Prisoner's Dilemma

Richard Reich wants to go beyond the conventional rhetoric about Wal-Mart and look at the relationship between low prices and low wages in a new way:

The fact is, today's economy offers us a Faustian bargain: it can give consumers deals largely because it hammers workers and communities.

We can blame big corporations, but we're mostly making this bargain with ourselves. The easier it is for us to get great deals, the stronger the downward pressure on wages and benefits. Last year, the real wages of hourly workers, who make up about 80 percent of the work force, actually dropped for the first time in more than a decade; hourly workers' health and pension benefits are in free fall. The easier it is for us to find better professional services, the harder professionals have to hustle to attract and keep clients. The more efficiently we can summon products from anywhere on the globe, the more stress we put on our own communities.

But you and I aren't just consumers. We're also workers and citizens. How do we strike the right balance? To claim that people shouldn't have access to Wal-Mart or to cut-rate airfares or services from India or to Internet shopping, because these somehow reduce their quality of life, is paternalistic tripe. No one is a better judge of what people want than they themselves.

The answer, Reich argues, is increased regulation to protect our public selves, who presumably want good wages and vibrant communities for everyone, from our private selves, who just want the best possible price. In a sense, Reich is revisiting the problem of the prisoner's dilemma, and concludes that on their own, people cannot be counted on to cooperate. In an attempt to minimize their costs, individuals will routinely defect against the larger community.

It is indeed a waste of time, as Reich notes, to argue whether Wal-Mart in itself is good or bad. Rather, the argument we should be having is about the constraints that Wal-Mart and companies like it should be required to operate under. If the private sector is characterized by an endless race to the bottom, then the only way out of the resulting dilemma is to raise the bottom up to an acceptable level. Doing that isn't free, but neither is the alternative.

Friday Cat Blogging

So many snowflakes, so little time.

Getting My Geek On

The last few days I've been digging on some projects I've been meaning to get to for a while, but just haven't. Here' the rundown:.

• I run my own mail server, and it's always bothered me that I would have to update the access file if I wanted to send mail from a new IP address. There's an easier way, however: SMTP AUTH. I got this working today, and the documentation is here.

• I've finally updated this site's software to work with Apache 2/mod_perl 2 as well as Apache 1.3/mod_perl 1. The code changes themselves were minimal, but there were some difficulties that took a while for me to figure out. The latest version of MasonX-App is here. Next on the to-do list: implement testing with Apache::Test and work on a more flexible session management framework.
• I failed, however, in upgrading my laptop to MySQL 4.1 from source RPM. This is a known bug with Fedora Core 3. Information on that bug is here, but I couldn't get the fix mentioned at the end to work for me. I did, however, learn a lot more about working with source RPMs, and added to my section on that topic here.

We now return to our regularly scheduled program.

Update: Testing with Apache is done. New improved version is here.

Malpractice

Heartened by their successful campaign to limit class action lawsuits, the GOP is moving now to cap damages in medical malpractice cases. Large jury awards, they say, are driving up the cost of malpractice insurance, which in turn is driving up the cost of health care and driving some doctors out of business.

Lawsuits, however, are not the problem that the Republicans and their allies make them out to be.

But for all the worry over higher medical expenses, legal costs do not seem to be at the root of the recent increase in malpractice insurance premiums. Government and industry data show only a modest rise in malpractice claims over the last decade. And last year, the trend in payments for malpractice claims against doctors and other medical professionals turned sharply downward, falling 8.9 percent, to a nationwide total of $4.6 billion, according to data compiled by the Health and Human Services Department.

The real story is a lot more banal. First, rates were kept artificially low while the insurers fought for market share.

Insurers acknowledge that they consider several factors besides claims costs in setting prices for doctors. In the 1990's, even as their costs were rising, malpractice insurers held firm on prices, even lowering them in some years to hold or win a share of the market.

"You always try to say you're not chasing market share," said Donald J. Zuk, the chief executive of Scipie, a medical malpractice insurer that does business in about 30 states. "On the other hand, you have to have a certain market share, you have to show a certain amount of growth, or you don't survive."

But by the late 1990's, some insurers discovered that they had dropped prices well below the cost of paying claims. Several went out of business. One of the biggest insurers, the St. Paul Companies, now Travelers St. Paul Companies, stopped offering medical malpractice coverage.

The surviving companies "had to raise prices or go out of business," Mr. Smarr [ of the Physician Insurers Association of America] said.

Then, insurance companies got hit by huge 9/11 payouts and a declining stock market.

