DeTritUs

Bob Casey represents more than both of them put together.

As we lurch towards another farm bill, this is worth considering. We often talk about the outsized power the South has in Congress, but on agriculture I think the real over-representation is for the Plains. Big sky country has 10 of the 21 seats on the Senate ag committee. The ag-heavy South only has 2 (both Republicans, though I will grudgingly admit I like Thad Cochrane). New England only has 1. Texas and California, the biggest ag states in the country, are not represented at all.

This is important because the Plains states have a model of agriculture that is increasingly not what the nation needs or can sustain: large industrial monoculture farms with a heavy petro footprint in fertilizer and an even heavier petro footprint in transporting their food to urban centers. On the coasts, we’re seeing an explosion of the direct-to-consumer farm model, but these farms are completely not represented.

Now, I do see the issue: Schumer represents more farmers than Baucus, but the vast majority of Baucus’s constituents are farmers and the vast majority of Schumer’s aren’t. (Blame Madison.) So obviously ag is going to be important to Baucus. But on our side, we need more people from the coasts and New England weighing in on this. And on the Republican side they probably should have a voice from Texas (which is a model closer to California’s — labor-intensive but not transportation-intensive).

I really fear the upcoming farm bill is going to be a monstrosity that would make Jamie Whitten blush. And I think a large part of that is because the people who will be writing it represent a shrinking fraction of the actual farms in the country, using a business model that is growing in its irrelevance and completely unsustainable.

Or, how you’ll pretend you already knew anything to avoid appearing behind the curve

10 years ago, Dean Kamen introduced the Segway Human Transporter. It was a general-use version of a walking aid he had developed for Johnson & Johnson. He also had an odd idea for marketing it: he wanted to make you think you had been eagerly awaiting his revealing it for years. It was a great marketing plan. People like Steve Jobs visited him (he paid them to, incidentally) and said things like “I can’t disclose what Ginger is going to be” – Ginger was its development code name, and you pretended you already knew that – “but it’s going to revolutionize how we build cities.” Journalists, even more than real people, absolutely hate to look like they’re behind the curve, so when Jobs starts intimating that he’s been watching this guy Kamen for years and looking forward to the release of Ginger, writers had to dutifully pretend they had been, too. And the sort of reader who would be in the vanishingly small personal Segway market (it was meant for what it’s primarily used for: tour guides and crowd-control police officers) also pretended they had been eagerly awaiting Ginger for a long time (these, remember, are the same people who keep buying first generation Apple products despite knowing that a better, cheaper generation will be introduced within 18 months of the first one).

I bring this up as an analogy for the current “need” for “entitlement” “reform” (nothing drips sarcasm quite like a set of quotation marks). I think I need not even provide a list of links of examples of people claiming the deficit and/or debt (the terms are too readily used interchangeably) are a looming crisis that threaten the US like nothing else. A few “serious” people are sent out to say this on the news, and journalists and real people, not wanting to feel behind the curve like they did with that whole housing thing, take up the call. Despite being silent during unprecedentedly large tax cuts, the launching of two wars, the extension of Medicare to cover prescription drugs without being able to negotiate low prices, and the nationalization of a few Wall Street firms (though in fairness, the grumbling began then), a whole bunch of people suddenly realized the only “serious” position is that entitlement spending (rather than any of the above) is the driver of deficit and/or debt, and by all means we shouldn’t question whether having lower tax rates than at any point in Reagan’s two terms is a good idea. And you pretended you’ve been worried about it all along.

The problem is, the calls for entitlement reform make even less sense than a several-thousand-dollar two-wheel self-balancing stroller that is too big to fit on most elevators being sold to a country with an obesity epidemic. The three big entitlements are Social Security, Medicare, and VA benefits. The first is irrelevant, the second is being addressed already, and the third isn’t usually included in the “entitlement” rubric because we’ve somehow transformed “entitlement” into a dirty word so nobody wants to tell me that the VA benefits I’ve earned are an “entitlement” (despite the fact that they are) and they are folded in to defense spending numbers.

