OUTSOURCING MEDICARE?....Here's the latest in outsourcing: get your heart bypass operation done in India for a fraction of the cost of having it done in Europe or America.

A study by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), and McKinsey consultants estimated "medical tourism" could be worth 100bn rupees (£1.21bn) by 2012. Last year some 150,000 foreigners visited India for treatment, with the number rising by 15% a year, says Zakariah Ahmed, an analyst who helped compile the report.

....A number of private hospitals also offer packages designed to attract wealthy foreign patients, with airport-to-hospital bed car service, in-room internet access and private chefs. Another trend is to combine surgery in India with a yoga holiday or trip to the Taj Mahal.

According to the figures in the article, a heart bypass in America costs about $25,000 compared to $8,000 in India. Even with roundtrip airfare added on you can save a bundle.

DELINEATING DISSENT....Andrew Sullivan is right to point with dismay to the final paragraph of Fred Barnes's recent diatribe in the Weekly Standard:

Senate Democrats have enough votes to block major Bush initiatives like Social Security reform and to reject Bush appointees, including Supreme Court nominees. They may be suicidal, but they could undermine the president's entire second term agenda. At his news conference last week, Bush reacted calmly to their vitriolic attacks, suggesting only a few Democrats are involved. Stronger countermeasures will be needed, including an unequivocal White House response to obstructionism, curbs on filibusters, and a clear delineation of what's permissible and what's out of bounds in dissent on Iraq.

Say what? The White House should tell us what kind of dissent on Iraq is permissible and what isn't? Is that really how these guys think?

As for curbs on filibusters, it's worth noting that Barnes is skating very lightly indeed over the story of why Democrats have been forced to filibuster a few of Bush's judicial nominees. I explain in more detail in the Washington Post today.

LESSONS OF HISTORY?....Tom Cleaver of Redress Press sends along this clip from the New York Times. The date is September 3, 1967:

U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote
Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror

by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

....A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam. The election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in January, 1966, to which President Johnson gave his personal commitment when he met Premier Ky and General Thieu, the chief of state, in Honolulu in February.

The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon Government, which has been founded only on coups and power plays since November, 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Deim was overthrown by a military junta.

I know, I know, this doesn't mean Iraq is Vietnam. But you have to admit, this story is pretty spooky.

AND NOW, THE WEATHER....Here's something a little off the beaten path: an interview at CJR with Anthony Wood of the Philadelphia Inquirer about news coverage of the weather. He's not very happy with it:

We need to keep weather in its place. The over-emphasis on weather is as irresponsible as an over-emphasis on crime news. It can leave viewers and readers with a distorted view of the world in which they live — and we are paying for it. You couldn't blame the benumbed public these days for thinking the universe has blown a circuit.

Ah, but just think what William Randolph Hearst could have done with the weather if only he'd had today's technology to work with....

THE MOOSE ON IRAQ....Marshall Wittman on the Iraqi elections:

We should not fall victim to either sour pessimism or irrational exuberance.

That's exactly right. It's not clear that the fundamental ground rules of the insurgency have been changed much by the election, but at the same time, the immediate success of the election itself is good news no matter what.

The rest of his post is right on target too.

THE SELF-CORRECTING BLOGOSPHERE....Atrios is right to mock the pretensions of right-wing blowhards who loudly insist that the blogosphere is superior to old media because it's "self correcting." Their notion that someone else pointing out your errors counts as "self correction" is risible. By that standard, everything in the world is self correcting.

What makes this all the more mock-worthy is the longtime aversion of conservative bloggers to comment hosting, which is the only genuine self-correction mechanism in the blogosphere. Yes, my comment section might be full of trolls and their vitriol, but anyone who has a factual disagreement with what I write has a forum to point it out in the same place as the post itself.

But take a look at the Ecosystem. As I write this, the top ten conservative blogs are Instapundit, Powerline, LGF, Malkin, Captain's Quarters, Sullivan, Hewitt, Volokh, Wizbang, and The Corner. Of those, only three have comments, and the LGF folks do everything in their power to keep anyone outside their own sycophantic fan base from contributing.