In 2000, about the same time that under-pricing and other market conditions began to push up prices in medical malpractice, the much larger world of commercial insurance was also going through a cycle of higher prices. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks cost insurers $40 billion and accelerated the upward pressure of the latest premium cycle.

Martin D. Weiss, the chairman of Weiss Ratings Inc., an independent financial rating agency, said the cyclical nature of the insurance business and a drop in insurers' investment earnings when markets fell had been among the strongest forces behind the rise in medical malpractice premiums.

Now, after a decade of bad decisions and bad luck, the insurance companies are looking for a bailout. If there is a compelling reason to give them one, let's have that debate out in the open. Blaming the legal system won't solve the underlying problems of the insurance industry, and it works against maintaining accountability in the medical profession. That's not a solution to a problem — it's a gift to the GOP's supporters.

God Bless You, Gene…

Today Mary emailed me the bad news: Dr. Gene Scott is dead at 75.

Mary and I stumbled across Dr. Scott while we were in graduate school at UMass. His show came on at something like 2 o'clock in the morning. His big issue was the link between the British Royal family and the Lost Tribes of Israel, and when he wasn't illustrating the connection with some rather amazing and complicated diagrams on his giant whiteboard, he was waiting for you to pick up the phone and give to the cause. During his many pledge breaks, he would show home-made videos of people riding on horses, while the Boss's "Born in the USA" would play in the background. (I'm sure God forgave him for the copyright violations.)

Dr. Scott had a unique style about him. On the shows I watched, he often wore a naval cap with a pair of sunglasses perched atop it. He used reading glasses as well, and had no qualms about pulling the sunglasses down and wearing both pairs simultaneously if need be. He also liked to shout at his audience, although it was hard sometimes to keep up with exactly what he was talking about. All in all, it was a fun show to watch.

After leaving Massachusetts, I've never seen his show again. And now, I guess, I'll never get another chance. But thanks for the memories, Dr. Scott, and God bless.

God the Abortionist

I got a kick out of this paragraph from Jim Holt's speculations on the intelligent designer in the New York Times today:

And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception. Souls bearing the stain of original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. That is why, according to traditional theology, unbaptized babies have to languish in limbo for all eternity. Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined.

Arguments like these, of course, won't change the mind of anyone who is convinced that God is the intelligent designer. But I think it would be interesting to see what would happen if a student raised points like these during a classroom discussion on intelligent design. Something tells me that this kind of "free inquiry" wouldn't be tolerated for very long.

Hyperactive

Ellen Ullman thinks that what's good for the computer isn't necessarily good for the user:

Multitasking, throughput, efficiency: these are excellent machine concepts, useful in the design of computer systems. But are they principles that nurture human thought and imagination? Not that long ago, we didn't think so. I am reminded of the scene in the 1976 movie "The Man Who Fell to Earth" in which David Bowie, playing an alien, sits watching a bank of television sets, each tuned to a different channel. The screens flash, the sound blares — the sensory overload is almost unbearable. Yet he watches unfazed. It is the surest sign that he is not human.

The more we embrace the virtues of the machine, the more difficult it becomes to slow down to a more human pace. Many people (and I have to include myself in this group) fool themselves into thinking that if they can find more efficient ways of doing their work, then they will have more time to sit back, relax, and enjoy the good life. The trouble is, those same efficient work habits structure the way one approaches leisure time as well. Why just read a book if you can have the TV on, too? Why bother going to the ballgame if you can't check your email during the timeouts?

So if you're reading this, get up and go for a walk. And leave the iPod at home.

Fake News

What, exactly, is "fake news"? Jon Stewart says that his program, The Daily Show, is fake, but it covers some real stories better than real news shows do. Fox would call what it does real news, but a lot of what they broadcast is opinion masquerading as fact. In some cases, bias produces bad journalism, but in other cases, bias improves the story by cutting to the heart of the issue.

If the line between the real and the fake is really so hard to discern, then what can we say about Armstrong Williams and James Guckert? Williams got paid,but I have no doubt he truly believed in what he was paid to promote. Guckert was not a reporter in any conventional sense, but is being a paid employee of a traditional media outlet a necessary and sufficient condition of being a journalist?

Today in the New York Times, Frank Rich notes that the confusion on this issue is just what the White House wants.

