Ethanol subsidies

James Hamilton wonders over at Econbrowser why corn-based ethanol is so popular with consumers.

The NAS study claimed that even if 100% of the U.S. corn crop were devoted to ethanol production (leaving zero for exports, corn flakes, or whatever), it would only displace 12% of our gasoline consumption; (thanks again to Jerry Taylor for steering me to that estimate).

Although powering our cars with corn is vastly more expensive than other alternatives, this choice seems to be tremendously popular with most Americans. If an economist were asked to justify this attitude, the argument would have to be that the market cost of imported oil vastly understates its true cost to us in terms of geopolitical implications of U.S. dependence on foreign oil. But if that is the underlying rationale, the preferred economic solution would not be a subsidy to corn producers, but rather a tax on oil imports.

The subsidies and economic inefficiencies they create result in taxpayers and consumers paying more than they would under a simple, direct import tariff. A tariff would also produce strong incentives not just for ethanol production but also a variety of alternative energy sources and conservation, with the big advantage that market forces would guide us to the most efficient options on the table. But I guess the ethanol subsidies have the advantage that Americans can pretend that somebody else is footing this bill.

John Edwards’ health care plan

Both Paul Krugman (via Mark Thoma) and Dean Baker have nice things to say about the universal health care plan advanced by presidential candidate John Edwards.

It’s not the cleanest plan in the world (there remains a substantial role for private health insurance, for example), but on the other hand it has some features that set it apart from, say, Schwarzenegger’s proposal in California.

Krugman (edited by Thoma):

But Mr. Edwards goes two steps further. People who don’t get insurance from their employers would… purchase insurance through “Health Markets”: government-run bodies negotiating with insurance companies on the public’s behalf. …

Why is this such a good idea? …[M]arketing and underwriting — … screening out high-risk clients — are responsible for two-thirds of insurance companies’ overhead. With insurers selling to government-run Health Markets, not directly to individuals, most of these expenses should go away, making insurance considerably cheaper.

Better still, “Health Markets,” …, “…modeled after Medicare” … offer a crucial degree of competition. The public insurance plan would almost certainly be cheaper … — after all, Medicare has very low overhead. Private insurers would either have to match the public plan’s low premiums, or lose the competition. …

So this is a smart, serious proposal. It addresses both … the uninsured and the waste and inefficiency of our fragmented insurance system. And every candidate should be pressed to come up with something comparable.

Baker:

This is a serious plan. What I find most interesting (agreeing with Paul Krugman) is the proposal to create a public Medicare type system that any individual or employer can buy into. [Cheap political advice for the Edwards campaign: hype this item to the moon as a small business friendly proposal. Small businesses hate to deal with insurers who can raise their premiums by ridiculous amounts, especially if one of their workers develops a serious illness.] This sets up a head to head competition between the public system and private insurers. We should all benefit from this sort of competition.

Krugman again:

So far, all we have from Mr. Obama is inspiring rhetoric about universal care — that’s great, but how do we get there? And how do we know whether Mrs. Clinton, who says that she’s “not ready to be specific,” and that she wants to “build the consensus first,” will really be willing to take on this issue again?

To be fair, these are still early days. But America’s crumbling health care system is our most important domestic issue, and I think we have a right to know what those who would be president propose to do about it.

As Baker points out, “Representative Dennis Kucinich has put forward a universal Medicare plan, but the media have largely opted to ignore his candidacy.” Still, it’s eleven months until the first primary; we’ll see what happens. Not ignoring the fact that it’ll take 60 votes in the Senate to pass anything remotely resembling universal health care.

Hillary takes responsibility

Marc Cooper:

Hillary Clinton is out on the campaign trail attempting to make a pivot on the war in Iraq.
…

Oh, says Hillary now of the notorious vote for war: “I accept responsibility.”
…

This, of course, begs a burning follow-up question from some enterprising reporter: “Senator Clinton, just exactly for what are you accepting responsibility? For the 3,000 American lives? The 25,000 wounded? The hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis? The hundreds of billions of dollars poured down the rat sewer? Could you, ma’am, be a bit more specific as to what your responsibilities are in this Gotterdammerung?”

Via Max.

Surge? Whatever…

Fred Kagan last December, quoted by Gregory at Belgravia Dispatch.

