I thought the Obama Administration was making domesting oil drilling impossible

Oil well drilling activity continued to increase in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to API's 2011 Quarterly Well Completion Report: Fourth Quarter. The report estimates that 6,149 oil wells were completed in fourth quarter 2011, a 10 percent increase from year-ago levels.

"There's good news that domestic drilling continued to increase into the fourth quarter of 2011," said Hazem Arafa, director of API's statistics department.  "And with policies that allow greater access to the vast energy resources right here at home, we can provide even more of the energy our country needs while hiring more American workers and generating more revenue for our government."

via api-ec.api.org

Is America's economy fair?

That's the question in this week's Scripps Howard column, following up on yesterday's Gallup poll and President Obama's State of the Union comment that "We can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share and everyone plays by the same set of rules." My take:

"Fairness" can be a slippery concept, so let's use Obama's formulation as our guide. In the American economy, does everybody get a fair shot? Does everyone do a fair share? Does everyone play by the same set of rules? No. Yes. No.

No, not everybody gets a fair shot. Sixty-five percent of American men born poor stay poor, according to research from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Sixty-two percent of those born rich stay rich. Other studies show that it's much easier to rise from humble circumstances if you're a native of Canada, Norway, Finland or Denmark than in the United States. The poor often lack the education and resources to advance in today's high-tech economy.

Yes, the people who are able to obtain jobs do their fair share. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says that American workers doubled their productivity between 2008 and 2009, and then did it again in 2010. Some of that is due to workplace mechanization, but some is surely due to American workers continually finding ways to "do more with less."

No, not everyone plays by the same set of rules. Banks get bailed out by taxpayers and their executives still collect bonuses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but homeowners stuck with bad mortgages are sneered at as "losers" by television pundits. If you're rich, it's tough to stop being rich, no matter how badly you screw up.

If you're less well off, one mistake can doom your whole life.

It didn't used to be this way in America. There were once opportunities to rise from humble circumstances. That's not really the case anymore. Horatio Alger may have become famous writing rags-to-riches tales about opportunity in America. But Horatio Alger is dead and mostly forgotten. And it's not fair.

I guess I could've applied the test posed by John Rawls and asked if this economic system would've been agreed to by most Americans if they were blind to whether they'd be advantaged or disadvantaged by it. My guess: No. But I don't think the tweaks would actually be all that massive under such a scenario.

Ben thinks the economy is unfair ... to free enterprise. Bwahahahaha!

Gingrich would bomb Cuba, is awesomer and less Communist than Reagan

Adam Serwer:

During his interview with Univision's Jorge Ramos this morning, Newt Gingrich was asked just how far he was willing to go in order to eliminate the Castro regime in Cuba. Gingrich said that he thought it was "baloney" that Obama intervened in Libya (a decision Gingrich was on both sides of on multiple occasions) but apparently hadn't thought of bombing Cuba. Gingrich said this contrast was "fascinating," and wondered why Obama "doesn't quite notice Cuba."

You know, I've wondered the same thing about Ronald Reagan. He too bombed Libya and didn't bomb Cuba! I blame Saul Alinsky and Kenyan anti-colonialism for Reagan's weakness.

More seriously: We don't expend much in the way of resources in toppling Castro because Castro represents no security threat at all the the United States. None. Zero. Zilch. He doesn't like us, and we don't like him, but the Communist regime there isn't going to do anything to us. We might see offing the regime as democracy promotion, but the rest of the world would see it (not without cause) as imperialist meddling. Gingrich should maybe shut up.

A very interesting poll on the fairness of our economic system.

Via Gallup, we learn that Americans are roughly divided on whether the country's economic system is fair—but that 62 percent believe that the system is fair to them personally.

Here's where it gets interesting. Fifty-six percent of Democrats believe the system is unfair. Fifty percent of independents believe the same. Only 42 percent of Republicans think the system is unfair.

Weirdly, though, more Democrats than Republicans believe they've profited from that system:

The columns, from left, are "fair," "unfair," and "no opinion."

There's a rough correlation between whether Republicans believe the economic system is fair and whether they believe the system is fair to them. That correlation pretty much disappears for independents and Democrats. Why is that?

The Philadelphia School District can't actually go out of business, can it?

Sounds preposterous, but via The Notebook, here's the City Controller formally and publicly telling the district that "we have identified various conditions and events that, when considered in the aggregate, indicate there may be substantial doubt about the School District's ability to continue as a going concern."

Man. I don't wanna move to the suburbs.

Who misses the 1950s now?

For most of my life, the 1960s have loomed large in the political life of the country. If you loved the 1960s, you were probably a liberal who loved the Civil Rights movement, feminism, Medicare—all the things that made the era perhaps the last great moments of center-left ascendancy in the United States. And if you hated the 1960s,  you probably missed the simpler times of the 1950s, when "Ozzie and Harriet" and Ward Cleaver ruled the airwaves, and life was orderly and a little more moral.