There aren't enough liberals in the top 30 to even make a top ten , but the top six are Kos, Marshall, Atrios, Washington Monthly, Crooked Timber, and Yglesias. All but one host comments — and if we could just get Josh off his butt we could make it a clean sweep.

The most laughable member of the conservative blowhard group, of course, is my very own fellow Irvinite, Hugh Hewitt. The man just wrote an entire book about the glories of the fast acting, self-correcting, interactive blogosphere, but his own blog has no comments. I'm not sure what he's afraid of, but apparently "interactive" and "self correcting" aren't really at the top of his list of virtues.

Tight message control has always been a key characteristic of conservative politics. It's emerged as a key characteristic of the conservative blogosphere too.

SHARON-ABBAS COOPERATION....I hate to blog about the possibility of peace between Israel and the Palestinians for an obvious reason: good news never lasts long. Still, the recent openings between Ariel Sharon and the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, are genuinely encouraging. The latest news is that Sharon has agreed to withdraw Israeli forces from several West Bank cities in return for Abbas's success so far in reducing violence in the Gaza Strip.

As usual, there's no way of knowing how well this cooperation will hold up until after the next suicide bombing — and there's bound to be one, after all. Still, it's hopeful news.

DNC CHAIR UPDATE....Apparently the conventional wisdom has Howard Dean ahead in the race to become DNC chair, followed by former Texas congressman Martin Frost. The Boston Globe has a good rundown on the race today.

However, the state party chairs met today and Time reports that they decided to endorse Donnie Fowler. I'm not sure how valuable their endorsement actually is, but it's definitely a disappointment for Dean, who seems to be battling against the entire rest of the field. As near as I can tell, the anti-Dean forces think that as long as they can keep him from winning on the first ballot he's toast.

Stay tuned. Votes are cast on February 12.

CANDIDE INVADES THE BLOGOSPHERE....I know, I know, I really need to ignore the wingnuts. It's better for my blood pressure.

But honestly, I just can't help myself sometimes. Instapundit links approvingly today to this post from Ann Althouse complaining — seriously — that the New York Times has changed one of the headlines on its website. Can you believe it!?! What's more, the new headline isn't as positive as the old headline. Bad New York Times! Biased New York Times!

Listen up, folks: the Times, like every other major newspaper, has a separate desk that handles its website. They don't publish one issue a day, either: they update the site continuously. New stories get added, old stories get modified, headlines change, etc. That might be annoying to bloggers, but until a story is committed to print it's subject to change. That's how the web works.

The screenshot on the right shows the collection of Times headlines as of 8 pm on Sunday. There are eight headlines about Iraq, seven of which are heavily positive and one of which is about the the number of people killed by insurgents. The only way the Times' coverage could be more positive would be to ignore the insurgent attacks altogether.

Which, I have a feeling, is what our conservative friends really want. No bad news, period, regardless of whether anything bad has actually happened. It's a brave, new, best-of-all-possible-worlds out there, folks.

IRAQI ELECTION BREAKDOWN....I just finished skimming through a bunch of reports on the Iraqi elections, and the current consensus seems to be that overall turnout was about 60% — which is pretty good. Turnout appears to have been very high in Shiite and Kurdish areas and very low in Sunni areas.

But how high and how low? Here's my rough guess:

• Shiite turnout: 70%
  

• Kurdish turnout: 70%
  

• Sunni turnout: 20%
  

(Based on an ethnic/religious makeup of 60% Shiite, 20% Kurd, and 20% Sunni, this adds up to a total turnout of 60%.)

If this is indeed how the turnout breaks down, and assuming that everyone votes for their own people, here's how the constitutional assembly will look:

• Shiites: 70%
  

• Kurds: 23%
  

• Sunnis: 7%
  

I don't really have anything very compelling to say about this. I was just curious to see how the numbers were likely to break out and how marginalized the Sunnis would end up being. Obviously the answer is "pretty damn marginalized," but beyond that it's hard to say if it matters. The election is good news, but it's still security that's the real issue. It seems unlikely that anything has changed much on that score.

