Why I'm still grumpy about National Review and the false 'Obama in Paris' story

My piece for The Philly Post, documenting how and why a good number of Republicans believe that Barack Obama is spending today--July 4--raising campaign cash, had a good run this week: Mentions at New York Magazine, Slate, and last night on the Rachel Maddow show. Both NY Mag and the Maddow show featured a tweet from Andrew McCarthy acknowledging he'd made a mistake.

But that's not quite good enough for me.

Maybe it's the old newspaper guy in me, but I think you should acknowledge and correct and error in the venue that you made it. And in this digital era, you should acknowledge and correct and error by noting it on the very post you made it.

As of the morning of July 4, Andrew McCarthy's original, incorrect post remains uncorrected.

So it's fine he tweeted his correction--it means he's not totally disengaged from the truth. But leaving the original post uncorrected means that it'll sit there, evidence for any activist who Googles it a year from now to make the case that President Obama really hates his country. I can only hope that the Googler notices all the related pieces saying "No, this isn't true." But McCarthy and NRO really should be saying that, too, in the venue where they committed the error. That they don't says something to me, at the very least, about NRO's editorial standards.

The New York Times normalizes John Yoo

Perhaps this is my bugaboo, but I cannot stand the way the New York Times mentions torture advocate John Yoo this morning. My problem? They don't mention the torture advocacy. And it seems relevant.

Why? Because the mention comes in a story about how conservatives are angry with Chief Justice John Roberts' vote on the Affordable Care Act.

By Saturday, John Yoo, a former Bush administration lawyer, was suggesting in The Wall Street Journal that there had been a catastrophic vetting failure in 2005 when the administration was considering Chief Justice Roberts’s nomination. 

“If a Republican is elected president,” said Professor Yoo, who teaches law at the University of California, Berkeley, “he will have to be more careful than the last.”

But Yoo isn't just a "former Bush administration lawyer" who "teaches law" at Berkeley. He's the lawyer who campaigned for an exceptionally expansive reading of the president's commander-in-chief duties under the Constitution—opening the legal gate to torture, yes, but also eavesdropping on Americans, suspending the First Amendment and crushing the testicles of innocent children.

So he's not just another conservative angry about expanded government powers. He's a conservative who provided the paperwork for the scariest expansions of federal power in the last decade—and that deserves a footnote of some sort every damn time he's quoted protesting government overreach. What's more likely to threaten your liberty: A president who can detain, torture, and silence you? Or one who, with the cooperation of Congress, tries to expand access to health care?

Yoo deserves to be a pariah, frankly. But since he's not, New York Times, is it too much to ask that you note the dissonance when quoting him? He's not just another Obama Administration critic.

'Liberals Against Labor Unions'

That’s the title of a very short essay I have in the July issue of Philadelphia Magazine. (It’s not online, that I can find, but it’s on newsstands now.) It’s a piece I fear will cost me a few friends in this town--and possibly beyond--and so I hesitated to write it. I don’t like making my friends mad!

But: I wrote it. And I stand by it. Now I’d like to elaborate.

The central point of the essay is that the city’s public labor unions--in virtually every sector of public governance--contribute to the sclerotic can’t-do-much-but-do-it-expensively-and-slowly-but-intrusively nature of Philadelphia governance. Let’s face it: Governance in this city sucks. They’re not the only culprits, but mostly public unions appear to act as constituencies that are owed favors and pandering instead of partners in making the city better.

It hurts to write that, because I believe it’s not a coincidence that the decline of unionization in America has coincided with stagnating middle class wages. And I don’t think you forfeit your right to seek a better life just because you go into public service.

But...

Here’s a good place to go back and examine one’s underlying principles. Conservatives are for small, limited government. They tend to believe--or at least, say--that liberals are for big government, possibly for its own sake. I’ve never felt that way, personally. But I do want government to do stuff--to provide infrastructure, education, policing, and a safety net for those who are unemployed, sick, or old, a regulatory framework to protect us from unnecessary harm--so that we as citizens are freed to make the most of our gifts and resources. Bigger government is a byproduct of that, but it’s not the goal.

The thing is: I think conservatives are right to some extent that a bigger government is one that’s more likely to reach into your life in ways that are burdensome instead of helpful. So liberals (like me) who advocate for doing all these things should be at the forefront of making sure they’re done well, so that the burden is more than offset by the benefits. And when they’re not done well, we have to examine where the fault lies.

