "the market" will inevitably solve all of humanity's problems. How's that looking now, guys? Not so good, eh? But that still begs the question of why, if the "invisible hand" is so all-fired important, the federal government has just handed out nearly $300 billion that, again, we don't actually have on hand in the Treasury, to bail out Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG? Shouldn't they have been forced to undergo the usual marketplace penalty for making incredibly, egregiously bad decisions about investments--namely, going under or being broken up or sold?

Because from where I sit, it makes far more sense for the government to spend its money on a social safety net that takes care of working families and their needs, than it does to guarantee the pensions and the 401(k)s of corporate executives. The Republicans make a great to-do of running around the country and telling people who actually have to work for a living that they shouldn't count on the government to give them a break--they have to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. So why isn't that the same advice they give out to their corporate masters when their own greed and unwillingness to do even the bare minimum that the law--promoted and supported by people like Phil Gramm and John McCain and George W. Bush, by the by--required? Sauce for the working-class goose is--or ought to be--most definitely sauce for the corporate executive gander.

Voting for John McCain is tantamount to economic suicide. Surely we can all agree that after eight disastrous years of the failed economic policies of the Republican Party, we really can't afford extending that run for another four years.

And on that note, let me return to the image of the Bush bookends that I alluded to at the start of this post. On January 22, 2001, the first trading day after George W. Bush took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average opened at 10,659. At the closing bell today, it was 50 points lower than it was at the start of Bush's disastrous presidency. For what it's worth, when Bill Clinton took office in January 1993, the DJIA stood at 3,253. When he left office eight years later and the present band of bungling baboons took over, it was at 10,587. In other words, we prospered under eight years of a Democratic administration that actually submitted a federal budget in balance for the first time in a generation. Since then, we've essentially been treading water, while the party that likes to paint itself--falsely, these days--as being foursquare for fiscal conservatism has spent more money than every drunken sailor in every liberty port in the history of the human race put together. Our economy is in a shambles, and we're liquid largely on the sufferance of the Chinese, who own most of our public debt. And it's mostly the fault of George W. Bush and his best friend forever, John McCain.

You should think about that when you step into the voting booth in a couple of months.