Do Nothing GOP

For the past 6 - 6!! - years, we've been experiencing huge economic problems. The GOP in the House to the rescue!!:

The current U.S. Congress, facing a backlog of unfinished business and sliding approval ratings, is on pace to clear fewer bills than its predecessor -- which had the least number of measures signed into the law since modern record keeping began in the 1940s.

Since the 113th Congress convened in January, the Senate has been in session 80 days and the House 84 days. Lawmakers passed 15 bills that were then signed by the president. That’s eight fewer than in the first six months of the last Congress and 19 fewer than in the same stretch of the 111th Congress.

“The 113th Congress is on track to be even less productive than the historic 112th Congress,” said Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “The problem arises from a Republican House unwilling and unable to engage in the normal process of negotiation and compromise with the president, and their continued willingness to live with a destructive sequester.”

Left undone have been major pieces of legislation including a budget agreement and a farm and food-aid policy bill. Lawmakers missed a July 1 deadline to prevent subsidized Stafford student loans from doubling to 6.8 percent. While the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration overhaul bill and farm legislation, the House hasn’t charted a way forward on either issue.

Just a reminder:  we've had divided governments before, and more was achieved. This bunch of GOP representatives is among the worst in U.S. history.

Ideology At Work

Everyone can agree that there is a presumption in favor of government regulations coming from as local a governing body as possible. So, in general and at first blush, it's better to let states regulate elections than the federal government. But this isn't in the constitution, it's just a truism. And the problem is that we know without doubt that states sometimes do a very bad job at regulating. In that case, the presumption is overruled and there is nothing in the constitution that says the federal government can't regulate voting rights.

Ilya Shapiro has a somewhat longer piece attempting to defend Shelby County v. Holder. Along with Roberts’s majority opinion, it’s as effective an argument against the outcome of the case as any rebuttal could be. Let me start with what Shapiro doesn't mention:

Section 2 of the 15th Amendment

Any constitutional provision the Voting Rights Act violates

Don't Hate The Player, Change The Game

According to many of its employees, Bank of America repeatedly committed fraud and screwed over its most vulnerable customers. This isn't that much of a surprise. But the proper response is not to simply hate Bank of America. B of A is a corporation and hating it won't change the behavior. Rather, the appropriate thing to do is vote for people who recognize that corporations will break the law if they can get away with it, and so demand better oversight and law enforcement. Minimal regulations are a good thing; it really should be against the law to alter in any way the forms and materials one receives from customers, or to threaten whistleblowers, or provide incentives to break the current law, etc.

These Bank of America employees offer the first glimpse into how they pulled it off. Employees, many of whom allege they were given no basic training on how to even use HAMP, were instructed to tell borrowers that documents were incomplete or missing when they were not, or that the file was “under review” when it hadn’t been accessed in months. Former loan-level representative Simone Gordon says flat-out in her affidavit that “we were told to lie to customers” about the receipt of documents and trial payments. She added that the bank would hold financial documents borrowers submitted for review for at least 30 days. “Once thirty days passed, Bank of America would consider many of these documents to be ‘stale’ and the homeowner would have to re-apply for a modification,” Gordon writes. Theresa Terrelonge, another ex-employee, said that the company would consistently tell homeowners to resubmit information, restarting the clock on the HAMP process.

Worse than this, Bank of America would simply throw out documents on a consistent basis. Former case management supervisor William Wilson alleged that, during bimonthly sessions called the “blitz,” case managers and underwriters would simply deny any file with financial documents that were more than 60 days old. “During a blitz, a single team would decline between 600 and 1,500 modification files at a time,” Wilson wrote. “I personally reviewed hundreds of files in which the computer systems showed that the homeowner had fulfilled a Trial Period Plan and was entitled to a permanent loan modification, but was nevertheless declined for a permanent modification during a blitz.” Employees were then instructed to make up a reason for the denial to submit to the Treasury Department, which monitored the program. Others say that bank employees falsified records in the computer system and removed documents from homeowner files to make it look like the borrower did not qualify for a permanent modification.