Conducting Tal Afar-type operations across the entire capital region all at once would require concentrating all available forces in the area and a “surge” of about 80,000 U.S. soldiers–a large number, to be sure, but very far from the “hundreds of thousands” or even “millions” generated by the use of specious historical examples.

Kagen three weeks later.

We need to cut through the confusion. Bringing security to Baghdad–the essential precondition for political compromise, national reconciliation and economic development–is possible only with a surge of at least 30,000 combat troops lasting 18 months or so. Any other option is likely to fail.

80,000? 50,000? 30,000? 20,000? Whatever…

CyberTran: Ultra-light rail for cities and suburbs

Gar Lipow at Gristmill.

CyberTran: Ultra-light rail for cities and suburbs

CyberTran[1] is a form of mass transit suitable for most parts of the nation, from suburbs to the densest parts of Manhattan. It is not so much a new system as an overlooked one. The advantages:

It offers 24-hour availability.
Your journey time is about the same as in a car.
Your rail-car is ready when you are.
You never need to stand.
Stops are near your home and your final destination.
You can read the paper during your trip.

No magic is involved.

CyberTran ultralight rail uses small cars carrying 20 passengers. (The same-sized cars could be configured to hold anywhere from six to 30 riders.) Small, light cars run on cheaper tracks. The total capital cost of a CyberTran urban system (including rail and guideways) is about a tenth or less the cost per passenger mile of conventional light rail[2]. That is important — capital costs dominate rail expenses.
CyberTran is an automated, driverless system. (With so many tiny cars, it has to be.) Outside of rush hour, it would be an on-demand system, calculating routes on the fly. During rush hour in dense urban areas, a series of CT cars following one another closely would mimic a conventional multi-car train with fixed schedules. Regardless, you would never have to wait more than five minutes or so for a car — usually less.

$6 billion “windfall” for schools?

From today’s SF Chronicle:

California schools are in line for a $6 billion windfall over the next five years, and interest groups are already lining up to get their share, promoting ideas like improving high schools, paying teachers more, and helping urban districts with severely declining enrollment.

The money is anticipated because K-12 enrollment is expected to drop while the state’s general fund revenues continue to increase. Several factors are contributing to the declining enrollment: Children of Baby Boomers are exiting the 5-to-17 age group, fewer people are moving into the state, and there has been a decline recently in the state’s birthrate.

How much of a “windfall” are we talking about here? With 6 million students in the system, $6 billion comes to $1000 per student. Spread that over five years, and we’re looking at $200 per student per year (never mind that we also have to assume that the economy stays healthy).

My local district, not atypical, spends about $7000 per student now. An extra $200 would of course be welcome, but it’s less than a 3% boost. Some windfall.

(Falling enrollment, by the way, has been a way of life in my district for the last ten years.)

CSS Follies

Damn, but CSS is frustrating.

Over the weekend, I was designing a simple site, to be maintained by the members of our local Green Party without anyone having to worry too much about an over-fussy design. The idea was simple enough: a banner across the top, a main column of blog-like content, and a navigation column over on the right. For design purposes, the two columns were fixed-width, reflecting a design element in the banner.

The main column would have a white background and dark green text; the nav column would be light gray-green with the same dark green text. Oh, and here’s the rub: the nav column would be the same height as the main column.

Well, bud, near as I can tell, there’s no straightforward way to accomplish that straightforward design in CSS. The nav column ends up being too short, not extending to the bottom of the main column.

You’d think that you could wrap the two columns in another div, and make the nav column’s height 100%, but you can’t do that because the columns have to float, and that divorces them from their container’s height.

Yes, there are some more less outlandish workarounds. Something about a bottom margin of 5000 pixels, and negative padding likewise, or vice versa, or something like that. I don’t really want to know.

It’s crazy that you can’t do such a simple layout in a straightforward way with CSS. Don’t tell the Web 2.0 police, but I ended up laying it out with a table. Five minutes and it was done.

I actually like CSS well enough in principle. But the simplest tasks can become a royal pain. Who thinks this stuff up?

Selling Indulgences: Monbiot on carbon trading

George Monbiot suggests that “The trade in carbon offsets is an excuse for business as usual”:

The problem is this. If runaway climate change is not to trigger the irreversible melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and drive hundreds of millions of people from their homes, the global temperature rise must be confined to 2C above pre-industrial levels. As the figures I have published in Heat show, this requires a 60% cut in global climate emissions by 2030, which means a 90% cut in the rich world. Even if, through carbon offset schemes carried out in developing countries, every poor nation on the planet became carbon-free, we would still have to cut most of the carbon we produce at home. Buying and selling carbon offsets is like pushing the food around on your plate to create the impression that you have eaten it.