Somewhere in the last few years, though, the script has flipped. Liberals have come to embrace the relative economic egalitarianism of America in the 1950s—blacks and women notably excepted—while conservative Republicans seem to view Dwight Eisenhower as an accomodationist who too easily surrendered to the welfare state designs of his Democratic predecessors.

I'm not sure where all this started to change. Paul Krugman's "The Conscience of a Liberal" certainly celebrated the 1950s to a degree I hadn't often seen in liberal writings before. And Max Boot comes along today to offer the conservative critique:

From our standpoint today, there are some good aspects of the 1950s–the hard work, the sense of common purpose–but also much that we would reject, especially the pervasive racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia, and other social attitudes–not to mention the pervasive drinking, smoking, and other bad habits. America today is far more individualistic and far more meritocratic with far less tolerance for rank prejudice and far less willingness to blindly follow the orders of rigid bureaucracies. 

On the whole this is a positive development–it is what has made possible the dynamism of an information age economy symbolized by Apple’s staggering earnings. We would all be poorer–literally–if we went back to more of a top-down command economy, which is what Obama seems to be pining for. Indeed per capita income in 1950 was $1,500 (which, adjusted for inflation, works out to around $10,000 today) compared with almost $40,000 today.

I think the "per capita" statistic is slightly misleading: The distribution of income is much more unequal today than it was in 1950—the critique that liberals have been making—so the "average" per capita American isn't necessary a typical American. The median household income in the United States—half of all households made more, half made less—was $3,319 in 1950, or about $31,000 in today's dollars. The median household income in 2010 was  $49,445. Taking these statistics and the ones Boot cites, America is roughly four times richer today than it was in 1950—but the middle American household isn't even twice as rich, in real dollar terms. (UPDATE: And that doesn't really address the fact that the middle American household probably has two incomes these days, whereas the 1950 household probably had one earner.) You may not see that as an actual problem (richer is still richer!) but it lies at the heart of the critique that liberals make of post-1980 politics and income inequality.

In any case, Boot says, "the 'Mad Men' world is not one most of us would like to live in today. It was, after all, a world where big institutions–whether big government, big media, big business or big unions–had far more power than they do today." Maybe I misunderstand, but it seems that conservatism once defended the role of big institutions in society as helping bring order and cohesiveness to the national community. What's changed (in part) since the 1950s, it seems, is that conservatism has taken a libertarian turn that rejects and attacks all of Boot's "bigs," with the seeming exception of big business.

Anyway, it's an interesting transition. The Weekly Standard likes to (frequently) depict liberals as cartoonish, aging hippies on its cover, but maybe it would be more accurate these days to stick a pipe in Ward Cleaver's mouth and a union card in his front pocket.

'Send me': These are the SOTU policies Obama won't actually pursue

One of my criticisms of President Obama has been his seeming willingness to sit back and let Congress take the lead on certain issues, refusing to wade into certain lawmaking issues that might force him to get his hands dirty. One reason the Affordable Care Act debate lingered for a year was that the president left most of the dickering to Congress.*

So the way I figure it, when Obama gives a State of the Union address and recommends policies, but casts himself in the passive role in getting those policies passed, you can be sure the president won't actually be pushing for those policies. 

My rule of thumb for determining what those policies are? When the president asks Congress to "send me" a bill—instead of suggesting he'll send Congress a bill to get passed. The passive "send me" happened four times in the State of the Union:

• He won't push to take tax breaks from companies shipping jobs overseas and give them to companies building their businesses here: "So my message is simple. It is time to stop rewarding businesses that ship jobs overseas, and start rewarding companies that create jobs right here in America. Send me these tax reforms, and I will sign them right away. " 

• He won't push for the DREAM Act—which provides a path to citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. Heck, he didn't even call it by name. "Let’s at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people who want to staff our labs, start new businesses, defend this country. Send me a law that gives them the chance to earn their citizenship. I will sign it right away." 

• He won't actually push to promote jobs and energy efficiency in one fell swoop: "Of course, the easiest way to save money is to waste less energy. So here’s a proposal: Help manufacturers eliminate energy waste in their factories and give businesses incentives to upgrade their buildings. Their energy bills will be $100 billion lower over the next decade, and America will have less pollution, more manufacturing, more jobs for construction workers who need them. Send me a bill that creates these jobs." 

• He won't push Congress to stop using its position to enrich its members: "So together, let’s take some steps to fix that. Send me a bill that bans insider trading by members of Congress; I will sign it tomorrow."

Congress has its role, and the president can't necessarily bend the branch to his will. But I think that the president hasn't always applied the leverage that he has. When the president asks Congress to take the lead, it seems likely he's washing his hands of his own good ideas.