Senior managers provided carrots and sticks for employees to lie to customers and push them into foreclosure. Simone Gordon described meetings where managers created quotas for lower-level employees, and a bonus system for reaching those quotas. Employees “who placed ten or more accounts into foreclosure in a given month received a $500 bonus,” Gordon wrote. “Bank of America also gave employees gift cards to retail stores like Target or Bed Bath and Beyond as rewards for placing accounts into foreclosure.” Employees were closely monitored, and those who didn’t meet quotas, or who dared to give borrowers accurate information, were fired, as was anyone who “questioned the ethics … of declining loan modifications for false and fraudulent reasons,” according to William Wilson.

 In fact, if you are a Republican who tends to resist "government regulations," you are well served to strongly enforce clear violations of law. That way you can prevent events like this and make the case more strongly that further regulations aren't needed.

The American Dream

I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said, "We desire a nation where those who are born rich will probably have better lives, even without trying very hard...

So, you are 2.5x more likely to be a rich adult if you were born rich and never bothered to go to college than if you were born poor and, against all odds, went to college and graduated. The disparity in the outcomes of rich and poor kids persists, not only when you control for college attainment, but even when you compare non-degreed rich kids to degreed poor kids!

Therefore, the answer to the question in the title is that you are better off being born rich regardless of whether you go to college than being born poor and getting a college degree.

College Administrators Get A Lot Of Money And Perks

SSDD:

According to documents unearthed in a month-long search of public records, NYU Law School has created an array of nonprofits to funnel money into lavish perks for its professors. The money has been used by professors to buy multi-million dollar brownstones and condos in Manhattan and Brooklyn with portions of some loans forgiven over time. In some cases, even the interest charged on the loans has been reimbursed . . .

Ten days ago, the Dean of the NYU School of Law, Richard Revesz, who has served in that post since June 1, 2002, stepped down to head up the Marron Institute on Cities and the Urban Environment, a nonprofit made possible by a $40 million gift from Donald Marron, the former Chairman and CEO for two decades of the Wall Street firm, Paine Webber.

Revesz’ mortgage deals with NYU date all the way back to June 24, 1998 when the NYU School of Law Foundation bestowed on he and his partner, Vicki Been (also a law professor at NYU), a 46.5465 percent interest in a brownstone on West 11th Street in the West Village. The home had been purchased by the Foundation on October 16, 1995 at a cost of $1,450,000. With considerable improvements made by the Foundation, the fair value was placed at $2,664,000 on the date Revesz and Been acquired their interests. The Foundation sold the 46.5465 percent interest to the law professors for $1,240,000 and provided their full purchase price in two mortgage notes. On December 19, 2002, a little over six months after Revesz became Dean of the Law School, the Foundation transferred its 53.45 percent interest in the property to Revesz and Been.

According to documents on file with New York City, large amounts of the interest on the Revesz mortgage loans were not being paid but were, instead, allowed to accrue and be added to principal. On March 30, 2012, Revesz and Been entered a mortgage modification directly with NYU, not the Foundation. The document notes that as of March 30, 2012 there was a combined outstanding principal balance in the amount of $2,180,597 (including capitalized interest) and a second outstanding principal balance of $1,197,661. The deal was renegotiated to reduce the amount of interest and extend the maturity date on the larger balance.

According to NYU’s 2010 federal tax filing with the IRS (the most recent one made public), Revesz owed the University at that time a total of $5,683,652. It is not known what the amount in excess of the mortgage debt represents.

Why College Is Expensive

The cost of driving the car (excluding the cost of the car itself) is more than my salary for the past six years.

Not Reassured

This NSA/Verizon/PRISM stuff is too creepy. There is an eternal debate, of course, about the trade-off between privacy and security. But, how can Obama ensure that 22,000 NSA employees are only doing their jobs and that there will be no malfeasance whatsoever? And why did it have to be secret?

Seeing What They Want To See

Katrina Trinko summarizes the message of a report on how the GOP is doing with young people is: "talk different." This makes it seem that the policies are fine but that the messaging is bad. She then goes on to give a number of examples where young people don't like the policies. She should perhaps for a minute consider whether the summary isn't "come up with policies that don't cater only to rich old people."

One reason might be the distrust of the GOP policies that led up to the recession. Fifty-one percent of young adults saw “Republican economic policies” as having played the “biggest role” or a “major role” when it came to the recession. Obama frequently blamed Republicans for the recession, an argument Romney never really refuted or even attempted to refute. Ultimately, these numbers should be sobering: Even on jobs and the economy — which was almost all Republicans campaigned on — the party failed to win over Millennials. It wasn’t that Millennials decided to vote on issues other than the economy, but that their disapproval of the GOP extends to what they perceive the party’s economic policy to be.