In Philadelphia, there are many reasons that governance is so sclerotic. The Republican Party gave up being competitive a long time ago, letting Democrats get fat and happy in their mediocrity. Huge chunks of the civil service are patronage machines aimed at delivering jobs to allies instead of services to citizens. Our recent mayors have either been (let’s be honest here) shady or (in the case of the current occupant) surprisingly ineffective at working the levers of power. L&I could get its own paragraph here.

But Philadelphia’s public unions also, from what I can see, carry a measure of responsibility. So we have to deal with the fact that their pensions currently outstrip our ability to pay for them; we have to deal with the apparent disregard they have for the citizens they serve; we have to deal with how they often seem to stand in the way of reforming government for fear of losing jobs.

(One thing: My piece was written and in the editor’s hands long before the school district’s blue-collar workers offered $20 million in givebacks to save jobs. Knowing that would’ve tempered how I wrote the original piece, admittedly. But I think the long-term trends are nonetheless clear.)

I am not Scott Walker. I am not a Republican. I don’t want to end public unions. (Neither does Walker, exactly; remember, that police unions were exempted from his Wisconsin crackdown, which means the moves there have been about consolidating Republican power rather than defending some small-government principle.) I want them to do better.

Living in Philadelphia has made me both more and less sympathetic to my libertarian-leaning friends. I’m not sure this (or any big city) can survive without a strong central government. But I also see how such a government, when it’s ossified and not-at-all nimble, makes the city a worse place to live. Right now, Philadelphia’s government makes this city a worse place to live for many of us who simply want to live and earn a living here. The public unions are part of the reason why. If those of us who are their natural allies acknowledge this, we can help them be part of fixing the problem.

The ACLU: Not just a bunch of liberal hacks, continued

Laura W. Murphy: 'Fixing' Citizens United Will Break the Constitution: "In “Fixing Citizens United,” Professor Geoffrey Stone -- usually a friend to the First Amendment -- argues for a constitutional amendment to “fix” the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. Professor Stone mentions the proposal rather offhandedly, but the idea is a nuclear option. A constitutional amendment -- specifically an amendment limiting the right to political speech -- would fundamentally “break” the Constitution and endanger civil rights and civil liberties for generations."

Murphy is the director of ACLU's Washington legislative office. They're obviously advancing a radical liberal agenda.

Conservatives vexed to discover Congress has power of taxation

Well, not all of them. But some of them. Take this tweet, for example:

Which, well, yes.

The second-most-trafficked blog post I've ever written here is one I wrote while reading The Federalist Papers.  It's where I dive deep to discover that the Founders intended that Congress have unlimited power of taxation.  Now they obviously didn't expect that it would be used in unlimited fashion, but they were very specific that the power had to be unbounded. Here's one Constitutional case where we don't have to speculate about their intent, because they told us.

Here is Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 31:

As the duties of superintending the national defense and of securing the public peace against foreign or domestic violence involve a provision for casualties and dangers to which no possible limits can be assigned, the power of making that provision ought to know no other bounds than the exigencies of the nation and the resources of the community. 

As revenue is the essential engine by which the means of answering the national exigencies must be procured, the power of procuring that article in its full extent must necessarily be comprehended in that of providing for those exigencies.
As theory and practice conspire to prove that the power of procuring revenue is unavailing when exercised over the States in their collective capacities, the federal government must of necessity be invested with an unqualified power of taxation in the ordinary modes.

The lack of limits, I think, suggests that the federal government indeed has the power to tax anything that moves. And anything that doesn't move.

I suppose you can argue that taxing people in order to encourage them to buy health insurance doesn't qualify as an "ordinary mode"--but as Chief Justice John Roberts noted in today's opinion upholding the Affordable Care Act, government uses tax policy to encourage and discourage all sorts of behaviors. That horse is out of the barn, and with the full-throated support of a good number of Republicans.

I can understand why conservatives might be disgruntled about today's ruling, though I don't think they have as much to be upset about as they think they do. But if you're going to be mad that the federal government has the power to tax you, don't get mad at John Roberts--he didn't invent the power. The Founders did.

Next up: Barack Obama to put a tax on singing 'The Star-Spangled Banner'

Heartland Institute Reacts to Obamacare Ruling | Heartland Institute: 

"“Today’s decision will go down in infamy. It marks the moment when we all lost our freedom because the Supreme Court drew a road map to guide those dedicated to imposing a totalitarian, statist government on the American people. 