For the first: Social Security. If anyone ever brings up Social Security in the context of debt, it is a huge red flag that they are being very dishonest. Social Security does not contribute to debt. In case you missed that: Social Security does not contribute to debt. By law it cannot. If you are a regular W2 employee, every paycheck you and your employer pay money to the Social Security Trust Fund (it’s called FICA or something like it on your pay stub; you don’t get to see how much your employer pays). This is sent to the Trustees, a board of technocrats who invest it in Treasury bonds. Now, here is where the dishonesty creeps in: Treasury bonds are how the US borrows money. So Social Security holds debt, yes. But it doesn’t create it, and its willingness (legal obligation, even) to buy it makes it cheaper for the US to borrow money (perversely, some conservatives actually consider this a bad thing).

Currently the Trust Fund holds something like $2.5 trillion in Treasury Bonds. Those are bonds that would have otherwise had to have been sold to us, or Chinese investors, or whatever. But they are bought at market price (and slightly favorable interest rates from the Treasury’s standpoint) like clockwork by the Trust Fund, using our payroll levy money. This is a Good Thing. The “problem”, to the extent that one exists, is that a whole lot of people are about to retire, and those of us who will still be working are making less in wages (but much, much more in unearned income) than we were expected to 30 years ago. So at some point in the next decade or a little later, the Trust Fund will have to start redeeming bonds to pay out Social Security benefits.

“But wait!” I hear from the wings. “I thought the Trust Fund went into the red last year!” No! This is another case of the egregious dishonesty that sours this debate. The Trust Fund’s outlays exceeded payroll levy revenue last year, yes. But not payroll levy revenue plus bond interest payments. Until 2010, the Trust Fund could pay all of its outlays with part of the levies, and plow the rest of the levies along with interest payments into new bonds. In 2010, they had to take some of the interest money and all of the levy money to pay Social Security benefits. So we’re accumulating bonds at a somewhat slower rate than we have been. We aren’t selling them yet, and we won’t have to for at least another decade (possibly never, if we can ever get wages up again).

Now, let’s say over the next several decades we have to redeem the entire trust fund to make Social Security benefit payments. In the very worst case scenario from a debt perspective, we’ll have to borrow to redeem every bond. And that would leave us… precisely where we are now. Debt would be unchanged. The absolute worst possible outcome with Social Security is that debt will remain constant rather than going down. And even that could be avoided by raising or removing entirely the FICA levy cap (it currently only taxes the first hundred thousand dollars or so of your income).

And the worst thing is, none of this is a surprise (unlike the surprising “debt crisis” that all “serious” people pretend they had worried about all along, despite doing nothing about it from 2001-2008). The actuarial issues facing Social Security were well known in 1983 when Alan Greenspan pushed a Social Security reform through Congress. It was actually a decent idea for the most part, and it’s why Social Security is in such a strong financial position. Payroll levies would go up (somehow Reagan could get away with pretending that’s not a “tax increase”, since people who work actual jobs pay it) which would make borrowing cheaper, and would allow income taxes (primarily paid by people who don’t work actual jobs) and unearned income taxes (essentially entirely paid by people who don’t work actual jobs) to go down. That way, we’d end up now where we are now: with a flush Social Security trust fund that has the resources to pay for the retirement of the baby boom (also, don’t listen to any nonsense about life expectancy: a retiree today is expected to live as long as a retiree 50 years ago; increased life expectancy comes pretty much entirely from decreased infant mortality, which means more workers paying into the system: it helps rather than hurts Social Security).

So: Social Security? Solved. Or, not even “solved” since there’s not really a problem to begin with.