The inability of real journalists to penetrate this White House is not all the White House's fault. The errors of real news organizations have played perfectly into the administration's insidious efforts to blur the boundaries between the fake and the real and thereby demolish the whole notion that there could possibly be an objective and accurate free press. Conservatives, who supposedly deplore post-modernism, are now welcoming in a brave new world in which it's a given that there can be no empirical reality in news, only the reality you want to hear (or they want you to hear). The frequent fecklessness of the Beltway gang does little to penetrate this Washington smokescreen.

I'm not a believer in the existence of a unified, universal "objective truth", and I don't believe that postmodernism, even in it's bastardized pop form, is necessarily a bad thing. And while I deplore the White House for the propagandistic line-blurring, I can't really say that the line between the real and the fake, or the objective and the subjective, is (or can be) bright. What we really need here is another way to look at the issue, but one which preserves the common-sense notion that the White House is doing something wrong.

This is a really big job, but I think that a start can be made by focusing on the concept of transparency rather than objectivity. Transparency should be understood in at least two ways. First, there is a transparency of roles. Williams, Guckert, and the other cast of characters Rich identifies were not honest about the real role they were playing. The actors portraying television reporters in the video "news" releases are the clearest example, but Guckert playing a reporter while doing no actual reporting finishes close behind. Even Armstrong Williams, who I don't believe said anything about NCLB that he didn't believe, doesn't meet this standard of transparency.

Second is a transparency of facts and criteria. In some ways this boils down to consistency. For example, ignoring the bad things your allies do while screaming bloody murder when your opponents do the same thing doesn't meet this standard. In other cases, what is important is that your "facts" match up in some way with the "facts" of others and the "facts" you have used before. In other words, you don't get to simply make stuff up. Finally, there is a need for the facts you use in private to be the same facts you use in public. Rumsfeld strikes me as the person in the administration who fails this test most consistently — while he is obviously making decisions based on a certain conception of the size of the Iraqi insurgency, for example, he refuses to even hint at a number in public.

By the standards of transparency, the White House's approach to the media clearly deserves condemnation. The issue isn't just blurring the lines between real and fake, or biased and objective, but between the visible and hidden as well. And the mainstream media does itself no favors when it holds on to the idea that its value lies in its dispassionate detachment. Good journalism doesn't have to be gutless and afraid to take sides, it just has to be upfront about what it does. Just ask Jon Stewart.

"A Good Man"

Writing about the David Kuo piece I discuss below, Amy Sullivan notes that Kuo make the seemingly obligatory "Bush is a good guy" claim before launching into his policy critique. She goes on to say:

But I guess this is where liberals and conservatives diverge. I'd much rather see the country run by a jerk of a guy who forgets his secretary's birthday and can't be bothered to remember staff member's names (much less give them nicknames) but whose policies make life better for MILLIONS OF PEOPLE than a president who gets along well with his staff and friends but whose policies hurt others.

I think this is basically right, but I also think that the real issue goes deeper. Many conservatives, it seems to me, believe that a person's public actions can only be evaluated in the light of that person's private character. Many liberals, on the other hand, seem comfortable divorcing the two and evaluating the public and the private separately and independently.

I'm fairly certain this difference has something to with the way conservatives and liberals tend to approach the issues of grace, salvation, and the possibility of a secular morality, and I'll leave a more detailed description as an exercise for the reader. But every time I hear Bush say "he's a good man" in an attempt to excuse disastrous public policy decisions that get lots of people hurt or killed, it only confirms my belief that Bush's brand of morality, regardless of how deeply held, is essentially sterile.

First DiIulio, Now Kuo

In 2002, you might remember, John DiIulio, who headed up Bush's "faith-based initiatives" program, publicly scolded the White House for its driving need of prioritize politics at the expense of public policy. Today, that complaint is taken up by David Kuo, the former deputy director in the same office.

First, says Kuo, the "compassionate" part of Bush's trademarked "compassionate conservatism" was not an important objective for the policy that was supposed to be its exemplification.

Capitol Hill gridlock could have been smashed by minimal West Wing effort. No administration since LBJ's has had a more successful legislative track record than this one. From tax cuts to Medicare, the White House gets what the White House really wants. It never really wanted the "poor people stuff."

What the White House did want, however, was a very public illustration of Bush's religious faith. That it got in spades, essentially for free, and with the blessings of Bush's most prominent Christian conservative backers.

Conservative Christian donors, faith leaders, and opinion makers grew to see the initiative as an embodiment of the president's own faith. Democratic opposition was understood as an attack on his personal faith. And since this community's most powerful leaders - men like James Dobson of Focus on the Family - weren't anti-poverty leaders, they didn't care about money. The Faith-Based Office was the cross around the White Houses' neck showing the president's own faith orientation. That was sufficient.