“The majority opinion on the individual mandate, authored by Chief Justice Roberts, held that, so long as failure to comply with a government directive is penalized by something ‘reasonably’ called a tax, Congress can force Americans to buy anything. It can force Americans to do something, indeed anything, like eat broccoli. It can force Americans not to do something, like not be obese. Or even not sing the Star Spangled Banner. All of this would be lawful under this ruling today. 

“There is no limit on the evil coming, unless we amend our Constitution. A dark day for America, indeed.” 

Maureen Martin
Senior Fellow for Legal Affairs
The Heartland Institute "

Emphasis added. No other comment offered.

Hey liberals: Get ready for the next Supreme Court battle

Ben and I have a fresh-fresh-fresh Scripps Howard column this week, reflecting on what lessons can be learned from the Supreme Court's ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act. Taking the victory at face value—though maybe I shouldn't—here's my take:

Liberals, enjoy the victory -- because now everything gets harder. 

And I mean everything. The Supreme Court's ruling doesn't end the debate over the Affordable Care Act, it simply throws it back to Congress. Obamacare-hating Republicans already run the House of Representatives. Further Republican victories in November could lead to an outright repeal of the law. It may be years -- if ever -- before the act joins Medicare and Social Security in relative safety from GOP assaults. 

Beyond that, liberals should understand -- as conservatives almost certainly do -- that the fight over Supreme Court nominees will become even more intense going forward. Conservatives don't believe that their argument failed; they believe that Chief Justice John Roberts failed. And they'll act accordingly. 

Remember Harriet Miers? George W. Bush nominated her to the court in 2005 -- but withdrew the nomination in the face of opposition from angry conservatives who felt insufficiently assured she'd take their side on the big issues. Conservatives have demanded those assurances ever since David Souter joined the court's liberal bloc after being appointed by a Republican president. 

They will double down on those efforts. And given the trend of recent years, no one should be surprised if -- when -- Republicans then filibuster the next Supreme Court appointment made by a Democratic president. The customary deference given a president in such matters will evaporate. 

Democrats should be planning and preparing for those clashes now. 

They should also be prepared to modify and improve the law over time. 

The truth is that Obamacare's individual mandate is a blunt, inelegant instrument to expand health coverage in the United States -- flawed, but also what was politically possible at the time it passed. Over time, it will need amending and refinement. That will take a lot of work. 

The defense of Obamacare isn't over. Thanks to John Roberts, it has just begun.

Did John Roberts actually just kill the Affordable Care Act?

Although I have a Scripps Howard column coming out soon that suggests otherwise, I think it's possible that Chief Justice John Roberts decided to kill the Affordable Care Act today--not with the beheading that everybody was expecting, but with a slow-acting poison.

Consider this.

One of the big things the Affordable Care Act does is make it nearly impossible for insurance companies to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions. That removed a big obstacle for many people obtaining insurance, but it also created a problem--burdening those companies with huge medical costs that they were otherwise avoiding. The individual mandate was intended to solve that problem by sending lots of healthy people (and their cash) to the insurance companies, allowing the insurers to still make money.

By reframing the mandate as a tax, though, Roberts may have found the mechanism that blows the house of cards apart. Here he is, delivering the majority opinion:

Indeed, it is estimated that four million people each year will choose to pay the IRS rather than buy insurance. ... We would expect Congress to be troubled by that prospect if such conduct were unlawful. That Congress apparently regards such extensive failure to comply with the mandate as tolerable suggests that Congress did not think it was creating four million outlaws. It suggests instead that the shared responsibility payment merely imposes a tax citizens may lawfully choose to pay in lieu of buying health insurance.

And:

First, for most Americans the amount due will be far less than the price of insurance, and, by statute, it can never be more. It may often be a reasonable financial decision to make the payment rather than purchase insurance.

Now. I doubt Republicans would mount a campaign to get everybody to pay the tax and avoid health insurance in order to undermine the purposes of he Affordable Care Act. But if the mandate is now framed in the popular mind as a "cheap tax I can pay" instead of a "rule that I must follow," it's possible that many young, poorly paid people will opt to pay the tax--and that insurance companies will drown over time as a result.

UPDATE: Ezra Klein is thinking along similar lines.

At Imprimis: Richard Vedder is wrong; education pays

At Imprimis—the "most influential conservative publication you've never heard of"—Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder argues that the federal government is creating more problems than benefits with its student loan programs, and along the way makes a weird observation:

What about higher education being a vehicle for equal economic opportunity or income equality? Over the last four decades, a period in which the proportion of adults with four-year college degrees tripled, income equality has declined. (As a side note, I do not know the socially optimal level of economic inequality, and the tacit assumption that more such equality is always desirable is suspect; my point here is simply that, in reality, higher education today does not promote income equality.)

