After reading this story today, I think I’ve realized Obama’s flaw, the one thing he lacks that is keeping him from solving the economic crisis with the snap of a finger today while acting only as the president-elect:  he is fatally prone to thinking too small.

President-elect Obama raised the jobs forecast for his stimulus plan from 3 million to as many as 4 million on Saturday, upping the ante of his economic blueprint for the second time in three weeks.

…

During the campaign, Obama had promised 1 million new jobs over an unspecified time. He bolstered that to saving or creating 2.5 million over two years in his radio address just before Thanksgiving. Then for Sunday papers the weekend before Christmas, aides said he had raised the target to 3 million, based on bleak new forecasts from economists.

Why wait until now to announce that your plan will create 3-4 million jobs?  You’re holding us back Obama.  Why didn’t you just say you’d create 3-4 million jobs at the start?  Better yet, why stop there?  If we can add that many jobs productively, why can’t we add double that amount?  10 times?  I won’t be silent until Obama spends 40 million jobs into existence!

Newsweek carried a thought-provoking column this weekend on whether Bernard Madoff should go to jail immediately.  I had read some incensed remarks wondering why he was allowed to spend his time before trial under “house arrest” in his apartment, and found myself in general agreement against this injustice.  But this essay in Newsweek by Mark Gimein changed my mind.  His main point, which the indignant wailers miss, is that Madoff hasn’t had his trial yet.  It’s not like he’s gone and “made-off” with his money, either (forgive me the pun).  Excerpts of the article:

The almost universal reaction to the conditions of Madoff’s release on blogs and newspaper comment boards was to ask why the hell a rich guy like Madoff should get special breaks and stay in his multimillion-dollar apartment instead of getting locked up with other defendants who can’t make bail in New York’s notoriously violent Riker’s Island jail.

A much better question, though, is why anybody is thrown in prison before trial when we have cheaper, better, and nonpunitive ways of making sure they don’t disappear. Yes, thanks to his money, Madoff has managed to stay out of jail while other federal defendants don’t. But for anybody who’s the least bit concerned about the rights of the accused, the way to make things fairer isn’t to jail Madoff before trial but to stop automatically jailing everyone else…

The presumption that defendants should remain free until they are convicted is centuries old in English common law. The writers of the Constitution saw it as significant enough that they made a point of keeping judges and prosecutors from short-circuiting the trial system by prohibiting “excessive” bail…

In the federal courts, the only purpose of bail was to prevent flight, until the passage of the Bail Reform Act of 1984. Part of a package of tough crime legislation, the 1984 law changed the calculus of the presumption of bail, weakening the presumption that people should not be jailed until conviction. (Capital cases have always been exempt from bail, creating an exception for the very worst crimes.) The bill added the amorphous standard of danger to the community as a determining factor in setting bail. On top of that, in the intervening years federal judges began confiscating bail bonds not only for actual flight but for all sorts of violations, making it harder for defendants to find bondsmen (who get paid 15 percent of the bail, which they keep whatever the outcome—a cruelty that’s hard to miss) to put up collateral.

Where once it was rare for defendants to be imprisoned because they could not make bail, it is now absolutely routine. In 2005, “the most recent year for which statistics are available from the Justice Department, only 34 percent of federal defendants were released before trial…

Those who imagine that revoking Madoff’s bail now will somehow strike a blow for equality later have it backward. Sure, it would hurt Madoff. But the high profile precedent and the howls of satisfaction at Madoff getting his comeuppance will yield to the reality that its most severe effect will not be on those who are well-lawyered and well-connected but on those who are not. To keep Madoff electronically monitored in his home opens the door for much less well-connected people to ask, with absolute justice, why they should not have the same right as well.

Here’s the top story from today’s CNN AM Quick News email, which summarizes news from around the world each day:

George the giant lobster liberated from restaurant

NEW YORK (CNN) — A giant lobster named George escaped a dinner-table fate and was released Saturday into the Atlantic Ocean after a New York seafood restaurant granted him his freedom, according to a statement from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

George the lobster was a “sort of mascot” for City Crab and Seafood in New York.