 Perhaps it's not how the politicians talk only about cutting taxes for rich people that's the problem.

Self Therapy

My evaluations weren't as great as I'd hoped they'd be. They weren't bad, just not great. I'll make myself feel better with this:

When you measure performance in the courses the professors taught (i.e., how intro students did in intro), the less experienced and less qualified professors produced the best performance. They also got the highest student evaluation scores. But more experienced and qualified professors' students did best in follow-on courses (i.e., their intro students did best in advanced classes).

The authors speculate that the more experienced professors tend to "broaden the curriculum and produce students with a deeper understanding of the material." (p. 430) That is, because they don't teach directly to the test, they do worse in the short run but better in the long run. 

To summarize the findings: because they didn't teach to the test, the professors who instilled the deepest learning in their students came out looking the worst in terms of student evaluations and initial exam performance. To me, these results were staggering, and I don't say that lightly.

How Can This Be True In Obama's America?

Same crime, different treatment.

Black Americans were nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession in 2010, even though the two groups used the drug at similar rates, according to new federal data. 

 This disparity had grown steadily from a decade before, and in some states, including Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois, blacks were around eight times as likely to be arrested.

Perceptions Of Performance In Groups

Starting at a young age I adopted the policy to believe the opposite of what people say about themselves. If someone mentions he's hardworking, I'd start of assuming he wasn't. Obviously, one should keep an open mind and make adjustments in one's perception as one goes along, but my assumption would be opposite. I haven't really changed my mind about this policy. Here is some justification for keeping it:

Personality measures taken at the start of the course showed that more neurotic individuals received lower status ratings at the first measurement stage, but made gains at the second stage. Extraverts, meanwhile, received marginally higher initial ratings but these decreased by time two. The effects were small, possibly because researchers controlled for a wide range of measures including other personality factors, gender, cognitive ability and individual assignment grades, which may soak up what might otherwise be observed. Further analysis confirmed effects were not due to regression to the mean, as variability in ratings was similar across the two time points. Instead, it appeared that the status changes were due to neurotics being seen to contribute more than had been expected, and extroverts less than expected.

"Science" - You Sure About That? Edition

Erick Erickson claims liberals are anti-science because they do not believe it is harmful if a woman makes the most money in a family. This dude is regularly on CNN. Let us weep.

Bad Theories Of Other Minds

Hard to get political disagreement when members of Congress believe members of the other part are pushing nefarious agendas. People who disagree politically do this all the time; members of all parties are often culprits. Here's an example:

REP. KING: Handing out benefits is not an economic stimulator. But we wanna take care of the people that are needy, the people that’re hungry, and we’ve watched this program grow from a number that I think I first memorized when I arrived here in Congress, about 19 million people, now about 49 million people. And it appears to me that the goal of this administration is to expand the rolls of people that’re on SNAP benefits. And their purpose for doing so in part is because of what the gentleman has said from Massachusetts. Another purpose for that though is just to simply expand the dependency class.

Movie Criticism

Some of my friends say I don't like any movies. That's not true - it's just that I'm more discriminating, like professional critics and unlike most movie watchers. One might argue that this is the result of a selection bias and not necessarily refined movie tastes, but one has to contend with the fact that people who watch more movies tend to be less forgiving.

Jonathan Plucker and colleagues compared the ratings given to films by professional critics, "amateur critics", and undergrad students, and discovered a continuum of overlapping opinion with the experts being the harshest judges, followed by the amateur critics, while the students were the most generous.

A further finding to emerge was that undergrads who'd watched more films tended to provide harsher ratings, but these were still more generous on average than the amateur and professional critics.

Couple Of Things

When taxes rates are as low as they are in the U.S., raising taxes raises revenue. Believe or not, it is orthodoxy among some groups that raising tax rates even when at the low level they were in the past few years will not raise revenue. Yet every tax rates are raised, so is revenue. Second thing: shrinking deficit is not good news. We should immediately slash the payroll tax rate again. Ask yourself why there is a gigantic fight over whether to raise income tax for the wealthy (class warfare!) but nobody put up a stink about a raise in payroll taxes. I'll give you a clue - payroll taxes disproportionately affect poor people.

