One of the policy mistakes we make a lot is to judge ideas in isolation when they need to be looked at comparatively. "Is this health-care bill perfect" is not as good a question as "is this health-care bill better than the current system and its plausible competitors?" Similarly, "does this system for evaluating teacher quality have problems" is a worse question than "does this system for evaluating teacher quality do a better or worse job than the status quo and its plausible competitors?" David Leonhardt got at this nicely in his column this week:
Value-added data is not gospel. Among the limitations, scores can bounce around from year to year for any one teacher, notes Ross Wiener of the Aspen Institute, who is generally a fan of the value-added approach. So a single year of scores — which some states may use for evaluation — can be misleading. In addition, students are not randomly assigned to teachers; indeed, principals may deliberately assign slow learners to certain teachers, unfairly lowering their scores. As for the tests themselves, most do not even try to measure the social skills that are crucial to early learning. The value-added data probably can identify the best and worst teachers, researchers say, but it may not be very reliable at distinguishing among teachers in the middle of the pack. [...]
[But] we will have to acknowledge that no system is perfect. If principals and teachers are allowed to grade themselves, as they long have been, our schools are guaranteed to betray many students. If schools instead try to measure the work of teachers, some will inevitably be misjudged. “On whose behalf do you want to make the mistake — the kids or the teachers?” asks Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust. “We’ve always erred on behalf of the adults before.”
You may want to keep that in mind if you ever get a chance to look at a list of teachers and their value-added scores. Some teachers, no doubt, are being done a disservice. Then again, so were a whole lot of students.
Policy questions are like going to the ophthalmologist: Better one or better two?
I'd also echo another point Leonhardt makes: I'm sympathetic to the idea that the L.A. Times's decision to partner with an education economist, do a quick-and-dirty analysis of test scores, and then release the data next to the teacher's names is a bit of a radical step. Parents are going to see that data, and it really is likely that they're going to get the wrong impressions about a lot of the teachers (though they'll also get the right impressions about many teachers). But as Leonhardt says, "one way to think about the Los Angeles case is as an understandable overreaction to an unacceptable status quo."
The teacher's unions really do need to figure out a way of assessing teacher performance that's acceptable to them, because in its absence, they're going to get steamrolled by solutions that aren't acceptable to them.
Photo credit: Ricky Carioti/the Washington Post Photo.
For the past few months, the GOP has been arguing that the jobs numbers are grim because of the policy uncertainty caused by Barack Obama's radical legislative agenda. So, do today's numbers provide support for that?
Well, no. The private sector added almost 70,000 jobs. Now, it's possible that they would have added more new jobs in the absence of the Obama agenda. But then you look at where the jobs came from: The largest gains were in the health-care sector, where 28,000 jobs came online. Health-care reform doesn't appear to be scaring that industry out of hiring, which is as you'd expect, as the bill makes demand for the services more, rather than less, likely.
This doesn't decisively prove that policy uncertainty isn't a problem -- you can't prove a negative -- but it's more evidence that it's hard to find evidence for the argument. Meanwhile, the economy as a whole actually lost jobs, as 114,000 Census positions expired and 6,000 other government workers were let go atop that. There's no uncertainty about what's happening there -- strapped state governments are cutting back -- and there doesn't appear to be much interest in addressing the problem.
So on the one hand, we're having a debate about what to do about private-sector jobs that's totally disconnected from the evidence. On the other hand, we're largely ignoring public-sector job losses, perhaps because it's obvious what we should do about that but Congress doesn't have the votes or the energy to do it.
During our discussion of the filibuster today -- which you can stream over at C-SPAN's Web site -- Heritage's Brian Darling talked a bit about the Senate's important role as a voice for the states. Responding to a questioner, he went so far as to say he'd consider repeal of the 17th amendment, which would mean that senators would again be elected by state legislatures rather than voters.
I've never understood this sort of thing, and said so in the panel. The Founders didn't wisely orient the Senate around states. They pragmatically oriented the Senate around states. But now that we've been the United States of America for a while and none of the states seem likely to secede, the fact that California has 69 times more people than Wyoming but the same representation in the Senate is an offensive anachronism, at least to Californians.
I went on to say that at this point in history, if we wanted the upper body to be based around quotas, then income, age bracket and education made more sense than states. Then I came home and read Kevin Drum's post echoing Larry Bartels's research (pdf) showing "that the responsiveness of senators to the views of the poor and working class is....zero. Or maybe even negative. And that's true for both parties. The middle class does better — again, with both parties — and high earners do better still." Conversely, the body's responsiveness to the views of North Dakota's farmers is really incredible.