THE PARTISAN MR. BUSH....I continue to dither about what exactly it is that motivates George Bush, but there's at least one thing that's always seemed clear to me: he is the most unfailingly partisan president we've had in a long time. It's genuinely hard to figure out a political philosophy that ties together tax cuts, Medicare expansion, war in Iraq, immigration reform, Mars missions, Social Security privatization, and vastly increased domestic spending, but even if ideological coherency sometimes takes a backseat in Bush's world, partisan advantage is always front and center.

Thomas Edsall and John Harris do a good job of deconstructing this in the Washington Post today. It's worth reading.

THE RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB....Kieran Healy tries to use Google — and only Google — to calculate how many Olympic-sized pools it would take to hold all the blood in the world.

Big deal. Sure, he gets his answer (1,100 OSPs), but it would be more impressive if he'd done it using only his cell phone. I just got a new cell phone myself, and given its vast array of non-phone-related features I'll bet I could do it. If Kieran still needs to use Google for a task like this, maybe what it really means is that he needs a new phone?

SELLING PRIVATIZATION....How long have conservatives been working to prepare the ground for Social Security privatization? For over two decades, reports Janet Hook in the LA Times today:

"It could be many years before the conditions are such that a radical reform of Social Security is possible," wrote Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis, Heritage Foundation analysts, in a 1983 article in the Cato Journal. "But then, as Lenin well knew, to be a successful revolutionary, one must also be patient and consistently plan for real reform."

The Cato article Hook is referring to isn't actually as sinister as the Lenin reference makes it sound (you can read it here), but it is fascinating. It basically lays out a long-term strategy for moving public opinion, and the conservative message machine has followed that strategy for 20 years through thick and thin:

"It started as the third rail of politics, but over a period of time conservatives kept at it until [their assumptions] began to sound like common sense," said George Lakoff, an expert in political communication at UC Berkeley.

Public opinion is the key to political change, and changing public opinion takes a long time. This piece is a wonderful little primer on how it's done.

INSIDE THE NFL....I don't live in Los Angeles, but I live close enough that I can take some civic pride in perhaps the finest show of municipal stubbornness on offer in the nation today: LA's decade-long refusal to spend one thin dime of public money on begging an NFL team to take up residence here.

With that in mind, Scott Gold has a fascinating piece in the LA Times today suggesting that the NFL actually likes this situation just fine. Why? Because with LA looming in the background, teams in other parts of the country have an easier time extorting concessions out of their cities by threatening to move if they don't get what they want. Gold suggests this has been the case in New Orleans, Seattle, Phoenix, and Indianapolis, and while sometimes the LA card is kept in the background, sometimes it's not:

[Indianapolis Colt owner Jim] Irsay's flirtation with Los Angeles was not subtle; at one point he applied for membership at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades.

So how long can other NFL clubs keep pulling this Godfather act? Gold says probably not for much longer:

The irony, said Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist and a professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, is that in the end, the NFL probably won't let any of the franchises that have threatened to move actually do it. Zimbalist thinks it more likely that the NFL will add a new team.

Many analysts say the strategy of using Los Angeles for leverage is about to run its course — just as communities and government officials are getting wise.

It is virtually certain that no public money, at least in the form of general funds, will go toward building a stadium or renovating an existing one in Los Angeles.

The rest of the nation will then realize that stadium projects can be completed with private money alone, said David Carter, an L.A. sports consultant who has been keenly involved in the effort to get an NFL team back in Southern California.

If that had been clear 10 years ago, team owners would have had no leverage because taxpayers would have called their bluff, Carter said. Instead, he said, "If Southern California goes last, the NFL gets the best of both worlds."

The amount of taxpayer money that the NFL has suckered out of gullible working class sports fans for stadium deals that mostly benefit the ultra-rich is probably enough to save Social Security for the next century. But hey — don't let it bother you too much. After all, it's not personal, it's just business. Capiche?