Also: Monbiot’s new book, HEAT, and a website, turn up the heat.

My fear is not that people will stop talking about climate change. My fear is that they will talk us to Kingdom Come.
Few corporations or public figures are now stupid enough to deny that climate change is happening, or that we need to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases. Instead, most of them now claim to be on the side of the angels. They make public statements or publish reports designed to persuade us that they are “working towards sustainability”.
In a few cases, they really are. But for every genuine reformer, there are half a dozen who are simply greenwashing their existing practices. The people who will destroy the ecosystem are not, or not only – sneering industrialists in pinstriped suits, but nice-looking people in open-necked shirts who claim that they are just as concerned as the rest of us to save the planet.
This site aims to ensure that they don’t get away with it. Its purpose is to expose the fudged figures, dodgy claims and empty public relations campaigns of the charming people who are wrecking the biosphere.

Shared depravity

Andrew Brown on the Lancet study.

helmintholog: 600,000 and deNazification

… At about the same time [1951], a poll found that 37% of Germans thought it would be better for Germany to have no Jews on its territory, and 25% of them had a good opinion of Hitler.

This doesn’t prove the unique depravity of Germans, only their depravity. …

I doubt that even convinced opponents of the war want to believe something that terrible has happened as a result of our actions, or inactions. I don’t know whether it is worse to think now that we could have done more to stop the war, or to reflect that we could do no more than we actually did. But if we opponents must look away as they pass the rows of corpses, why should we expect that supporters of the war should face the facts when they have so much more at stake.

hilzoy on north korea

A nice extended account of the recent history of North Korea and nuclear weapons. With links.

Do You Feel Safer Now?

Those ridiculous knee-jerk Democrats. Why on earth would they think that the person who has had complete control over America’s foreign policy for the last six years should be blamed in any way for a foreign policy disaster of enormous proportions? Who could imagine that there could possibly be anything wrong with our policy towards North Korea?

(Via Glenn Greenwald)

RIP AB 2948

Arnold Schwarzenegger has vetoed AB 2948, the bill that would have effectively done away with the Electoral College in favor of direct election of the president, once enough states passed similar bills (and they overcame the inevitable court challenges).

Schwarzenegger’s veto message reads,

To the Members of the California State Assembly:

I am returning Assembly Bill 2948 without my signature.

I believe strongly in democracy and in honoring the will of the people. While this bill honors the
will of the majority of people voting for the office of President of the United States across the
country, it disregards the will of a majority of Californians.

I appreciate the intent of this measure to make California more relevant in the presidential
campaign, but I cannot support doing it by giving all our electoral votes to the candidate that a
majority of Californians did not support.

This is counter to the tradition of our great nation which honor states rights and the unique pride
and identity of each state.

Sincerely,

Arnold Schwarzenegger

The message is either dishonest or disingenuous. If this mechanism had been in place the last time there was a discrepancy between the popular and Electoral College votes—2000—, the result would have been the election of the candidate that the majority of Californian (and American) voters did support, rather than what we got.

Then why the veto? Most likely because the Republican Party has an advantage over the Democrats in the Electoral College, largely because of demographics. Republicans do better in small states, and small states are disproportionately represented in the College.

I’m not so foolish as to believe that the Democrats aren’t equally dishonest when it serves their purpose, or that this back-door approach to abolishing the Electoral College had much chance of gathering enough support nationwide to take effect. But it would have been nice to try.

Are We Really So Fearful?

Ariel Dorfman expresses better than I can my discomfort with the arguments against torture, valid as they may be, that appeal to efficacy or to self-interest.

It was always the same story, what I discovered in the ensuing years, as I became an unwilling expert on all manner of torments and degradations, my life and my writing overflowing with grief from every continent. Each of those mutilated spines and fractured lives — Chinese, Guatemalan, Egyptian, Indonesian, Iranian, Uzbek, need I go on? — all of them, men and women alike, surrendered the same story of essential asymmetry, where one man has all the power in the world and the other has nothing but pain, where one man can decree death at the flick of a wrist and the other can only pray that the wrist will be flicked soon.