Back in February, Annie Lowrey* wrote a piece estimating the Senate's composition if it was organized around income, gender and race, and age. For our purposes, imagine the income-based Senate:
Based on Census Bureau data, five senators would represent Americans earning between $100,000 and $1 million individually per year, with a single senator working on behalf of the millionaires (technically, it would be two-tenths of a senator). Eight senators would represent Americans with no income. Sixteen would represent Americans who make less than $10,000 a year, an amount well below the federal poverty line for families. The bulk of the senators would work on behalf of the middle class, with 34 representing Americans making $30,000 to $80,000 per year.
Imagine trying to convince someone -- Michael Bloomberg, perhaps? -- to be the lonely senator representing the richest percentile. And what if the senators were apportioned according to jobs figures? This year, the unemployed would have gained two seats.
And by now, I bet they'd have gained even more seats than that. My hunch is that this Senate wouldn't have had any trouble at all passing extensions of unemployment insurance. Which isn't to say we should blow up the Senate and refashion it based on people's W-2 forms. But it is worth thinking about what the body's imbalances mean in practice. The fact that states have relatively weak needs has, I think, contributed to a situation in which party affiliation -- and not state conditions -- are far and away the most powerful determinants of voting.
Some Democratic-leaning groups are e-mailing around this clip of Erin Burnett and Andrew Ross Sorkin hailing August's jobs report as good news indeed.
I'd say this is the soft bigotry of low economic expectations, which isn't the same as saying it's wrong. As Sorkin says, if your measure was "is American entering a double-dip," today's jobs report is pretty good! We're not entering a double dip! At least, we weren't in August. But from the perspective of recovery, we need to be creating 200,000 jobs a month if we're going to get unemployment back to a normal level in the next five years. Even if you ignore the Census jobs -- and I don't think you should, as those are real people out of work -- gaining 60,000 or so jobs isn't going to cut it.
David Brooks has a column today offering a counterfactual scenario in which Obama entered office, passed a massive payroll tax cut instead of the stimulus bill, focused his rhetoric on long-term growth rather than short-term recovery, cut spending, and did a super-popular energy bill rather than the mildly unpopular health-care bill. The idea, of course, is that he and the Democrats would be in better political shape than they currently are.
Like any counterfactual, you could poke holes in this. But instead, let's grant it. Obama entered office in January of 2009, had a long conversation with Future Brooks, and adopted this plan. As Brooks doesn't mention cap-and-trade or a price on carbon, I'll assume this is an energy investment bill rather than a carbon-pricing bill. As Brooks doesn't argue that his plan would've reduced the unemployment rate relative to its current level (and as that would be a very difficult case to make), I'll assume the economy looks pretty much as it looks now.
Maybe, in that world, Brooks is right. Maybe Democrats would be facing a loss of 25 or 30 seats rather than 45 or 50. I could think of reasons that that's not true, but let's say, for the moment, that it is.
What Brooks seems to be offering is a trade: Do less stuff, hold more seats. Now, Brooks doesn't think the health-care bill was a good bill, but Obama does, and most Democrats do. I'm not really sure what Brooks thinks of the stimulus plan's long-term infrastructure investments, but Obama and his team thought they were extremely important to the economy's long-term growth prospects. A universal health-care bill and hundreds of billions in much-needed, long-term investments in exchange for 15 or 20 House seats? Well, what are supermajorities for, if not making that precise trade?
You could say, I guess, that Obama and his team could've gotten more done by doing less in years one and two and then holding Democratic seats so they could continue passing legislation in years three and four. But I'd look at that a bit differently: They spent years one and two working on the issue areas of interest to massive Democratic majorities, like health-care reform and infrastructure investment, and they'll spend years three and four working on things that are of more interest to divided government, like deficit reduction. That is to say, they got everything they could out of the Democratic supermajority, and now they'll actually be able to pivot to the center more easily, as Democrats won't be yelling at Obama to fulfill his campaign promises and do health-care reform.
The odd man out in all this is energy reform, but I'm of the perhaps-pessimistic opinion that a serious cap-and-trade bill never really had a chance. Either way, I'm much more inclined toward critiques of Obama that focus on what more he could have done over the past two years. Saying he could have done less and then he would've been criticized less may or may not be true, but I'm much more worried about failing the uninsured and failing the climate than about failing Democratic candidates running in the 2010 midterms.