The lobster, which PETA said was 140 years old and weighed 20 pounds, had been confined to a tank at City Crab and Seafood restaurant in Manhattan when two customers alerted the animal group.

The PETA statement did not say how the extraordinary age estimate was determined, but restaurant manager Keith Valenti told CNN that lobsters can grow a pound every seven to 10 years, and he put George’s weight at 18 to 20 pounds.

“I’ve been here for 12 years, and that’s the biggest lobster I’ve ever seen,” Valenti said.

He said the lobster had been “sitting in the restaurant’s tank and acting as a sort of mascot,” but when PETA got involved and requested the release, it “seemed like the right thing to do.”

PETA President Ingrid Newkirk said in a statement, “We applaud the folks at City Crab and Seafood for their compassionate decision to allow this noble old-timer to live out his days in freedom and peace.

“We hope that their kind gesture serves as an example that these intriguing animals don’t deserve to be confined to tiny tanks or boiled alive.”

Shedding the tight confines of his old restaurant display tank, George was driven to Maine by PETA members and was returned to his natural habitat on the ocean floor Saturday, the organization said.

It is heartwarming, I suppose, that a possibly 140-year-old lobster finally is getting to experience the ocean, but I don’t know how CNN determined this to be today’s biggest, most important story.  I also don’t know why I still get that e-mail.

A column by George Will featured today on RCP is worth posting in its entirety:

The Toll of a Rights ‘Victory’

By George Will

WASHINGTON — Like pebbles tossed into ponds, important Supreme Court rulings radiate ripples of consequences. Consider a 1971 Supreme Court decision that supposedly applied but actually altered the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

During debate on the act, prescient critics worried that it might be construed to forbid giving prospective employees tests that might produce what was later called, in the 1971 case, a “disparate impact” on certain preferred minorities. To assuage these critics, the final act stipulated that employers could use “professionally developed ability tests” that were not “designed, intended or used to discriminate.”-
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Furthermore, two Senate sponsors of the act insisted that it did not require “that employers abandon bona fide qualification tests where, because of differences in background and educations, members of some groups are able to perform better on these tests than members of other groups.” What subsequently happened is recounted in “Griggs v. Duke Power: Implications for College Credentialing,” a paper written by Bryan O’Keefe, a law student, and Richard Vedder, a professor of economics at Ohio University.

In 1964, there were more than 2,000 personnel tests available to employers. But already an Illinois state official had ruled that a standard ability test, used by Motorola, was illegal because it was unfair to “disadvantaged groups.”

Before 1964, Duke Power had discriminated against blacks in hiring and promotion. After the 1964 act, the company changed its policies, establishing a high school equivalence requirement for all workers, and allowing them to meet that requirement by achieving minimum scores on two widely used aptitude tests, including one that is used today by almost every NFL team to measure players’ learning potentials.

Plaintiffs in the Griggs case argued that the high school and testing requirements discriminated against blacks. A unanimous Supreme Court, disregarding the relevant legislative history, held that Congress intended the 1964 act to proscribe not only overt discrimination but also “practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation.” The court added:

“The touchstone is business necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.”

Thus a heavy burden of proof was placed on employers, including that of proving that any test that produced a “disparate impact” detrimental to certain minorities was a “business necessity” for various particular jobs. In 1972, Congress codified the Griggs misinterpretation of what Congress had done in 1964. And after a 1989 Supreme Court ruling partially undid Griggs, Congress in 1991 repudiated that 1989 ruling and essentially reimposed the burden of proof on employers.

Small wonder, then, that many employers, fearing endless litigation about multiple uncertainties, threw up their hands and, to avoid legal liability, threw out intelligence and aptitude tests for potential employees. Instead, they began requiring college degrees as indices of applicants’ satisfactory intelligence and diligence.