Kuo is right about the administration's preference for conservatism at the expense of compassion, and hearing this truth told by a former White House staffer is refreshing in a way. But I feel it necessary to note that Kuo isn't telling any secrets here — he's just looking at the public record and putting it in context. Bush's use and abuse of faith is there for anyone to see. If more would only try.

Just Kill It

Want to save a quick $10 billion a year? Then kill the Pentagon's missile defense program. Zero it out. While we keep spending the money, it keeps failing the tests. The idea is fatally flawed anyway, so it's time to admit this was all just a huge, expensive mistake and move on.

$82 Billion More

The ink isn't even dry on the $2.5 trillion budget Bush submitted a week ago, and already he's asking for more. Specifically, he's asking for $82 billion more to pay for the ongoing occupation costs in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Greg Saunders at The Talent Show is absolutely correct when he says that no Democrat should vote for this money until the White House lays out an exit strategy. Of course, standing up in this way will generate a lot of noxious rhetoric from Republicans accusing those who merely ask for a plan with the crime of "emboldening the terrorists."

It's a damn shame that we have an administration that has so little to offer in the way of solutions that it feels necessary to brand as a traitor anyone who notices. I'm as tired of and insulted by that kind of Coulteresque nonsense as anyone. But if accountability means anything any more, then the very least that can be expected is a response to the simple question, "What now?" As Democrats and as Americans, it's time to hold this administration's feet to the fire and demand some answers. The "accountability moment" is now.

The Bush Legacy

In his budget, Bush has shown us the future, and it isn't pretty:

Congress and the White House have become adept at passing legislation with hidden long-term price tags, but those huge costs began coming into view in Bush's latest spending plan. Even if Bush succeeds in slashing the deficit in half in four years, as he has pledged, his major policy prescriptions would leave his successor with massive financial commitments that begin rising dramatically the year he relinquishes the White House, according to an analysis of new budget figures.

Bush's extensive tax cuts, the new Medicare prescription drug benefit and, if it passes, his plan to redesign Social Security all balloon in cost several years from now. His plan to partially privatize Social Security, for instance, would cost a total of $79.5 billion in the last two budgets that Bush will propose as president and an additional $675 billion in the five years that follow. New Medicare figures likewise show the cost almost twice as high as originally estimated, largely because it mushrooms long after the Bush presidency.

The end result is obvious to everyone in the reality-based community:

By the time the next president comes along, some analysts said, not only will there be little if any flexibility for any new initiatives, but the entire four-year term could be spent figuring out how to accommodate the long-range cost of Bush's policies.

"That president would have to face a very fundamental decision as to whether he would want to do what was right and be a one-term president or continue to play the same game and push it onto his successor," said Leon E. Panetta, who served as budget director and later White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton. "That's really the choice that's going to face the next president."

Let no one think there isn't a method to this madness. Apart from protecting Bush's legacy by pushing the crisis back until he has left office, it also puts the GOP in an enviable strategic position regardless of who wins the 2008 presidential election. If a Democrat wins, the weight of the budget crisis combined with a presumably uncooperative Congress will leave that administration to drown in a sea of red ink and unfulfillable promises. If a Republican wins, however, the scene is finally set for rolling back what remains of the New Deal and the Great Society safety net that conservatives hate so much. It's a win-win, except that everybody else loses.

Winners and Losers

The top story on the major news sites right now is about the Iraqi election results, but apart from some vote totals and blather about a "new birth for Iraq", there's not a lot of analysis about who the real winners and losers are or what the results bode for the future. Fortunately, there's Juan Cole to give us the details.

Smoke and Mirrors

Earlier this week, Atrios and Josh Marshall noticed that Bush's budget was getting a pass of sorts from the press. Despite the budget's reliance on dishonest accounting tricks and gimmicks, nobody was using the time-honored phrase "smoke and mirrors" to refer to its thaumaturgic calculations.

We can all breathe easier now, for in today's Washington Post, Cheryl Block has a long piece entitled "Smoke, Mirrors, & Shades Of Enron!", outlining the truly awe-inspiring array of budgetary chicanery used by the administration. Here's a good example:

Under the proposal [for tax-favored savings accounts], existing Roth IRAs would be renamed RSAs and taxpayers would be permitted to convert funds from traditional and nondeductible IRAs into these new accounts. What the spinners don't tell you, though, is that while these new accounts amount to huge tax cuts, they are actually recorded in the budget as revenue increases in the first few years.