Vedder kind of gives the game away with his postscript—he doesn't care about income inequality, he just thinks it a handy tool to use in the argument against education. And it's true in a very narrow sense that increased access to college hasn't reduced income inequality. In truth, it's probably contributed a bit. Check out this chart:

Would you rather have a four-year college degree—likely with above-average earnings and below-average unemployment—or do you want to just keep that high school diploma?

Or study the numbers here: Between 1990 and 2008, a man with a high school diploma saw his earnings grow just 61 percent—that lagged the 67 percent inflation rate during that same period. Men with bachelor's degrees saw a 209 percent increase in income; men with PhDs saw a 227 percent increase.

Getting a good education, it seems, has been really smart way to stay ahead of the inequality trend.

And that matters, because college education—while more pervasive than it ever has been—is still the exception than the rule: Adults with four or more years of college comprised less than 30 percent of the population in 2009. Combine the relative scarcity of diplomas with the income benefit those diplomas conferred, and you get part of the explanation for increased income inequality in the United States in recent decades.

There are other things that Vedder, to my mind, gets wrong, and clearly we need to talk about how we pay for education and get it delivered. But Vedder's case is premised on this wrongheaded—misleading—idea that college education hasn't been very helpful economically, so to hell with the federal government helping young people get a degree.

Citizens United, the FIrst Amendment, and the Daily News

I bow to no man in my love of the Philadelphia Daily News, but I'm occasionally driven to distraction by one odd habit of the newspaper: Printing letters to the editor that are simply wrong or misleading on the facts—without correction or any indication to readers that the information in the letter is incorrect.

Understand, I'm not talking about a difference of opinion here. I'm talking about easily quantifiable distortions, like Michael Kubacki's letter in today's paper:

In fact, prior to Citizens United, there were a number of corporations that enjoyed unlimited political-speech rights. Philadelphia Media Network Inc., which owns the Daily News, was one of them. In fact, every corporation that owned a newspaper or a radio or TV station was allowed to say whatever it wished, whenever it wished. Other corporations, however, could not. The major effect of the Citizens United case was simply to level that playing field. 

Let us cut through the usual dreary rhetoric about "billionaires" and the "super-rich" who "buy themselves a candidate," and ask some simpler questions. First, why should corporations like Philadelphia Media Network Inc., CBS and the New York Times be permitted to pummel us daily with their political views while Monsanto and Target and BP must be completely silent? And second, when did political speech in America, by anyone, become something that must be suppressed? What an strange attitude for a newspaper to adopt.

Here's the problem: Kubacki is muddling two different kinds of "speech."

In terms of shouting one's opinions to the world, Monsanto, Target, and BP don't have to be completely silent—they're as free as the Daily News or the New York Times to spread word of their views through print and broadcast, and often do. Who hasn't seen BP's "greenwashing" ads in print on TV, for example? 

By the same token, the Daily News—which I'm guessing has not made corporate contributions to campaigns, at least not recently—has never had any more freedom (or less) to make cash donations to political campaigns than BP, Monsanto, etc.

So Kubacki's thesis—that papers somehow have more speech rights, before Citizens United, than other businesses—is simply, demonstrably wrong. But the Daily News' readers won't know that. That's a disservice to those readers and to the Daily News. 

The American Enterprise Institute's really awful new study on income inequality

A new paper from AEI's Kevin Hassett and Aparna Mathur says what you've heard about exploding income inequality in the United States is wrong: It's not really happening, they say, because consumption trends have remained relatively stable—the rich are consuming more, yes, but so are the not as rich.  It's a variation of the old "even poor people have color TVs now!" argument.

This is completely misleading.

Here is how you know it's misleading. Nowhere in the paper do Hassett and Mathur use the word "debt." And nowhere in the paper do the duo use the word "credit."Nor "bankruptcy."

Instead, the two suggest that debt is something kids do and adults pay their way out of: "Individuals are generally assumed to be able to smooth consumption by borrowing in the low-income years and saving in the high-income years."


Only that's not really true, at least not anymore. 


Here's what personal household debt has done during the last 60 years:

Debt is the blue line. It's always been going up, but the pace accelerated after 1980, and then started going nearly straight up during the first decade of the 21st century. That led to....

A big rise in bankruptcies. That big drop in 2006? That wasn't an improvement in American's well-being: That was the result of a new law meant to make it tougher to file for bankruptcy—and make sure that credit card companies could keep collecting fees from tapped-out customers.