On to the second: Medicare. This is a problem, actually. Before Health Care Reform, its trust fund was set to go broke (actually broke, not just the “gaining money more slowly” version of broke that has struck Social Security) in 2017. HCR extended that to 2029. That’s good in that it gives us some breathing space, but not good enough to call it fixed. My question for the “deficit hawks”, though, is why they worked so hard to weaken health care reform, the one law that has actually done something about Medicare’s deficit problem? If they hadn’t lied so loudly and continuously, a much more workable bill could have passed that would have extended the lifespan of Medicare even more.

There are several other options possible. Annie Lowrey suggested Congress do nothing, which would in fact eliminate the deficit problem: Bush’s tax cuts would go away, Medicare doctors would get paid less (this is a de facto sort of rationing), and our long term debt will stabilize. I’m not so much “for” this as I think it’s the only workable idea that might happen. In the real world where we can’t simply have a sane health care system like every other industrialized country, one of two things will have to happen: Democrats will have to raise taxes, or Republicans will have to keep old people from getting medical care (or both).

On taxes: cry me a river. I don’t really care what your tax rate is. You’ll shut up and like it, because in no conceivable political universe will the tax rates go back up to what they were in the 80s, let alone in the 50s.

On health care spending: well, if we insist on having the profit motive be part of medicine, we’re saying old people can’t get as much health care as they want. Sorry; I’m not the one who said we should have for-profit insurers and providers. Since we do, we’re going to have to spend less on end-of-life care, which is where a disturbing amount of this money is going. We’re also going to need fewer tests being done (and these are still done in states with tort reform, so don’t even start on that crap). Again, don’t blame me; I’m not the one who said we should have for-profit hospitals and practices. And insurers (which, again, I didn’t say should be for-profit, but mostly are) will have to deny more and more of those claims. Good luck with that.

So, “serious” people concerned about debt: Social Security is not a problem, and you’re the ones who made Medicare a problem, which will have to be solved either by bringing the remaining 40% of health care spending out of the private sector, or denying care, and we’ll make that choice when we come to it. There is no debt crisis, and we can go back to worrying about getting people jobs that pay well.

The judgment that is (hopefully) called for is: is the US presence in Afghanistan doing good that outweighs its harm? That is a difficult question to answer even about a component of an industrial process in a factory, let alone about an occupation.

This is why civilian control of the military is a Good Thing: war takes on a logic and momentum of its own and is generally a lot easier to start than to stop (this, incidentally, was the theme of my senior essay on Clausewitz and T. E. Lawrence). Particularly pernicious is the possibility of military personnel missing not the fact that they are failing at their objective, but that they no longer have a concrete and identifiable objective — it’s hard not to ask that question about Afghanistan at this point.

One argument I hear is the “sunk costs” argument: we have to stay in so that those who already died won’t have died in vain, which seems to rely on the idea that the way to honor one unnecessary death is to have a lot more of them, and that the way out of a hole is to keep digging. I don’t think this argument requires any further dismissal. A troubling bit of dark irony is the domino theory argument: what started out as a war to keep Afghanistan from bringing down Pakistan is now a war to keep Pakistan from bringing down Afghanistan. To the extent I see an argument for continued occupation, this is it.

Sheri Berman had an article in Foreign Affairs last year comparing Karzai to Louis XIV (or at least comparing his position to Louis’ early in his reign). “Duke” sounds more romantic than “warlord” but the parallels are striking. Mais Hamid n’est pas Louis, so the (troubling) idea is that we are functioning as his army: Louis himself was no campaigner either, but he also didn’t repeatedly ask his army to go away, as Karzai has of us.

My hope is that the death of Bin Ladin gives Obama the political breathing room to put before the American people the only question that should matter: is our national security aided or harmed by our continuing to occupy Afghanistan? I find it appalling that this question has not been given any serious public debate in the past decade.

On another note, getting Petraeus out of theater and into Langley is a big part of this — not because of any of his failings but rather because of his success in the past and the expectations it has caused stateside. Afghanistan is not Iraq (though in fairness, 6 years ago I thought Iraq was not Iraq, or possibly I thought the de facto partitioning of the country would not “work” as “well” as it seems to have).