How is this budget magic achieved? For one thing, conversions from existing IRAs would be taxed now in exchange for tax savings later. In addition, since contributions to these new accounts would not be deductible, revenues are projected to increase in the first few years as taxpayers deposit funds into the new accounts rather than the old-style IRAs. Most of the revenue loss from these changes does not show up in the budget until savers withdraw their funds over decades into the future, well beyond a five-year or even a 10-year budget window.

My favorite trick, however, is one she doesn't mention: including as revenue $1 billion from drilling for oil in ANWR, even though nobody is currently drilling for oil in ANWR and Congress hasn't changed the law to allow anyone to start drilling for oil in ANWR. How crooked is that?

Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

This is not what we need right now:

"I think Howard Dean would be viewed as synonymous with being upper-East Coast liberal, and that just makes the burden on southern Democrats that much more difficult," said James F. "Jim" Kyle Jr. (D), the minority leader of the Tennessee Senate. "Hopefully he will try to be chairman of the entire party and not the chairman of a niche of the party members."

And hopefully, people like Kyle will give Dean a break and not feed unfair stereotypes about him to the media.

Reporters on this story right now are looking for conflict and controversy, and they want spicy quotes that illustrate that angle. Democrats should all agree not to give them any. Sure, some of these stories will get written anyway, but Democrats don't have to be such good enablers.

Update: Clinton agrees with me: "We've got to stop beating on each other and redirect our fire against the people we disagree with." Right on.

Tricky

It hasn't been a particularly good week for Republican dirty-tricksters. A quick rundown:

• Jeff Gannon, aka JD Guckert, gave up his White House press corps badge and resigned from the fake news organization / GOP political front group Talon News. Now that he won't be spending his time asking loaded questions at White House press conferences and reprinting RNC press releases under his own byline, he'll be able to devote more time to his other pursuits.
• Joseph Steffen, aide to Republican Governor Bob Ehrlich of Maryland, got fired for spreading false rumors of marital infidelity about Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, who will most likely run against Ehrlich in 2006. Ehrlich, who recently made headlines by devoting the first part of his State of the State address to a rant against "assassin politics", is opposing a broader investigation.
• Allen Raymond, a GOP cosultant, is going to jail for jamming the phones of the New Hampshire Democratic Party on election day in 2002. Also implicated in the scandal are Chuck McGee, the former GOP ED in NH, who will be sentenced next month, and James Tobin, Bush's 2004 regional campaign chairman, who is under indictment.

What a bunch of morons.

What's a Few Hundred Billion Between Friends?

When Bush got his Medicare prescription drug benefit through Congress in 2003, he swore up and down that it wouldn't cost more than $400 billion over 10 years. As it turns out, that's not even close:

The Bush administration offered a new estimate of the cost of the Medicare drug benefit on Tuesday, saying it would cost $720 billion in the next 10 years.

That is much more than the $400 billion Congress assumed when it passed legislation creating the benefit in late 2003.

This new estimate is for 2006-2015, and the White House is technically correct when they say that the new projection doesn't look at the same 10-year period (2004-2013) on which the $400 billion figure was based. However, I don't think the White House will get a lot of mileage out of that response. First, it admitted a year ago that that its original cost estimate of $400 billion was wrong, and that the real number for the same period would be closer to $535 billion. Second, since the benefit doesn't kick in until 2006, an estimate which takes 2004 as its starting point doesn't really provide an accurate 10-year figure. Overall, the White House has now moved deep into "fool me twice" territory, and relying on a history of bogus calculations and hair-splitting distinctions doesn't seem like a winning rhetorical strategy to me.

Democrats, on the other hand, are approaching this revelation in exactly the right way — they're using it to attack the overall credibility of the administration.

[Rep. Rahm] Emanuel said: "The new cost estimate destroys the credibility of the Bush administration. Officials were so far off in estimating the cost of the Medicare law. Why should we believe what they say about the financial problems of Social Security?"

Representative Pete Stark of California, the senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, said: "I told you so. We can't trust numbers provided by administration officials. They'll say anything to get a bill passed. And if the new drug benefit costs more, the extra money goes to their friends in the pharmaceutical industry, not to senior citizens."

Stark notes that these new figures prove that the Democrats were right in 2003 when they fought to allow negotiations with the drug companies to lower prices, which is a nice populist touch. It's easy to hit the ball out of the park like this when you're given such a gift of a pitch, but it's still nice to see the Democrats taking a big swing.