And just for kicks, here's what happened to the personal savings rates:

Americans stopped saving.

And incidentally, this wasn't a widespread phenomenon. By 2007--just before the crash--this is what debt and income levels looked like for the various quintiles of American society:

In both charts, you'll note that the debt exceeds income for every income group...except for the top quintile.

Now, you can argue that Americans shouldn't have dug themselves such a deep hole, and that's a great argument to have. What you can't do is argue that everything is fine and dandy because consumption trends were consistent among the various income groups. The devastation of savings and the rise of big borrowing masked the growing inequality and permitted the consumption to continue—and when it became unsustainable, the economy went boom.

It's such an obvious objection, you have to wonder if AEI's economists were even trying. The report shouldn't be taken seriously.

Obama and immigration: A reader responds

A reader of the Reading (Ca.) Record Searchlight does not like my take on the immigration debate. He writes:

You start by saying Obama did a "righteous thing." By whose definition? Is circumventing congress righteous in your opinion? Are constsnt rewards for illegal immigrants a good thing, knowing their presence puts millions of Americans out of work (including minorities, the poor, the young, and blue collar workers) and costing us well over $100 billion per years a righteous thing? I am assuming you are on the liberal side of things. Liberals seem to operate on emotion. I think that they believe that heart-felt emotion trumps reason, logic, and adhearance to the law. You admit that we, as a nation, have the right to defend its borders and enforce our laws, but you just don't want us to do that for "moral" reasons. Huh? is it moral that the people of our country constantly suffer at the hands of of millions of illegals and a federal government that has an agenda of its own that doesn't include keeping our country sovereign? 

Question-If we let the younger illegals stay, will that be enough for you, or do you want amnesty ("comprehensive immigration reform") for the other millions of illegals? I'd like a response to this one, please. Why does my country keep on backing down, backing up, and bending over on this issue? When to we get a president that actually puts Americans first and says, "Illegal immigration is wrong. It is bad for this country. It should never have been allowed to get to this point in the first place and is no longer acceptable. From now on, it will no longer be tolerated, so all those in the country illegally, regardless of race, ethnicity, nation of origin, or income/educational level, will have to leave by a set deadline. Failue to do so will incur severe penalties. The illegal immigration "party is over?" Why are we always pandering to people who have no right to be here? Why is that righteous and moral? ALL illegal immigrants should face the threat of deportation. 

Betraying this country in favor of millions of trespassers is in no way righteous.

My reader and I disagree on just how much America has "suffered" from illegal immigration; I think it's obvious there have also been benefits, to a great many people, or there wouldn't be such market for illegal immigrants to fill. It's also indisputably true that illegal immigrants often pay taxes—particularly Social Security taxes—that they'll never get to benefit from. And a lot of the pain and suffering created by illegal immigration is probably because it's illegal—like Prohibition, we're creating more problems than we solve by criminalizing behavior. So is it a net good or a net negative that there are so many illegal immigrants here? Since I'm a namby-pamby liberal, I suspect it's a net good; and if it is a net bad, it's probably not nearly as bad as what the most ardent opponents (like my reader) believe and would have you believe.

Now, the question: Amnesty?

I don't think that's necessary, but I probably have a narrower idea of what constitutes "amnesty." If it means that we shouldn't deport every last person here illegally...then maybe I believe in amnesty--mostly because I think we can't and won't. The resources simply don't exist. "ALL illegal immigrants should face the threat of deportation?" Good luck with that.

But. I think there's a middle ground between "deport them all" and a full-blown path to citizenship. I think most reasonable solutions to solving the immigration issue involve greatly expanding work permits that allow foreign workers to legally enter the country and work here. And by greatly, I mean numbering in the millions. Essentially, we'd tell people who are currently residing here illegally: "You came here the wrong way. That means you forfeited the possibility of becoming a citizen and gaining those benefits. But by registering legally, you'll have permission to work and to go home on occasion without have to make a risky re-entry into the United States."Only workers who'd originally entered the United States through approved means would ever be eligible for citizenship.

What does this accomplish? A few things:

• It relieves the federal government of the strain of trying to chase quite so many illegal immigrants if fewer of them are illegal. That's a money saver.

• It's been documented that many illegal immigrants aren't so much interested in citizenship as they are in work; if they could go home without risking their lives on re-entry, many of them would. Many such folks settle here for no better reason than it's hard to go back home. Giving folks legal status might change that dynamic.