So Peter Orszag will begin contributing occasional columns and blog posts to the New York Times. That seems like a good hire. For a long time, the administration staffers who got boosted to op-ed pages came from the speechwriting team: Think William Safire or Michael Gerson or Mark Thiessen. You could also add James Fallows and Rick Hertzberg and Chris Matthews to that list, though none of them are specifically newspaper columnists.
To some degree, this made sense: Experience writing speeches seems more applicable to writing columns than most other skills on offer in your average White House. For one thing, it involves writing words other people might want to read. Directing the Office of Management and Budget usually doesn't.
But the fact that speechwriters made the most natural columnists doesn't mean they're the ones with the most interesting insights: The policy people, the people building the bills and running the negotiations and navigating the legislature -- that's more interesting stuff, actually. But how did you know if they could write? Well, with Orszag, it was his blogging. Same goes for Keith Hennessey, who ran George W. Bush's National Economics Council and now writes a very good blog. Academics like Tyler Cowen and Brad DeLong also belong on this list. Paul Krugman, as it happens, got his big break at Slate, which isn't that far off. Now that there are forums for people who aren't professional writers to do public writing, we're finding that some of those people are perfectly good writers, and then we get the benefits of their writing and their life spent doing something other than writing. It's an encouraging trend.
My recent writings against the expansion of intellectual protection laws to new domains have led to a few e-mails like this one: "I recently read your article on fashion copyright and have to totally agree, i also think it should apply to every aspect of life.
So in [the] future I will copy every word you ever write and reprint it in another publication or format without giving you any credit or paying for your creativity in anyway."
Touche! Sadly, copying blogs posts without credit or compensation is a crowded market. Take Bullfax.com, whatever it is. They do just copy my posts. They don't link them back to me, or attach my name to them. But what do I care? I find it hard to believe that there's anyone who has chosen to read my blog on Bullfax.com rather than at The Washington Post. And if Bullfax.com ever did become a serious site, the fact that all its content was stolen would quickly emerge -- destroying its credibility and probably giving me some publicity in the process.
Of course, straight duplication is, in blogging and most other endeavors, rarer than conceptual mimicry. Most bloggers -- and for that matter, most writers and reporters -- have seen stories they've broken or ideas they've developed or research they've unearthed appear under other bylines. You can't always prove that it was your efforts that got ripped off, but fairly often, you know. This is more akin to the issues in the fashion world, where things that look suspiciously like runway designs show up in Forever 21 a few days after they're first photographed in Milan.
But, again, so what? If my ideas become popular, that gives me a market advantage, as I know them best. And because I care about my ideas and think they're correct and think it would be good if they got more exposure, I'm hard-pressed to complain when they begin to spread. If the situation were such that this sort of thing was putting writers in the poorhouse or people were no longer generating new ideas because it stopped seeming worthwhile to do so, that might argue for some change in policy. But that's not happening at all. Quite the opposite, in fact: There's probably more innovation because people are building off each other's work freely.
If you happen to be near C-SPAN 2 at 10 a.m. Eastern today, you can catch me and a couple of other folks talking about the filibuster at the American Political Science Association. The moderator, Gregory Koger, is author of the book "Filibustering," which presents a bit of a problem for his panelists: We're actually going to have to know what we're talking about. Luckily, he's sent out his questions beforehand. Here's what I'm planning to say:
1) The 111th Congress has passed several landmark bills, including the stimulus act, health-care reform and financial regulation reform. Has Senate obstruction really had much influence on the legislative process?
You can answer this a few different ways, though all of them begin with the word "yes."
First, take the marquee pieces of legislation: Health-care reform, the stimulus and financial regulation. In a world without a filibuster, instead of signing every single Democrat to those initiatives, which means every single Democrat had veto power over anything they didn't like in those initiatives, you would have needed 51 of the 59 or 60 Democrats serving in the Senate. So rather than placating Max Baucus, Mark Pryor, Mary Landrieu, Jim Webb, Bill Nelson, Evan Bayh, Claire McCaskill, Blanche Lincoln, Tom Carper, and Ben Nelson, you would've only have needed to placate one of them, and then you could've negotiated with the others from a position of strength in which passage was assured and their vote would've simply been preferable.