More Unexpected Honesty

Today's award for unexpected honesty about Bush's budget goes to Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS). Talking about Bush's proposal to cut almost $600 million from farm subsidies next year, Cochran said:

"Frankly, I don't think anyone in the administration really thought Congress would go along with this."

Of course they didn't. The goal is to make headlines with a "bold plan" — the actual implementation of that plan is almost beside the point. You would think that eventually the disconnect between Bush's plans and his follow-through would begin to be noticed by the press and the public. Time will tell, but I'm not holding my breath.

An Honest Appraisal

Everyone I know is all atwitter today about Bush's FY 2006 budget, which probably says more about the people I know than anything else. As expected, it is filled with cuts to all sorts of vital programs, made necessary, the administration insists, by the budget deficit. It is typical of this administration's approach that it can blame its actions on a problem that it by-and-large created with absolutely no sense of irony.

A lot will be said about this budget, and I'll leave it to others to unpack the details. But so far, the award for the most unexpectedly honest line about the budget goes to none other than Dick Cheney. Speaking about how the particular cuts were chosen he said:

"It's not something we've done with a meat ax, nor are we suddenly turning our back on the most needy people in our society."

Cheney's right on both counts. First, this administration has been turning it's back on the most needy people in our society for the last four years, so there is nothing "sudden" about the priorities on display here. Second, the budget blade of choice for the Mayberry Machiavellis is the scalpel, not the meat ax. Both cut deeply, but Bush & Co. get extra style points for surgically isolating the programs they think will give them maximum political advantage. And for them, political advantage is the only bottom line that really matters.

Bird-Brained

Apparently, the avian flu is getting ready to kick our ass:

…the prevalence of the infection in birds makes a new, more deadly human outbreak likely. Public health experts say it is only a matter of time before the flu strain remakes itself, unleashing a disease that is both highly lethal and as easy to catch as an ordinary flu bug.

If this occurs, World Health Organization officials predict that, in the most optimistic scenario, 2 million to 7 million people would die worldwide and that the toll could potentially reach 100 million. Health experts say the virus has already exhibited traits similar to those that caused the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, which is estimated to have killed about 40 million people.

Tommy G. Thompson, former U.S. secretary of heath and human services, told reporters at his farewell news conference in December that avian flu was his greatest health fear. He called it a "really huge bomb" that concerned him even more than bioterrorism.

Naturally, the White House responds by announcing big budget cuts aimed at the Centers for Disease Control and other programs that focus on epidemics:

President Bush's budget for 2006 cuts spending for a wide range of public health programs, including several to protect the nation against bioterrorist attacks and to respond to medical emergencies, budget documents show.

Faced with constraints on spending caused by record budget deficits and the demands of the war in Iraq, administration officials said on Friday that they had increased the budget for some health programs but cut many others, including some that address urgent health care needs.

The documents show, for example, that Mr. Bush would cut spending for several programs that deal with epidemics, chronic diseases and obesity. His plan would also cut the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by 9 percent, to $6.9 billion, the documents show.

Our President, apparently, feels comfortable rolling the dice for all of us in order to protect his tax cuts and his war. Gee, I feel better already.

Passwords and Security

Via Tomalak comes this meditation on passwords by Michael Schrage. Let's cut to the chase:

The obvious answer: the stronger and more complex the password scheme, the lazier and more technically incompetent the security system administrator. As [authentication expert Richard E.] Smith demonstrates in a series of keen analyses, the rise of plain-text “sniffer” technology combined with computationally enhanced processing power makes traditional password protection ever weaker and more fragile.

So why are we demanding that millions of people spend more and more time and memory on a security procedure that yields less and less protection? The world doesn’t need “better” or “more secure” passwords; it needs to wean itself from passwords and PINs as the medium of authentication. We’d be far more secure with more layered approaches to authentication — “suspicion engines” on the lookout for deviant behaviors — and more subtle yet persistent ways of tracking and challenging online identities.

Schrage's argument suffers from a couple of problems. The first problem lies with his one-sided description of the security implicaitons of using passwords. While his point about the increasing vulnerability of text-based authentication systems to brute-force attacks is valid, he never indicates whether this kind of attack is a significant part of the problem. What about co-workers guessing logins based on their knowledge of the target? What about lazy users who never change the default, or use the most common passwords? In these cases, I would argue, a better password policy can definitely be a part of a good security strategy.

The second and most disappointing problem with this piece, though, is Schrage's refusal to discuss any of the alternatives in detail. Instead, he provides only hints as to what might replace passwords in our wired world. What's a "suspicion engine", and how does it work? And what are these "subtle yet persistent" technologies he mentions? I wish there were more answers here, but there aren't.