This is, of course, just one reason why college attendance increased from 5.8 million in 1970 to 17.5 million in 2005. But it probably had a, well, disparate impact by making employment more difficult for minorities. O’Keefe and Vedder write:

“Qualified minorities who performed well on an intelligence or aptitude test and would have been offered a job directly 30 or 40 years ago are now compelled to attend a college or university for four years and incur significant costs. For some young people from poorer families, those costs are out of reach.”

Indeed, by turning college degrees into indispensable credentials for many of society’s better jobs, this series of events increased demand for degrees and, O’Keefe and Vedder say, contributed to “an environment of aggressive tuition increases.” Furthermore they reasonably wonder whether this supposed civil rights victory, which erected barriers between high school graduates and high-paying jobs, has exacerbated the widening income disparities between high school and college graduates.

Griggs and its consequences are timely reminders of the Law of Unintended Consequences, which is increasingly pertinent as America’s regulatory state becomes increasingly determined to fine-tune our complex society. That law holds that the consequences of government actions often are different than, and even contrary to, the intended consequences.

Soon the Obama administration will arrive, bristling like a very progressive porcupine with sharp plans — plans for restoring economic health by “demand management,” for altering the distribution of income by using tax changes and supporting more muscular labor unions, for cooling the planet by such measures as burning more food as fuel and for many additional improvements. At least, those will be the administration’s intended consequences.

I’ve come to see the university education system in America today as misguided and dysfunctional.  As Will says, the hiring practices of big companies today (as well as governments at all levels) seem predicated on the idea that someone who went to college is automatically more valuable than someone who didn’t, and meets a certain standard of intelligence.  I suspect that there are a lot of potential causes for this system–viewing education as a “right,” trying to use higher education to bring about “social change,” as two examples–and there are many negative effects of it.

Will points out what everyone already knows: that there is essentially a plateau of high-paying jobs which you cannot scale without a college degree.  However, I had not fully considered the effect this actually has on poorer people.  Under the current system, a person must take classes full-time for 3-4 years to have a shot at a higher-paying job.  It is difficult, but not impossible, to support oneself by working full time while doing this.  But the fact is that this time and money commitment is simply less and less of a workable option the farther down the economic ladder you go.

Of course, the government could attempt to make up for this by providing grants and loans to low-income students, as it does now.  But with grants, the taxes required to raise the money would destroy jobs in the private sector, making the job competition even greater for these jobs.  Loans don’t have this effect as much, but I still think that the private sector could and ought to be responsible for them as well.

Another problem that comes out of this college-for-all paradigm is an overall decline in the quality of education.  Universities of all kinds, but especially big state schools, try to teach much more than they did a century ago.  For example, the University of Georgia, where I go, offers the whole spectrum of liberal arts, business, journalism, agriculture, pharmacy, social work, forestry, and “family and consumer sciences.”  This non-exhaustive list doesn’t even count their professional programs like law, vet, and soon-to-be-added medicine.

I see no reason it should be this way, with one institution trying to teach so many disparate disciplines and trades at the same time.  Colleges began by teaching merely the liberal arts, as well as professions like law, medicine, and theology.  Since all these other colleges were introduced, the focus on liberal arts has diminished, and I think they probably are not as effective.  In UGA’s case, when you have a whole bunch of people there who don’t care about literature, science, and art having to take introductory courses in those subjects, it creates a lot of waste all around.  It wastes departments’ resources by having to provide the courses.  It wastes the students’ time and money by forcing them to take classes they’ll largely forget about after they are done.  Who benefits from that?  And students who major in liberal arts have to spend time as well taking courses in disciplines unrelated to their concentration, while working in a less effective department in their own area of study.  Liberal arts majors are the students ultimately going into academia in these subjects, so we are potentially hurting the next generation of professors and researchers through this paradigm.