Legislation constructed in that world simply looks different. Some might say it's worse, more extreme. I'd say there's less legislating to the lowest common denominator, and you can make harder choices. Either way, the stimulus is larger, maybe by a couple hundred billion dollars. Health care has a public option or a Medicare buy-in. That's the stuff people usually think of when they talk about the filibuster.
But as Greg writes in his book, breaking filibusters isn't impossible: It just takes time, procedural commitment and, though he doesn't say this, a sufficiently large majority. Sufficiently large majorities, however, are willing to expend time and play procedural hardball on their top issues. In those cases, the filibuster modifies the legislation -- maybe it makes it worse and maybe it makes it better, but it doesn't kill it off entirely. It's smaller bills with less commitment where filibusters and holds simply keep anything from happening at all: everything from nominations to regulatory changes to the everyday upkeep of the government.
And then there's the universe of legislation that never really gets attempted because the filibuster slows things down such that there's no time and little appetite for new fights. Nominations and funding bills simply have to get done, and so they usually do. But plenty of other efforts that should be considered never are, as there's just no space for them on the calendar.
Finally, I think the 111th Congress is a misleading Congress to look at. We've seen a once-in-a-generation alignment of forces: A 60-vote majority for the first time since the 1970s, a new and (initially) popular president, a massive financial crisis. Imagine this same environment and this same sort of procedural team play with 53 Democrats. That's a world in which our big problems simply do not get addressed -- and it's much closer to the world that we normally live in. I'd also say that on all three major issues -- financial reform, the stimulus, and health-care reform -- we ended up doing a lot less than was needed, and punting some of the hardest questions out to the future. So here's the report on our Congress: Even when given a generational opportunity to make progress on our problems, they can't make as much progress as we really need made. Eventually, that dynamic is going to catch up with us.
2) Name up to three reforms that you think the Senate should adopt, no matter which party is in the majority in the 112th Congress?
First, let's do the common-sense reform: I'd like to see the time-costs associated with obstruction reduced. If the filibuster was more like a 60-vote requirement and less something that minorities could use to slowdown the Senate by forcing everyone to spends weeks on an unemployment extension that passes 97-0, I think that'd be a good idea.
As a broader point, we need to think hard about the procedural arms race that the United States Senate has turned into. The filibuster has become a de facto 60-vote requirement, which wasn't the intention, and reconciliation is increasingly used for all manner of bills, including the Bush tax cuts and the health-care reform law, which also wasn't the procedure's original intention. Both situations lead to worse and more awkward legislation. We're also seeing the majority offload issues it wants to address but can't do over minority obstruction onto the executive branch, or the Federal Reserve. Think of the EPA handling carbon emissions, or the Fed dealing doing quantitative easing because only 59 Democrats are willing to vote for further fiscal policy. This devolution of power from Congress to actors who are less accountable but more able to act is something we need to consider very carefully. The outcome of obstruction isn't always gridlock -- sometimes it's simply a different form of action, and not always a form we should prefer.
3) How would we know if the Senate is broken? At what point would you say that the Senate needs to change?" (In other words, what are the proper metrics for evaluating the functioning of the Senate?)
I don't know that there is on objective metric for this. A libertarian might be ecstatic to see the Senate collapse into gridlock and acrimony. A deficit hawk might not. But either way, "broken" isn't a necessary measure here. We don't need to be so binary. "Better" and "worse" are more useful concepts. If the Senate isn't working well, and we could make it work better, the fact that it's not necessarily totally broken isn't a good reason to delay reforms.
And to the point of whether the Senate is working well, I'll leave folks with two of the underlying political dynamics that seem to be driving the place. We have rules, as everyone agrees, set up to encourage bipartisan cooperation. But the system gives the minority party both the incentive to see the majority fail, as that's how they win the next election, and the power to make them fail. So we have rules for a bipartisan world -- but we live in a partisan world. As Ron Brownstein likes to say, we've got parliamentary politics clashing with supermajoritarian rules. I'm not sure that really works.
Second, I think there's a real and growing question of political accountability. Political scientists like yourselves say that people vote on conditions, not politics. A recent Pew poll found that only 26 percent of Americans knew that you needed 60 votes to break a filibuster. Another 25 percent though you only needed 51. So in a world where people don't pay much attention to Congress and don't understand it very well and mainly vote based on a rough approximation of how well policies seem to be working in their own lives, how're they supposed to judge the majority's program when the majority isn't able to implement it? What're the chances that people are judging the majority based on outcomes driven by the minority? I'd say pretty high, and that's something that should worry us.