Whoops

A lot of careers have been made publishing what is essentially junk. I think there is something to priming, but a number of researchers have gone way overboard. A lot of it is due to incentives, of course.

Not something we didn't already know, but good illustration of the particular affliction dogging the GOP right now. Used to be that, as a governor, you claim credit for all the free gifts handed to your constituents by the federal government. Perry is rejecting this gift, even though "Texas, which, has the nation’s highest rate of uninsured residents — 24 percent, or more than six million people — is already a disaster."

What's the point of rejecting Medicaid expansion when your state has the highest rate of uninsured residents? No point really. Not saving your constituents any money - the Medicaid expansion is funded by national taxpayers, not Texas' specifically. You get an unquestionable benefit. So the point is just to be obstinate to demonstrate distaste, as Ezra Klein puts it, "It’s a classic example of cutting off your nose to spite Obama." The GOP is not just far right of the mainstream right now; that's a problem but not the main problem which makes the current GOP crop among the worst in U.S. history. The conspicuous problem responsible for its historic badness is that it doesn't want to do the hard work of molding government into something that benefits their constituents. Instead, GOP legislators and governors simply want to make statements.

GOP In The House Really Bad Legislators

What positive agenda have they gotten through? Jonathan Bernstein:

Couldn’t write a bill because he was distracted by Fast and Furious and Benghazi? Why not just say that his computer was down or that a dog ate his homework? At least those cliched excuses don’t imply what is really going on here: Republican politicians who believed that the job of a member of Congress is to be outraged, and once they’ve done that, they can pretty much go home.

More Frum On Guns

Because it needs to be said:

Weird stories like this, shocking as they are, distract us from the reality of what guns mostly do in America. The New York Times cast light on that daily truth in adisturbing long report this weekend.

Intimate partner homicides account for nearly half the women killed every year, according to federal statistics. More than half of these women are killed with a firearm.

Women often know that the man in their life is dangerous and will seek a protective order against him. One study of urban women found that 20% of murdered women had previously obtained a protective order. Yet there's a big loophole in these protective orders: a judge may tell a man to stay away from a woman. But in the large majority of states, a man under a protective order may still keep his guns. Even in those states that require surrender - California - the requirement is barely enforced.

Which is how we get cases like these:

Deborah Wigg, a 39-year-old accountant in Virginia Beach, obtained a protective order in April 2011 against her husband, Robert Wigg, whom she was in the process of divorcing. In her petition, she described a violent encounter in which Mr. Wigg grabbed her by her hair, threw her down, ripped out a door and threw it at her. He was arrested and charged with assault. She also made clear in the petition that her husband owned a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun.

She eventually won a full protective order, but Mr. Wigg kept his gun, which he used in his business installing and servicing A.T.M.’s.

Ms. Wigg and her co-workers at an accounting firm openly fretted about the weapon. She agreed that every morning she would call Marty Ridout, a partner at the firm, so he could make sure she was safe.

On the morning of Nov. 8, 2011, Ms. Wigg left Mr. Ridout a voice mail message saying everything was fine.

Around 11 p.m. that night, however, Mr. Wigg, 43, showed up at his wife’s home and began ringing the doorbell and pounding on the door. Ms. Wigg called her parents. Her mother, Adele Brown, told her to hang up and call 911.

But as Ms. Brown and her husband, who lived about a half-mile away, were heading over, Mr. Wigg smashed through the door and into the house. The Browns arrived to find a neighbor bent over their daughter’s bleeding form, screaming, “Debbie, don’t leave me!”

“When we got to her, those beautiful blue eyes were already set,” Ms. Brown said.

Ms. Wigg died of a single shot to the head.

After shooting his wife, Mr. Wigg drove to the Browns’, apparently to kill them as well. He killed himself in their front yard.

When I write about guns, I often hear from gun owners who insist they need weapons to protect their families. That's a laudable impulse. Yet it's very often true that when it comes time for the weapon to be used, it is turned against that family.