It is a story that our species has listened to with mounting revulsion, a horror that has led almost every nation to sign treaties over the past decades declaring these abominations as crimes against humanity, transgressions interdicted all across the earth. That is the wisdom, national and international, that has taken us thousands of years of tribulation and shame to achieve. That is the wisdom we are being asked to throw away when we formulate the question — Does torture work? — when we allow ourselves to ask whether we can afford to outlaw torture if we want to defeat terrorism.

I will leave others to claim that torture, in fact, does not work, that confessions obtained under duress … are useless. Or to contend that the United States had better not do that to anyone in our custody lest someday another nation or entity or group decides to treat our prisoners the same way.

I find these arguments — and there are many more — to be irrefutable. But I cannot bring myself to use them, for fear of honoring the debate by participating in it.

Can’t the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the “intelligence” that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

Are we so morally sick, so deaf and dumb and blind, that we do not understand this? Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America?

(Via Marty Lederman)

Sunday Godblogging: A Prayer for War

A Prayer for War

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them, in spirit, we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it-for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!

We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

— Mark Twain

(Via Sam Smith)

No Quick Fix

George Monbiot points out problems with Paul Crutzen’s proposal to mitigate global warming by injecting tons of sulphur into the stratosphere.

No Quick Fix:

Challenging a Nobel laureate over a matter of science is not something you do lightly. I have hesitated and backed off, read and re-read his paper, but now I believe I can state with confidence that Paul Crutzen, winner of the 1995 prize for chemistry, has overlooked a critical scientific issue.

Republicans vs Democrats on the economy

Kevin Drum:

Did you know that Democratic presidents are better for the economy than Republicans? Sure you did. I pointed this out two years ago, back when my readership numbered in the dozens, and more recently Michael Kinsley ran the numbers in the LA Times and came to the same conclusion.

The results are simple: Democratic presidents have consistently higher economic growth and consistently lower unemployment than Republican presidents. If you add in a time lag, you get the same result. If you eliminate the best and worst presidents, you get the same result. If you take a look at other economic indicators, you get the same result. There’s just no way around it: Democratic administrations are better for the economy than Republican administrations.

Skeptics offer two arguments: first, that presidents don’t control the economy; second, that there are too few data points to draw any firm conclusions. Neither argument is convincing. It’s true that presidents don’t control the economy, but they do influence it — as everyone tacitly acknowledges by fighting like crazed banshees over every facet of fiscal policy ever offered up by a president.

The second argument doesn’t hold water either. The dataset that delivers these results now covers more than 50 years, 10 administrations, and half a dozen different measures. That’s a fair amount of data, and the results are awesomely consistent: Democrats do better no matter what you measure, how you measure it, or how you fiddle with the data.

But it turns out there’s more to this…

What the Terrorists Want

Bruce Schneier.

What the Terrorists Want

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

Schneier includes a number of interesting links, including this one on the practicality of the plot in question.

Fear, of course, serves purposes beyond those of the terrorists.

History Unfolding: Judge Taylor’s opinion

There’s been a lot of virtual ink spilled on the subject of Judge Taylor’s decision on the (il)legality of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping. For a discussion of fine legal points you’ll have to go elsewhere, but the view I’d like to associate myself with is expressed by historian David Kaiser at HIstory Unfolding.

Judge Taylor’s opinion:

In the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the Founding Fathers set forth a vision of a new form of government and gave their descendants the best tools that they could to preserve it. Their work reflected their own painful experiences. Until the 1770s, they had believed that they lived under the most perfect form of government yet devised, the unwritten English constitution, which appeared to guarantee them a series of critical rights. As it turned out, however, that constitution had not prevented George III from imposing tyranny over the United States. Thus, in 1787 when they came together to write the constitution, they had learned the critical lesson that any system could conceivably degenerate into tyranny. That was the point of the correspondence between Jefferson and Madison the next year, which I have already quoted in an earlier post (of December 25, 2005), which began when Jefferson complained of the absence of a Bill of Rights. Defending the omission, Madison explained, first, that he had feared that it would be difficult to get all the necessary rights improved, and secondly, with or without such a bill, a government in times of crisis would always find some way to violate it. Jefferson replied wisely that while Madison was not wrong, the existence of a Bill of Rights would make it harder for a government to trample upon them during a crisis and easier to restore them when it was over. No wiser prediction, I venture to say, ever came from the hand of that remarkable man.
…