• If immigrants had legal status, it might be more difficult for employers to exploit them, wage-wise, and indirectly suppress wages available for American citizens. 

There would be other benefits, I think, as well.

But yes, I stand by the "righteousness" of Obama's act: Yes, many young people are here illegally, but A) it's not their fault and B) they're not culturally "of" their home countries. Shipping them back to homes they never knew ends up destroying a lot of those lives--without, I think, creating a enough of a deterrent to future offenders to make those destroyed opportunities worth it. They lose more than we as a society lose by letting them stay. Better to use them as a resource for creating a better America. It's not a perfect solution, because it means we have to accept the fruits of illegal immigration. But we're going to do that anyway, so let's at least do it in a productive, positive fashion.

Final thought: I've been at anti-immigration rallies—and yes, they were often more "anti-immigration" than "anti-illegal immigration." It may well be that liberals emote on this issue, but I guarantee we don't have the market cornered.

Of *course* China's economy is slowing down

Chinese Data Said to Be Manipulated, Understating Slowdown - NYTimes.com:

"Record-setting mountains of excess coal have accumulated at the country’s biggest storage areas because power plants are burning less coal in the face of tumbling electricity demand. But local and provincial government officials have forced plant managers not to report to Beijing the full extent of the slowdown, power sector executives said. 

Electricity production and consumption have been considered a telltale sign of a wide variety of economic activity. "

One quick, obvious thought: Of course China's economy is slowing down. It's an export-based manufacturing economy--and consumers in the rest of the world are either A) holding onto their cash, B) don't have any cash, or C) are paying down old credit cards. We're not buying as much stuff as we used to. That means China can't sell as much as it used to. China may be stronger than a lot of Western nations, but n a globalized economy, nobody gets out alive.

Mitt Romney and the crisis of capitalism

The New York Times reports that even when Mitt Romney lost, he won: "The private equity firm, co-founded and run by Mitt Romney, held a majority stake in more than 40 United States-based companies from its inception in 1984 to early 1999, when Mr. Romney left Bain to lead the Salt Lake City Olympics. Of those companies, at least seven eventually filed for bankruptcy while Bain remained involved, or shortly afterward, according to a review by The New York Times. In some instances, hundreds of employees lost their jobs. In most of those cases, however, records and interviews suggest that Bain and its executives still found a way to make money."

The Times adds: "Bain structured deals so that it was difficult for the firm and its executives to ever really lose, even if practically everyone else involved with the company that Bain owned did, including its employees, creditors and even, at times, investors in Bain’s funds."

If there's a crisis of capitalism these days, it's because it's very much a rigged game: The people at the top can't lose, even when their investments go to hell. The people below them can't really win--again, witness the stagnating middle-class wages of the last 30 years--but they can lose. It's not the old days where the shuttering of a factory meant the devastation of the local family that had owned it for 50 years, and so everybody lost together. These days, the Mitt Romneys of the world dust themselves off, count their piles of cash, and move onto the next town. Of course that's going to breed resentment. And if Romney is saying his business acumen is the reason he should be president, then it's absolutely fair game for criticism. 

More to the point: The other day I mentioned Bill Voegeli and his idea that capitalism might be revived if more people--workers--had skin in the game, in terms of compensation tied to the success or failure of their companies. I like that idea, but workers clearly do have skin in the game: When jobs go away, so does their ability to earn a living. Capitalism might also be improved if private equity firms like Bain also had real skin in the game, if they suffered instead of making profits even as the businesses they buy go under in a sea of Bain-generated debt.

Obama and immigration

Ben and I debate the president's DREAM Act order in this week's column for Scripps. My take:

Obama did a righteous thing. 

Yes, America has a right to defend its borders. And yes, it has the right to deport people who came and lived in our country illegally. 

But it would be morally wrong to deport young people who came to the country as children -- and who, having lived here most of their lives, genuinely understand themselves to be Americans. The sins of the father, after all, should not be visited upon the son. 

In a sane political culture, Congress would have passed a law -- the DREAM Act -- codifying such principles. We do not live in a sane political culture: The last attempt to pass the act, in 2010, won a majority of votes in the Senate, but could not clear a filibuster. (The filibuster is evil, but that's a discussion for another time.) 

So it's disingenuous of people like Rubio to suggest that the president's act made it "harder to find a balanced and responsible long-term solution" about how to let such young people legally live and work here. There has been little indication the Senate was headed toward such a solution, which is one reason why Obama acted. 