And this remark doesn't illustrate the solution, as Schrage intends, but rather the problem of moving beyond passwords in many environments:

Somehow, the world’s ATM banking systems have managed to get by with a bare minimum of fraud for more than 20 years by relying upon only four-digit codes. So what do the banking geeks grasp about password management?

Well, they probably grasp requiring the user to insert a coded card into the device, combined with a mechanical interface that prevents rapid brute-force attacks on the PIN, combined with a camera to record all the goings on at the keyboard is a pretty good defense. But something tells me we aren't going to see a setup like from Yahoo! anytime soon. Even the lauded banking geeks can't get beyond passwords online, as a quick trip to any financial services website will demonstrate.

And that's the rub. You can talk about the usability and security problems with passwords all day long, but until there is another system that can realistically take its place, you're just talking trash.

For now, the only solution I've found to the password problem is to choose strong passwords and use a password management utility. If you have a PalmOS PDA, I recommend Strip. On my linux laptop, I run PwManager. If you run Windows, I've heard Password Safe is good. Other suggestions are welcome in the comments.

Friday Cat Blogging

Sometimes I like to spend the morning just sitting on the sofa and reading the New York Times.

Pointing Out the Obvious

Kudos to Washington Post associate editor Robert G. Kaiser for calling them as he sees them during a Q&A after the State of the Union:

Washington, D.C.: Anything he said strike you as objectively untrue?

Robert G. Kaiser: Yes. Bush often describes a world whose features are all highly debatable, if not simply invented. He proposes "a comprehensive health care agenda" that will leave perhaps 50 million Americans without health insurance. Is that comprehensive in any meaningful sense? He promises big economic benefits from legal changes, "tort reform," that independent economists say cannot have more than a small economic effect even if enacted, which is not likely. He promises to increase the size of Pell Grants, not noting that they have shrunk far below the level he promised when he came into the White House. He proposes to reduce American dependency on foreign supplies of energy, when independent specialists say that as long as we need oil, we will be heavily, and increasingly, dependent on foreign suppliers. Bush spoke of a free and sovereign Iraq as though all was well there, but Iraq is a country in terrible straits, with most uncertain prospects. Bush didn't invent the rosy scenario approach to politics, of course. There's a lot of tradition behind this kind of wishful rhetoric.

Kudos as well to fellow WaPo stafferDan Froomkin, who points to a number of stories in appearing papers across the country which challenge various parts of Bush's speech. Of course, there were a lot of stories that dutifully reported the President's lies without comment, but maybe the press is looking to be a tad more vigilant in the second term than it was in the first. Let's hope so.

Benefit Offset

It looks like the New York Times story cited in the post below missed a big part of the Social Security story. Jonathan Weisman of the Washington Post explains the "benefit offset" that private account holders can expect.

Under the proposal, workers could invest as much as 4 percent of their wages subject to Social Security taxation in a limited assortment of stock, bond and mixed-investment funds. But the government would keep and administer that money. Upon retirement, workers would then be given any money that exceeded inflation-adjusted gains over 3 percent.

…

"In return for the opportunity to get the benefits from the personal account, the person forgoes a certain amount of benefits from the traditional system," the official told reporters. "Basically, the net effect on an individual's benefits would be zero if his personal account earned a 3 percent real rate of return. To the extent that his personal account gets a higher rate of return, his net benefit would increase."

Even if your private account beats the three percent per year growth figure, you might not get to control the excess. Instead, you might be required to put most of it into a government-issued annuity to bring your retirement income up to the poverty line. And if your account grows on the low side of three percent, you lose — you're still subject to the offset, but your account can't make up for it.

It's important to remember, however, that private accounts do nothing to directly affect the long-term solvency of the system. Given that Bush has ruled out any tax increases, the only way he can make up for the projected $3.7 trillion shortfall is to cut benefits, even though he hasn't said exactly how. But Jason Furman and Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities remind us that no matter how you slice it, most of us would do worse under the likely Bush plan than under the current system. In some cases, much worse.

However Bush decides to structure the voluntary aspect of his plan, the more immediate and important choice is whether we want to preserve the present system of guaranteed benefits or begin to phase it out under the camouflage of "personalization". For me, the right choice is obvious.

What's Voluntary About This?