SPECIAL LA TIMES BASHING EDITION....For the past couple of weeks the LA Times has been running an "experimental" Sunday column in which they allow their critics to savage them in print. So far this experiment hasn't gone so well: Mickey Kaus wants a gossip column and Hugh Hewitt demands a firmer adherence to the Republican party line in reports about Iraq. Yawn.

Today's column isn't bad, though: Marc Cooper complains that the conventions of journalistic objectivity produce bland, hard-to-fathom copy:

As thorough as The Times' reporting has been, it often reads as if written by acrobats in pain — skilled professionals twisting themselves and their copy into knots as they strain to "balance" what they are actually seeing with the sometimes fantasy-based spin of both Iraqi and U.S. officialdom.

....Among the many Times dispatches from Iraq this past month, there was one tasty first-person report that boldly stood out from the lot....The Times should have the courage to run more of these first-person pieces full of personal observation, analysis and interpretation from a staff of reporters more than able to provide them. I suspect the resulting product would be contradictory — different reporters seeing different realities. So what?

I agree. Unfortunately, since this criticism applies to all of American journalism, not just the LA Times, I'm still not convinced this experimental column is working.

This is especially true since the professional LA Times critics are put to shame today by its letter writers, who, like me, are wondering why the Sunday editorial section has seemingly decided that its target audience is fourth graders. Here are today's letters to the editor:

Charles W. Froehlich Jr. of San Diego: "In the Jan. 23 edition, I count almost one-third of the section constituted of cartoons."

Pauline Regev of Santa Monica: "Why not add the horoscopes, Dear Abby and a recipe or two to the newly formatted Sunday Opinion. Together with comics, the inane columns of Joel Stein and Michael Lewis, cutesy quizzes and illustrated sound bites, the dumbing down of what was once the most insightful section of your newspaper will then be complete."

Norman M. Lobsenz of Redondo Beach: "Can someone explain why The Times published Michael Lewis' "Domestic Drama" column (Jan. 23)?....I could not, for once, contain my irritation at the amount of useless stuff you publish while cutting out other stuff to save newsprint."

Um, yeah. I guess I'm just one of those old-fashioned fuddy duddies, but I kinda think the editorial section should mostly contain trenchant, hard hitting opinion on the big subjects of the day. For the past two weeks, though, the entire front page of the Sunday editorial section has been taken up by a gigantic cartoon. This might be worthwhile if the cartoons were actually funny and thought provoking, but take a look at this week's effort. WTF?

The Sunday editorial section is four pages longer than the usual daily section. In today's extra four pages, there are a grand total of three — three! — actual op-eds. The rest is cartoons, experimental columns, and cutesy little primers and anecdotes.

Like a TV series cancelled after the first show, it's time for this disaster to be put out of its misery. Surely the world contains enough bright, engaging writers with genuine opinions to fill up a serious op-ed section? And if there aren't, why not just turn it over to Jon Stewart and Bill Maher and be done with it?

ELECTIONS IN IRAQ....The voting in Iraq seems to have gone pretty well. As expected, there were some attacks, but not many more than on a normal day. Also as expected, turnout was high among Kurds and Shiites, but lower in Sunni areas.

So how is the press treating it? I'm watching CNN right now and they seem pretty enthusiastic. The New York Times says there was a "party atmosphere" on the streets of Baghdad. The Washington Post reports that the election "yielded higher turnout than expected and less violence than feared." The LA Times observes that election day attacks "failed to create the turmoil that some feared."

That seems pretty straightforward, doesn't it? The war zealots in the blogosphere seemed to spend most of the runup to the election desperately trying to preempt potential bad news, but guess what? It turns out the press reports whatever's going on, both good and bad. Go figure.

UPDATE: I've now watched about an hour of CNN's coverage, and they're just gushing. But I thought the MSM hated freedom?

UPDATE 2: On the other hand, commenter Canucklehead notes that turnout is way down from Saddam's 99%. I have a feeling there's practically no one left in the blogosphere who retains a sense of humor about this, but I thought it was funny.....