Finally, a lot of the defenses of the filibuster seem to be, well, idealistic. They talk about the preservation of debate, though anyone who's ever watched the Senate make its way through these bills knows that we're not seeing a high-minded effort at persuasion take place on the floor. They talk about the protection of minority involvement, and the incentives for bipartisanship. The problem, they say, isn't the system, but that it's being abused.
But if the system leads inexorably to abuse, then it's not a good system. I might prefer a world where the filibuster protects debate and ensures bipartisan outcomes, but I don't think we should pretend that's the world we have. The choice is between electorally driven gridlock and something else. I'd like something else.
Another month, another grim jobs report. We lot 54,000 jobs in August. Most of those -- in fact, 114,000 of them -- were expiring census jobs. The private sector added jobs slowly but steadily, posting 67,000 in gains. This report doesn't really tell a story of recovery nor of recession. It's just stagnation: We're not falling back into the hole, but nor are we getting out of it. No wonder the White House is looking for further stimulus measures.
Update: The August jobs report, not the July jobs report. Sorry folks. The numbers in the post are right, though.
Jon Cohn asked some lefty economists to imagine a world in which we'd passed a $1.5 trillion stimulus. What, he wondered, would be different? How much better off would the economy really be?
It's a good question, and I think one of the political problems right now is that the Obama administration didn't get the counterfactual into the conversation early enough: They decided to call $800 billion pretty much what they wanted rather than a downpayment on what they needed.
So it's left to the blogs. Cohn gets two economists on the record. Dean Baker, president of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says that a rough calculation would just multiply the impact of the actual stimulus by two: "The Congressional Budge Office estimates that the stimulus added 1.7-4.5 percent to GDP and that it lowered the unemployment rate by 0.7-1.8 percentage points. If it were twice as large, assume GDP growth in the 3.4-9.0 percent range and the drop in unemployment in the range of 1.4 -3.6 pp. In other words, the unemployment rate today would be between 7.7 percent and 8.8 percent." He also thinks there's some chance it would have "kicked off self-sustaining growth with a bigger round of investment coming on board and maybe even some real wage growth."
Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, agrees that more stimulus would've meant more jobs. Maybe as many as 5 million of them. But he also sounds a cautious note we were hearing back in 2009, too: "Though the economy needed that size stimulus, I’m not sure there were good vehicles for executing such a stimulus," he says. "I’m not sure I would have wanted to double the tax cuts, and it wasn’t possible to double much of the investments and get them underway in this time period. We could have given states more relief. And, we could have extended the time period of much of the stimulus elements--unemployment insurance, investments, state relief, etc.--so we wouldn’t need to renew than now."
I'd make one further point: You could certainly imagine a stimulus package that was more politically effective than the one we passed -- even if it was less economically effective. A payroll tax holiday and a doubling of Social Security checks might've done less to help the economy and make needed investments, but it would've been more visible to most of the country, and it would've created a larger political constituency in favor of the program.
As it is, you can make a good case that the stimulus will change America in important and beneficial ways, but it's equally clear that lots of people won't notice those changes happening, or know who to attribute them to once they're done. How many folks are seriously going to walk into a doctor's office in 2011, see a new computerized records system, and think to attribute it to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009?
The White House is considering a push for hundreds of billions of dollars in new stimulative spending, focusing on business tax cuts including a temporary cut in payroll taxes. In part, this is good policy. In part, it's necessary policy. Anne Kornblut and Lori Montgomery quote an unnamed Democratic strategist complaining that the White House has let the issues get away from them in advance of November's election. "'We did the mosque, Katrina, Iraq, and now Middle East peace?' said a Democratic strategist who works closely with multiple candidates and spoke on the condition of anonymity. 'And in between you redo the Oval Office? It has become a joke.'"
Also keep an eye on the increasing mobilization around Social Security. Whatever else the fiscal commission does, it seems likely to come out with some package of reforms for the stories social insurance program. But Republicans aren't very interested in raising payroll taxes, and House liberals have now announced their unified opposition to anything that includes benefit cuts. Oh, and when you read today's jobs report -- and the expectations are that it'll be grim -- keep in mind that a quarter of the currently employed were unemployed at some point in the recession, and many of them report that they're overqualified and underpaid by their new jobs.