From the beginning, Bush has stressed that his plan to replace Social Security with private accounts would be "voluntary". Presumably, the pollsters that he never uses told him it would be effective marketing to let people think they had a choice in the matter. I've wondered before how this would work, and yesterday the White House finally addressed this part of the President's plan.

Workers could opt to invest in private accounts at any point. Once in them, if they decided they wanted out, they would put their entire account into an investment fund containing only Treasury bonds. The official said that would have the same effect as sticking with the traditional Social Security system.

Workers who decided not to put part of their tax money in personal accounts would presumably be subject to the same benefit reductions as those who participated.

So, the private accounts are voluntary, but the benefit cuts aren't. In other words, you can pay lower taxes or pay higher taxes — and get exactly the same government payout in return. There's not really a choice if one of the options is irrational. In the end, this is just more flim-flam from a President who can't seem to sell any of his ideas honestly.

Oh, and while we're on the subject, saying that converting your private account to T-Bills = opting out of privatization = "sticking with the traditional Social Security system" is just flat-out nonsensical. Can we please get a press that aggressively challenges crap like this instead of passing it along without comment?

Time to Get Hammered

If it's time for the State of the Union, then it's time to play the State of the Union drinking game. I'm afraid I won't be joining the rest of you this year, however. Oh, I'll be drinking, but I can't bring myself to actually watch the damn thing. I'm really worried that after a few cold ones, Dubya's desultory discourse would drive me to hurl my empties at the TV in an attempt to stop the madness. Sure, I'd feel good for a minute or two, but after the smoke cleared it would hit me: how am I supposed to watch the Daily Show now?

Hate Plate

Virginia, which already has over 180 specialized license plates, is about to get one more.

The House of Delegates passed legislation Tuesday authorizing special license plates for supporters of traditional marriage, rejecting critics' claims that the measure trivializes matrimony.

The license plate would feature the words "Traditional Marriage" and interlocking wedding rings over a red heart.

Del. Robert Brink, D-Arlington, suggested the bill could open the door to other license plates promoting virtuous lifestyles — healthy living and considerate driving, for example.

I don't call it virtuous when people proudly declare their state-sponsored homophobia as they drive around town. I'm not sure if "considerate driving" is virtuous or not, but having that plate on your car would likely get you run off the road around here. Hmm… we clearly need some better ideas. Perhaps the Rude Pundit could come up with a few.

Update: No word yet from the Rude One, but Waldo Jaquith is on the case.

On the Importance of Being Bold

Let's face facts: when it comes to proposing "bold new ideas", the Republicans have enjoyed a near monopoly over the Democrats for a long time now. Republicans are helped in this respect by the fact that none of most important social institutions built up in the last 75 years have been based on conservative ideology. When it comes to challenging the status quo, the GOP can focus on just about anything it wants. Sure, most conservative social policy amounts to little more in the end than a gussied up version of "gimme that", but in a political environment where a plausible claim to boldness has a virtue and legitimating power all its own, one can't discount the importance of finding big windmills to tilt at.

If Democrats are to fight their way back to become the unquestioned majority party again, they must move beyond simply defending their existing accomplishments and find some windmills of their own. Universal health care might be a place to start, or maybe expanding economic democracy in the workplace. Lakoff et. al. have moved the idea of properly framing debates to center stage, but you need some content for that debate, too. The debate doesn't need to start with press releases from Pelosi and Reid with legislation ready to go, either — let the programs bubble up from left-wing think tanks through a left-wing media apparatus. Don't have those yet? Then build them. This is going to take a while, so we need to be patient and stay the course. In the end, the new Democratic majority might accomplish what the GOP has been so far unable to do: actually get those bold ideas implemented.

The Catch-22 of Privatization

In his column today, Paul Krugman writes about the contradiction at the heart of the case for privatizing Social Security.

They can rescue their happy vision for stock returns by claiming that the Social Security actuaries are vastly underestimating future economic growth. But in that case, we don't need to worry about Social Security's future: if the economy grows fast enough to generate a rate of return that makes privatization work, it will also yield a bonanza of payroll tax revenue that will keep the current system sound for generations to come.

Alternatively, privatizers can unhappily admit that future stock returns will be much lower than they have been claiming. But without those high returns, the arithmetic of their schemes collapses.

It really is that stark: any growth projection that would permit the stock returns the privatizers need to make their schemes work would put Social Security solidly in the black.

I tried to make the same point a while ago, but as you would expect, Krugman really nails the essential tension. And Jesse Berney over at Kicking Ass provides the perfect punch line:

In other words, their "solution" only works if the "problem" disappears.

Swish!