Not Important

Infrastructure report card: D+. But at least it evaluates only unimportant stuff, like the quality of our roads, dams, sewers, gas lines, drinking water and other trivialities. We certainly shouldn't invest in fixing it, as this would only create a lot of jobs and ensure we don't have structural problems in the future (remember, infrastructure spending is supply-side spending!). Also, interest rates are at the lowest they'll be for at least a  generation, making the borrowing to pay for infrastructure as cheap as it will ever be for years to come. But the Social Security trust fund dries up in 30 years! What about that?!!!

Hard To Comprehend

Two things:

1) How very, very different the lives of the powerful are from normal people. Nixon is largely causally responsible for thousands upon thousands of deaths, including U.S. soldiers. He did it largely for personal gains. No one will care about this as much as they care about Watergate.

He was not held accountable at the time because of possible disruptions of other powerful peoples' (Johnson and Humphrey) plans. Utterly astounding (not in a good way).

2) What must a person, powerful or otherwise, be like to put personal gain ahead of the lives and well-being of so many people? Really - I honestly can't conceive of it.

Note: Very similar though not identical comments apply to LBJ in starting the war.

All This Wasteful Government Spending

Why should our taxpayer money go into research and design. What, an engine that might be 3.5 times as efficient as typical combustible engines? Call me when something useful comes along.

Short Attention Spans

When the working paper from Alsenia and Ardagna came out saying cutting government spending would help economic growth, a couple of my conservative friends sent it to me, one with the glib comment that as a liberal, I'd "find a way to ignore it." I wonder who is ignoring it now that has been exposed as a terrible basis for understanding the problems we have been facing for the last five years.

The Pope Is Gay?

Maybe he is or maybe he isn't. Only he knows for sure. But it looks like some high-ranking members of the Catholic Church are gay, the Pope found out about it and the numerous cover-ups and general machinations, and is now stepping down. Two main things: 1) Secret societies are probably always going to end up terrible in some way, because people who love both secrecy and power are probably going to do some bad stuff. 2) Being gay and having gay sex does not belong to the category of bad stuff, so the Church should take a minute to think about the damage they do by making people feel guilty just for being human beings. The Pope is a human being and might be gay. That can happen, and odds are pretty good it has happened at some point in the Church's history. Because people are people and that's it.

Pretty Convincing

Former George W. Bush speech-writer Frum on guns.

Gun makers often design their weapons in ways that present no benefit for lawful users but that greatly assist criminals. They don't coordinate the issuance of serial numbers so that each gun can be identified with certainty. They stamp serial numbers in places where they can be effaced.

They reject police requests to groove barrels to uniquely mark each bullet fired by a particular gun.

They sell bullets that can pierce police armor.

They will not include trigger locks and other child-proofing devices as standard equipment.

They ignore new technology that would render guns inoperable by anyone except their approved purchaser.

Why? Why? And why?

Thinking About Scrapping The Blog

In the meantime, this.

Something For Everybody

Be positive in the new year.

It's Just Made Up

One of the hardest things for many people to grasp about money and governments (and the relations between them) is that it really just is all made up: it's people keeping track of who owes what to whom. Nothing has intrinsic monetary value. It makes for a lot of mistakes in economic planning and fiscal policy. If the government is in debt, it just needs to be credible in saying that someday it will pay itself back and there will be no problems. That's really it.

In the news release announcing his bill to derail the platinum coin effort, Republican Representative Greg Walden says something really stupid: “My wife and I have owned and operated a small business since 1986. When it came time to pay the bills, we couldn’t just mint a coin to create more money out of thin air.

American Socialism

Thoroughly American, but not so socialist.

93.5% Of Human Brains Are Abnormal

You do the math.

Voxel Based Morphometry (VBM) is a way of analyzing brain scans to detect structural differences. It's most commonly used to compare groups of brains to find average differences, but some neuroscientists have started using VBM to check for abnormalities in a single brain. Scarpazza et al list 34 pieces of research about that, including 13 since 2010.

So it would suck if there were a problem with individual VBM... but there is...

The authors took 200 normal brains and compared each one of them in turn to a control group of 16 normal brains. Because all of them were healthy, the comparisons ought to show no significant differences.

The technique was set up so that, in theory, only 5% of the brains should have been wrongly labelled as containing an abnormality. But in fact, a full 93.5% of the normal brains gave at least one false positive.

So 5% is more like the rate of not being wrong. Oops.