It's Friday, finally Friday. Welcome to Wonkbook.
Top Stories
The Obama administration may introduce a sweeping package of business tax cuts in coming weeks, report Anne Kornblut and Lori Montgomery: "Among the options under consideration are a temporary payroll tax holiday and a permanent extension of the now-expired research and development tax credit, which rewards companies that conduct research into new technologies within the United States...Policy staffers are debating a range of options. For example, a payroll tax holiday - a top priority of many business groups - could be applied only to new hires or extend to current employees. It could be limited to small businesses or extended to larger firms."
FLASHBACK: McConnell advocated a payroll tax cut holiday back in 2009:http://bit.ly/d8bk9T
Paul Krugman makes the case that stimulus advocates have been vindicated: http://nyti.ms/cBdDMN
The 60+ members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus will oppose any fiscal commission report suggesting cuts to Social Security, reports Brian Beutler: "The CPC has, of course, tried to throw its weight around in the past with little success. Dozens of House Democrats once pledged to vote against a health care bill that didn't include a public option, then lost the tug of war and voted yes. But the Social Security fight is different. The underlying legislation won't embody a goal -- like universal health care -- that progressives had pursued for generations. There's much more reason to take this pledge at face value. The question is whether they can round up enough votes to block a bill if it has broad support among Republicans and conservative Democrats."
The FCC's proposal on net neutrality has been delayed until after the midterms:http://bit.ly/a1Jjt3
A quarter of currently employed people were unemployed at some point during the recession, reports Michael Fletcher: "Re-employed workers were more likely than others to see themselves as overqualified for their jobs, and six in 10 said they either changed careers or seriously considered doing so while they were out of work. Pew's survey of re-employed workers was taken as the nation endures the longest bout of long-term unemployment since World War II. Almost 45 percent of the nation's 14.6 million jobless Americans have been unemployed for at least six months."
Still to come: How immigrants could solve all our problems; Ben Bernanke defends his handling of the financial crisis; a new government agency is searching for a miracle fuel to replace gasoline; employers are shifting health costs to workers due to the economic downturn; Rand says small business workers will benefit from the health-care reform bill; and a profile of Mr. Rogers.
Economy/FinReg
Ben Bernanke admitted to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that regulatory failure enabled the collapse, reports Ariana Eunjung Cha: "Bernanke said the government did not do enough to protect consumers in the marketplace and to force large financial institutions to strengthen their internal risk-management systems or to curtail risky practices...He blamed 'shadow banks' (financial entities that are not regulated depositories that help channel savings into investment); poor risk management by insurers and investors; and the permissive standards of lenders that allowed many households, businesses and financial firms to take on more debt than they could handle, among other factors."
Jobless claims are only down slightly, and productivity has dropped for the first time in two years:http://bit.ly/djzjLt
Elizabeth Warren has pulled out of a Harvard class she planned to teach, spurring speculation about a possible appointment:http://bit.ly/da7CXT
Lobbyists started targeting the Fed only two days after FinReg passed, reports Michael Crittenden: "The records show Bank of America Corp., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and American Express Co. have all met with Fed staff at least once since mid-July to discuss the interchange issue. Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc. and others have also discussed tough rules for derivatives with government officials...The Fed on Aug. 20 hosted a discussion with a group representing firms that use derivatives to hedge risks--so-called end users. The group included executives from Safeway Inc. and Boeing Co., as well as representatives from the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce."
The Economistwarns against placing the whole burden of speeding the recovery on central bankers: "Cheaper money is an obvious offset to tighter budgets and, historically, many of the most successful fiscal adjustments have been matched by looser monetary policy. But these are not ordinary times. Central banks cannot cut short-term rates any further. And in many places the recovery is sluggish for a reason that also renders central banks less effective: economies are deleveraging as households, in particular, rebuild their savings and pay down debt. If people do not want to borrow, monetary policy, although not impotent, gives a smaller lift to the economy than it normally would."
The Economist prefers a mix of monetary and fiscal stimulus:http://bit.ly/cJtItw
Steven Pearlstein proposes using the expiring Bush tax cuts to invest in infrastructure: "For several decades, policymakers have tossed around the idea of an National Infrastructure Bank to provide loans and matching grants for highway and transit projects, a new air traffic control system, high-speed rail, clean-energy generation and smart electric grids, and an expansion of state college and university systems. Over the years, this idea has won bipartisan support from business groups, labor unions, governors and big-city mayors. And with interest rates at record lows, construction costs down 25 percent and so many construction workers unemployed, there is no better time to launch such an effort."