Alongside all this, I think there now exists a profusion of master’s degrees and programs.  Since bachelor’s degrees are now so common, job seekers often find it necessary to earn advanced degrees to increase their competitiveness and earn higher pay.  Thus, many schools now offer master’s programs in areas like “public policy,” for example.  Such programs last for perhaps three semesters, putting students through classes that seem to add little benefit to their working skills.  (I make these claims based on the experience of several friends enrolled in such programs.)  This is all to edge out those students who have merely bachelor’s degrees looking for the same jobs, but what will we do when the master’s degree becomes the new standard of hiring for this tier of jobs?  A master’s degree used to be a very rigorous certification to achieve, requiring one to defend a thesis or produce original research.  Who’s being served now that it is slowly replacing the bachelor’s degree as the standard of hiring, and being greatly diluted in the process?

The New York Times had an op-ed last week dealing with this same issue.  The author, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, concludes:

Discrediting the bachelor’s degree is within reach because so many employers already sense that it has become education’s Wizard of Oz. All we need is someone willing to yank the curtain aside. Barack Obama is ideally positioned to do it. He just needs to say it over and over: “It’s what you can do that should count when you apply for a job, not where you learned to do it.”

I wish this was a joke.

That’s all.

I’m back home for Christmas break, and used today to thumb through Newsweek.  Happily, this week’s cover story was much more relevant, well-researched, and necessary.  It tells the personal story of Thomas Tamm, the government official who first leaked to the press the existence of the NSA wiretapping/domestic spying program.  Since making his one stand before the US government, his life has become something of a maelstrom — his house has been raided, employment has been scarce, and he knows he’s under investigation at the highest levels of the FBI.  He could be arrested at any time, but as of yet has not been.  The costs of standing up to the government have been tremendous — not only to him, but to his family, friends, and other past associates.

Robert Samuelson, meanwhile, finally gives a sensible perspective in a mainstream outlet on what lobbying really is, and why it should not be looked down on in a democracy.

On the page facing his commentary, though, is an entirely wrong-headed piece by a former Clinton economic official.  The sub-headline about encapsulates the story.  It begins promisingly, saying, “World leaders have spent trillions on confused, inadequate rescue plans,” but from this reaches what seems to me the most bafflingly backwards of conclusions: “They need to spend more.”  Consider this in light of the story I just posted, and read the rest if you want.  We do not run the risk of inflation, we ensure it; it’s already happened.

Federal spending soars 25% before bailout

The government’s spending commitments exploded by 25 percent in 2008, putting taxpayers more than $1 trillion in the hole even before the astronomical costs of the economic bailout were taken into account, according to an annual report released Monday by the White House.

A joint report by the White House budget office and Treasury Department said that much of the increase in obligations came from an unexpected jump in veterans benefits liabilities, while revenues remained mostly flat because of the recession that began a year ago.

Jim Nussle, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, called the report “sobering.”

The report showed that U.S. debts and liabilities are close to passing the value of the U.S. population’s net worth, said Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting fiscal responsibility.

In gay marriage news, Newsweek is trying to rock the boat in response to Prop 8 passing in California.  Though of course I’m against any measure, like prop 8, which denies people of their rights, I think Newsweek’s ridiculous attempt to explain how the Bible is actually a pro-gay marriage text is ultimately going to do more harm than good, to the magazine itself as well as the movement.  The author, in addressing sections of the New Testament that would seem to take a negative stance on homosexuality, turns for perspective to one guy out there who reads them as actually being castigations of the Roman Emperor.  No one except people who were already in favor of gay marriage are going to be convinced by this.  On the other hand, it likely has gotten so much play on talk radio and on Christian blogs that it has energized its opponents and convinced a whole host of people who may not have had negative views of the media to perceive an agenda.

Anyway, I’ve been following the threads on one particular response to this.  Click over to read my responses to some of the bloggers (you can just ctrl+f my name).