Without Congress' stamp of approval, however, Obama's action is imperfect. The next president can reverse it. (Presumed GOP nominee Mitt Romney has not said if he would do so.) So it only amounts to a temporary reprieve from the threat of deportation faced by young immigrants. And it does nothing to create a path to citizenship for them. At best, the Obama administration has only made limbo a bit more comfortable for such young folks. 

Congress can still act. It can still permanently resolve the status of young immigrants. Until that happens, the Obama administration's decision not to deport is the best of a bunch of bad options. Better than that: It's righteous.

Ben counters that Obama's act is an "usurpation of congressional authority. Congress makes the rules on immigration and naturalization. Not the president. On that point, the Constitution is clear." Ben is right, and I'm also not sure I care.

Congress also has the power to declare war and to make "make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;" but the last 12 years or so—under both Obama and his predecessor—have seen the executive branch essentially claim those powers as its own, ignoring many of the rules that Congress had already put in place. And Congress didn't really see fit to do anything about it.

So if that's the kind of government we've got—and I'm not really happy about that—then let's use that usurped power for good now and again, why don't we? What the president did was, to my mind, unambiguously good. I'd feel worse about the means of getting there if I thought that we'd get restraint in other important areas.

On being a stay-at-home dad

I wrote about it for The Philly Post. A taste:

"At times, I wonder if I’m ruining him. 

Why? Because writing takes sustained thought. And sustained thought is hard to come by when your kid needs clothes, needs to go outside, needs to go inside, needs something to eat, needs something to drink—”I’m so very hungry and firsty” are words he utters a dozen times a day—needs boo-boos kissed, needs a book read, needs a hug, needs to interrupt me when I’m on the phone, needs, needs, needs, needs everything but to take a goddamned nap once in awhile. 

Sometimes I give him my iPad and send him off to watch Thomas The Tank Engine for a couple of hours—just so I can get some work done. Great parenting, right?"

Dear Stu Bykofsky: Please never write about Asian women ever again

It's been less than a year after Stu Bykofsky creeped out Philadelphia with his wink-wink did-he-or-didn't-he? column about his trip to Thailand and the easy availability of sex with prostitutes there. Today, he's writing—again—about Asian women and sex. To be fair, the topic is at least newsworthy: Philadelphia Housing Authority director Michael Kelly resigned last week and admitted an affair with Audrey Lim, a Singapore native who also got the job of PHA's human resources director under Kelly. Bizarrely, though, Kelly—who comprised one-half of the affair and who was, after all, the person who apparently abused his authority in this case—gets only a passing mention in Byko's column. Instead, Stu weaves a tale in which Lim spins a web with her dragon lady wiles:

Her name is Audrey Lim and she is from Singapore. She did the right things to prepare herself for success. She earned a master's degree in occupational therapy, a master's in government administration and then a doctorate in industrial/organizational psychology (whatever that means). Like you, she worked hard. Unlike you, perhaps, she met her future boss — PHA Executive Director Carl Greene — in a bar, according to PHA sources. Where better to discuss Community Development Block Grants? Before you could say, "Fill it again, Joe," she was hired as a "senior adviser" for $95,000. See that, kids? You don't need to pound on doors or fire off resumes on the Internet. If you are shapely and well-spoken, just sip a Singapore Sling in a bar and let the PHA job offers come to you. This isn't exclusive to the PHA. Younger and prettier and thinner Americans get paid more, it has been shown many times. Instead of a postgraduate degree, I'd suggest you grads invest in cosmetic surgery or a stomach bypass. This is not to denigrate Dr. Lim, who resigned last month, reportedly to return to Singapore to minister to a sick relative. Greene hired her — no information about how much senior advice she gave him — and when he was sent packing for sexual improprieties, reform PHA Executive Director Michael Kelly hiked her salary to $125,000 and put her in charge of PHA's human resources, which is what she became. Nine months later they were doing the housing hoochie koochie. I don't have to say allegedly because the married Kelly admitted the affair.

In Byko's telling, the story of the PHA isn't one in which a series of men took advantage of their power to get their jollies—but rather one in which those powerful men found themselves helpless before a "shapely" woman sipping "Singapore Slings" in a bar. Given what we've learned about Byko over the last year, it's hard not to read this column as speaking to some of his increasingly weird hangups—particularly when it comes to Asian women. But the whole thing comes off creepy and slut-shaming, while essentially giving the boys a pass. The man has editors, doesn't he? Maybe they should encourage him not to write about Asian women and sex anymore. They'd be doing us all a favor.

How about we make the workers into shareholders?