Robert Kuttner argues Obama can do a lot to jumpstart the recovery without legislation: "The Labor Department received an additional $25 million in its 2011 appropriation for enforcement of wage and hour standards, and plans are moving forward to revive other areas of enforcement that were deliberately sabotaged for nearly a decade....The other source of leverage, potentially much more effective, is government's power as a contractor. The U.S. government spends half a trillion dollars a year to buy goods and services from the private sector. Federal procurement, directly or indirectly, influences about one job in four in the entire economy. And most large national companies do business with the government."
Small business employees will benefit from health care reform, writes Kate Pickert: "According to the study, funded in part by a contract from the U.S. Department of Labor, once the Affordable Care Act is fully implemented, 95% of American workers will have health insurance through their jobs, up from 85% today. This increase, say the authors, will be largely driven by more small businesses offering coverage. 'Currently, only 60.4% of workers at businesses with 50 or fewer employees have an offer of coverage; the proportion is projected to increase to 85.9% after the reform,' asserts the study."
Employers are pushing health care costs onto workers during the downturn, reports David Hilzenrath: "The premiums that employees pay for employer-sponsored family coverage rose an average of 13.7 percent this year, while the amount that employers contribute fell by 0.9 percent, the survey found. For family coverage, workers are paying an average of $3,997, up $482 from last year, while employers are paying an average of $9,773, down $87, according to the survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust."
The US is suing Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio for violating immigrants' civil rights, reports Evan Perez: "Mr. Arpaio is the elected sheriff for Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located. He is known for tough policing policies and has become a vocal critic of illegal immigration. He has used his post to carry out operations aimed at detaining immigrants and turning them over to federal law enforcement for deportation...The Justice Department suit, filed in federal court in Phoenix, said the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office receives millions of dollars of federal funding and is required to cooperate with federal investigations as a condition of receiving that money."
Hundreds of millions of Race to the Top dollars are going to developing new testing methods:http://bit.ly/aMYJWE
Donald Berwick defends health care reform's changes to Medicare:http://bit.ly/abPbMs
James Ledbetter sees immigration as our ticket out of the housing crisis: "Until hundreds of thousands of those homes sell, the market is likely to stagnate. So, goes the argument, let's open the borders to immigrants who promise to buy a house. Every year tens of thousands more people apply for the highly coveted H-1B visas than receive them, and even the rejected applicants tend to be highly educated and highly skilled. Expand the number of visas granted, make them contingent on buying a house, and the newcomers will make a fast and substantial dent in the glutted market."
Long-form interlude: Tom Junod's 2008 profile of Mr. Rogers.
Energy
The head investigator of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says its findings still hold:http://bit.ly/b5QMxn
The temporary Gulf well cap has been removed, reports Harry Weber: "The cap was removed as a prelude to raising the massive piece of equipment underneath that failed to prevent the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. The government wants to replace the failed blowout preventer first to deal with any pressure that is caused when a relief well BP has been drilling intersects the blown-out well. Once that intersection occurs sometime after Labor Day, BP is expected to use mud and cement to plug the blown-out well for good from the bottom."
"Smart meters" are not increasing energy prices in California, reports Todd Woody: "An independent review of the smart meters released Thursday found that the devices were functioning properly and attributed the high charges to a heat wave last year that coincided with their installation as well as poor customer service by P.G.&.E. 'They are accurately recording usage and throughout our evaluation we found no systemic issues,' Stacey Wood, an executive with the Structure Group, a Houston consulting company, said on Thursday at a meeting of the California Public Utilities Commission. 'We did identify there were weakness in the focus on customer service.'"
Jim Manzi questions whether polluting countries owe something to countries affected by climate change: "It’s important to remember that most people reading this blog live in a world of legally defined rights and obligations enforced by courts, police, and, ultimately, the monopoly on large-scale force held by government in the form of an army. But the relationships between nation-states and societies don’t have such clear delineations of enforcement and responsibility."
Sorry for the slow blogging this afternoon, I was crashing on a column and then I had to run to a panel at the American Political Science Association's conference, and both took longer than I'd thought. So I'm going back to column writing, and more normal blogging will resume tomorrow.
So Peter Orszag will begin 
