Politics Index

TAB DUMP.

January 5th, 2009 admin

• The International Crisis Group's Report on Gaza.

• Frost/Nixon: A Dishonorable Distortion of History.

• The Legend of Master Legend.

• The End of the Financial World As We Know It.

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THE PROBLEM WITH TAX CUTS.

January 5th, 2009 admin

Yves Smith has a nice post on the trouble with using tax cuts as your primary source of stimulus. "The problem with tax cuts," she writes, "is they may not be spent." Imagine a tax cut of $400 to a household that makes $120,000, that isn't unable to pay their mortgage but is anxious about the future. Will they spend it? Or save it?

If they save it, then the tax cut was wasted money, at least as far as stimulus goes. This is not an idyll worry. "We saw it, big time, with last summer's tax rebate. Gary Shilling did a detailed look at when the checks got in the hands of taxpayers versus changes in retail spending. He concluded that about 80% of the tax rebate was saved." Yikes. Conversely, the benefit to government spending is that the money gets spent.

There are a couple mitigating factors here. The first is that the government can only spend so much money so quickly. After the first couple hundred billion, you begin to run out of things you wanted to do. And some of that stuff might not even be good to do, like building endless new highways. If you need $800 billion in stimulus but governments can only quickly spend $300 billion, then a tax cut might be better than nothing.

The second is that we know how to target tax cuts such that they get spent. It's simple, really. Give the money to the poor. They, after all, need to spend it. They need to pay off debt and fix the car and send in the heating bill. The more progressive the tax cut is, the likelier it is to be used.

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PANETTA TO CIA.

January 5th, 2009 admin

Somewhat surprisingly, Obama has named Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff, as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Panetta has no particular background in intelligence, but deep experience in the executive branch. Moira Whelan argues that this will be a crucial asset to the CIA. "[Panetta] knows how brains work inside the West Wing because he was there as White House Chief of Staff, and therefore will know how to provide information that gets attention in the way it should...this will give the IC a big advantage in terms of getting their point of view across in the Oval." Panetta is also an uncompromising opponent of torture. Last August he took to the Washington Monthly to write:

According to the latest polls, two-thirds of the American public believes that torturing suspected terrorists to gain important information is justified in some circumstances. How did we transform from champions of human dignity and individual rights into a nation of armchair torturers? One word: fear.

Fear is blinding, hateful, and vengeful. It makes the end justify the means. And why not? If torture can stop the next terrorist attack, the next suicide bomber, then what's wrong with a little waterboarding or electric shock?

The simple answer is the rule of law...We cannot simply suspend these beliefs in the name of national security. Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values. But that is a false compromise. We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don't. There is no middle ground.

We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that.

It's hard to say what Panetta will do as head of the CIA. But we can say what he won't do. And maybe, for now, that's improvement enough.

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TIME FOR A BLOGGER ETHICS PANEL.

January 5th, 2009 admin

Michael Oren is "a distinguished fellow at the Shalem Center and a professor at the foreign service school of Georgetown University” who specializes in Israeli politics and has been writing furiously for an array of American outlets since the war in Gaza began. Indeed, the description I just quoted comes from the bio line beneath his LA Times op-ed. As Tony Karon notes, though, there's a bit more to Oren's story. "Oren is currently in Gaza, in the uniform of the Israeli Defense Force, in which he is a reserve officer whose current duty is as a media officer working to shape perceptions of the Gaza operation." Nothing wrong with that, of course. But it's the sort of thing that should be made clear.

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GAZA AND PRESENT-BIAS.

January 5th, 2009 admin

One of the odder wrinkles in the conversation over Israel's attack on Gaza is the incredible present-bias it exhibits. One day Israel was not dropping bombs on Gaza, and people seemed fine with that, and then the next day they were dropping bombs on Gaza, and people began asking how they could possibly do anything else. Not only have we always been at war with Eastasia, but there has never been any option besides being at war with Eastasia. Matt Yglesias put it well this weekend:

I think that if people want to be honest, they need to ask themselves how many of them were sitting around the day before Israel started this action not only feeling that it would be smart for Israel to start a massive military action in Gaza but feeling so strongly about it that one would question the Jewish credentials and basic intelligence of anyone who didn’t agree. Frankly, I didn’t hear a lot of Americans taking that position. Then the Israeli government changed its policy, and a lot of Americans decided to agree with the new Israeli policy. Which is fine as far as it goes. But people who didn’t regard the previous policy as unconscionable at the time have no business suddenly deciding that it’s unconscionable to disagree with the new policy.

But suddenly you have a lot of posts like Sahil Mahtani's demanding "what is the alternative?" But no one imagines that if Israel had not unleashed Operation Cast Lead Mahtani would be writing posts entitled "Massive Air Strikes Followed by a Ground Invasion of Gaza: There Is No Alternative."

The question is not whether there were alternatives. It's whether Operation Cast Lead was the best possible approach. Whether it was preferable to air strikes without a ground invasion, or a ground invasion without air strikes, or easing the economic blockade, or doing nothing. It seems undeniable that Operation Cast Lead has devastated Hamas's conventional weapons capabilities. Those capabilities were meaningless. Now they will be even more so. In the short-term, that may mean fewer rocket attacks. In the long-term, however, Hamas is likely to be less internationally isolated, more hardline, and more credible as a symbol of Palestinian resistance and suffering. And that may be the good outcome. The bad outcome would be Salafism taking root in Gaza.

And for those who ask the question of alternatives, one thought experiment. The Israeli political class has been explicit in contrasting the ruthless efficiency of the Gaza operation with the ineptitude of the Lebanon War. To read the Israeli press, the Gaza incursion has the feel of a rebound relationship. Which begs the question: If Israel had not gone to war in Lebanon and suffered a humiliating stalemate, would it be at war in Gaza? And if not -- if there's even a chance of not -- what does that imply about the necessity of this mission?

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