At The Claremont Review of Books, William Voegeli--friend and occasional nemesis--acknowledges popular discontent with capitalism, and intriguingly suggests that can be fixed by making capitalism something people do--as opposed to something that happens to people. Most intriguingly, he suggests giving workers a stake in their companies by tying wages--in part or in whole--to the success of the enterprise. He suggests that labor unions have been the biggest obstacle to such an arrangement:

"The greatest monument to the illusion that employees can and should prosper regardless of the economic condition of their employer is the rusting ruin that's the American labor movement. In Which Side Are You On? (1991), labor attorney Thomas Geoghegan lamented that the failure to take the biggest equity position it could in the industries where it represented workers "was the longest-running mistake in the history of labor, the unwitting, almost Gandhi-like renunciation of power." Geoghegan's explanation is that unionists were so strongly committed to the idea that workers and employers' relationship had to be adversarial that they never accepted the possibility of it being collaborative. "The attitude in labor was: collective bargaining is for adults, stockholder meetings are for kids.""

Perhaps. And maybe I'm too cynical. But I think it might be difficult to persuade management and ownership of companies to share equity with their workforces--especially in the 21st century, when those workforces can be outsourced or replaced by high-tech robotics that can do the jobs of several humans, often faster and better. If there is popular discontent with capitalism, it's partly because workers perceive that they're not seen by management as collaborators--and perhaps not even quite human, but as balance-sheet entries that can all too easily be eliminated to fatten a company's margins. Maybe these issues can be resolved, however.

In any case, I'm also intrigued that Voegeli's capitalist response to the crisis of capitalism doesn't sound hugely different from that of actual self-described socialist Harold Meyerson, who regularly extols German-style industrial capitalism--in which workers are well-represented on governing boards, and thus have some skin in the game of the enterprise--as a solution to what ails us. There are some distinctions between their approaches, to be sure, but the underlying concept is sound: To restore capitalism, and confidence in capitalism, workers must be given a clear-cut stake in its success. After 30 years of watching the middle class stagnate while top incomes soared, that change in approach would be welcome indeed.

What does social science prove about gay marriage?

David French says that liberals are so committed to gay marriage that they'd be in favor even if it demonstrably harmed children of gay marriage:

"There could exist definitive social science that homosexual families produce — on average — worse outcomes for their children than heterosexual families, and the fervor of the gay-marriage advocates would be undimmed. After all (and like no-fault divorce), the case for gay marriage has never been about the welfare of children, but instead, the fulfillment of adults.  "

At risk of saying, "I know you are but what am I?": Does anybody really think that the mass of social conservatives would drop their opposition to gay marriage even if definitive proof existed that children did better in gay families? I think the mass of opposition to gay marriage is rooted in religious beliefs—people believe it to be morally wrong—and field research probably isn't going to persuade them otherwise. The emphasis on "the welfare of children" is the fighting ground mainly because it offers a secular reason to oppose gay marriage—though advocates undoubtedly believe it to be true, because they believe gay marriage is morally wrong. But if the child welfare argument weren't available to them, they'd find another objection. We all have our predispositions, but contra French, liberals aren't any more committed to theirs than conservatives are.

Let's raise taxes to pay for our wars

Walter Pincus makes a sensible suggestion:

"Given today’s situation, why doesn’t President Obama link his request to restore Clinton-level taxes on the wealthy to the $88.5 billion requested for fiscal 2013 to pay for continuing the war in Afghanistan and counterterrorism efforts worldwide? That Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account, the supplemental appropriation created to fund Iraq, Afghanistan and other military actions abroad, is expected to continue as long as the United States has troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas confronting terrorists. 

For planning purposes, the Congressional Budget Office sees the OCO account running $44 billion a year through 2022. 

What about Obama, Romney or even hawkish members of Congress introducing a special excise tax on telephone calls or even Internet usage or ending some tax loopholes to pay that $44 billion a year. Taxes have been used to pay for America’s past wars going back to the War of 1812 — except for Iraq and Afghanistan."

There's an old saying: "If you want less of something, tax it." Since we have an all-volunteer military, the vast majority of Americans don't feel the effects of their country being at constant war around the globe--a situation that's persisted long enough now that most of us simply don't pay close attention anymore. Explicitly linking Americans' tax bills to those wars might give them some skin in the game--and force officials to justify their actions instead of relying on inertia to continue military operations. Which is why no such tax will be passed, probably. But it's galling to see some folks try to cut Social Security and Medicare while feeling little obligation to pay now for the wars we conduct.