I’ve been writing a paper all night, and while emailing myself a copy, I saw the top story of the CNN morning email–a newsletter I’ve been getting for several years now, but which I now always just delete without reading.  However, today’s begged comment after I read:

U.S. to send more troops to Afghanistan

(CNN) – The U.S. military plans to move three more combat brigades to Afghanistan by summer, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates plans to deploy more troops to Afghanistan.

Gates landed Thursday in the Afghan city of Kandahar, where he was met by Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces battling a resurgent Taliban and its al Qaeda allies. Gates said the deployment will include one brigade that was scheduled to be sent to the 7-year-old conflict in January and two more that have yet to be named.

After not posting for a couple of weeks, it becomes hard to start again.  Knowing what to post about, wanting to catch up on things missed and trying to offer explanations for the large gap of writing all become questions that further delay writing.  This happened to me; now I’m stopping it.  In the future I’ll just resume without any explanation.

In the time since my last writing, a couple of things worth noting have happened: Obama won, the economy sucked, and everyone in America lost.

The story that finally motivated me to write was this:

U.S. Unveils New Programs to Ease Credit

The Federal Reserve and the Treasury announced $800 billion in new lending programs on Tuesday, sending a message that they will print as much money as needed to revive the crippled banking system.

The two new efforts — one mainly to finance loans for consumers, and an even bigger one to push down home mortgage rates — marked the latest but hardly the last of the federal government’s efforts to shoulder the losses that began with subprime mortgages and have spread throughout the economy.

All told, the government has assumed at least $7 trillion in direct and indirect financial obligations in the form of Wall Street bailouts, emergency lending and government guarantees on bank deposits, inter-bank loans and home mortgages.

As the New York Times writes, $7 trillion.  $7,000,000,000,000.  I saw a story a couple of weeks ago, posted by drudge, which had the grand total figure at $4.5 trillion.  Since then our government’s commitment to fix our economy has expanded $2.5 trillion, or about 50%.  Has it stopped now?  I doubt it.

PERSPECTIVE:

The US government’s budget for fiscal year 2009 (that being Oct 08-Sept 09) was $3.1 trillion.  Note that this amount was $407 billion higher than what the government took in, by its own accounting.  That is, this budget was already a deficit.

The budget was released in February, before the collapse of Bear Stearns, and before the depth of the economic crisis was apparent.  Thus, all of this money to “help” the economy comes from outside the budget.  In fact, it dwarfs the budget for this year!  The government has already spent or pledged to spend more than twice as much as its own admitted operating costs for the next year. That’s on top of its own operating costs, so in effect triple the amount budgeted.

No doubt none of this new money was planned or budgeted for.  Where then will it come from?  Americans would notice a tax increase of $7 trillion, as that would be around $23,000 per person (taking the population to be 300 million).  Since not every person is a taxpayer, it’s a lot more than that per taxpayer.

Yet there won’t be a tax.  I won’t see the taxes on my job at the newspaper next year shoot from $100 to $30,000, or anything like that.  (In fact, Obama has promised that not only will I not see a tax increase, I will see a tax decrease as someone earning less than whatever his quoted income limit was.)  The money will be printed.  Well, I doubt it will actually be physically printed; it’ll just be credited to the accounts of  the banks and companies receiving it.

We can of course be mad about the moral injustice of this action, but I see it as being economically unsound, as well.  Again, going by the government’s budget documents, the estimated GDP of the American economy for this time will be $15 trillion.  The government is attempting to add to the economy an amount equal to half of all the goods produced in the country last year.

Is there any way this can not have a devastating effect?  News stories always list inflation down in the article as a potential risk of the plan.  The money supply is exploding.  We will now experience drastic inflation as well as the shocks of the rest of the credit crisis.

Does anyone think that the leaders in Washington, outgoing or incoming, know what the fuck they’re doing?  The government created this mess; do we now look to the government to fix it?