IRAQ UPDATE....According to CNN, voting in Iraq is going OK so far. Of course, polls have only been open for half an hour so far. Keep your fingers crossed.

THE LATEST FROM THE GOP....Mark Schmitt has the latest in Orwellian language control from Republicans, this one courtesy of Minnesota's governor. You really have to wonder about these guys sometimes. It's almost like they're required to do something outrageous just to prove their Republican bona fides these days, sort of the way aspiring mafia thugs are required to kill someone to become made guys or something. Or maybe it's a competition of some kind.

Or maybe they've just lost their humanity entirely. Hard to say.

WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEW....Just thought I'd mention that I saw The Merchant of Venice last week and it was pretty good. I'm not really a big Shakespeare fan, but I've always liked MoV and this production was a nice one, both well paced and well staged. Al Pacino's phrasing of Shylock's lines was odd in a way I can't quite put my finger on — certainly non-Shakespearean, in any case — but it was also compelling and distinctive. Recommended.

(Just so you won't be inadvertantly disappointed, though, I should make clear that I have generally plebeian taste in almost everything, including Shakespeare movies. My favorite recent productions were Mel Gibson's Hamlet and Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing. If you think this shows appalling judgment, you should ignore my MoV recommendation as well.)

Let's see, what else have I seen recently? Sideways was OK, though I don't really understand either the wild praise or the heated abuse it seems to inspire in so many people. Coach Carter was predictable but watchable — barely. Phantom of the Opera was disappointing, even though I like the musical.

That's it. I guess the Best Picture nominees are next on my list, along with Hotel Rwanda and a few others. What else is out there that I should be sure to see?

WORK READINESS....New York State already requires high school students to pass a stringent battery of tests in order to earn a diploma, but apparently the business community remains unhappy with the skill level of graduating students. They want the state to award a "work readiness" credential to students who pass a new and different kind of test test:

The test would cover so-called soft skills in 10 broad areas, including the ability to communicate, follow directions, negotiate and make basic decisions. It will be tried out in pilot programs this spring and could be ready as early as the fall, officials said. The test, given by computer, would include one section on speaking skills, with oral answers to be recorded and then analyzed by examiners.

I've got nothing against testing for these abilities, but I have a different idea. The business community, as you may have heard, is our foremost booster of private enterprise. So why do they expect the taxpayers to subsidize a skills screening test for their prospective employees? Does the state pay for their drug screening?

Instead, how about if private testing firms create their own "work readiness" credentials? Competition would quickly separate the wheat from the chaff, and different firms would likely specialize in skills testing for different kinds of jobs. Employers would choose their preferred firms and preferred testing regimens and would pay to have their prospective new hires tested. Those who don't feel that this kind of testing is worth the extra cost would just rely on a diploma and a job interview, like they do now.

I can think of a few regulatory issues this might inspire, but nothing very onerous and nothing unsolvable. So why is the state involved in this at all? If the free market hasn't created a demand for this on its own, maybe it's not something the taxpayers should get too excited about either.

AMEN, BROTHER....What Max said.

A BIGGER MILITARY?....A bipartisan (but hawkish) group called on Congress today to increase the size of the armed forces:

While estimates vary about just how large an increase is required, and Congress will make its own determination as to size and structure, it is our judgment that we should aim for an increase in the active duty Army and Marine Corps, together, of at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years....After almost two years in Iraq and almost three years in Afghanistan, it should be evident that our engagement in the greater Middle East is truly, in Condoleezza Rice's term, a "generational commitment." The only way to fulfill the military aspect of this commitment is by increasing the size of the force available to our civilian leadership.

What does this mean? Here's some back-of-the-envelope arithmetic:

Assuming that "several years" means at least three or four years, these guys are suggesting an increase of around 100,000 troops. This is roughly eight divisions.

A couple of years ago the CBO issued a report that estimated the cost of a new division at about $10 billion up front and then $5 billion per year to maintain and deploy. Eight divisions, then, would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 billion per year for the next few years and $40 billion to maintain after that. This amounts to a permanent increase in the defense budget of about 10%.

Should we do this? I have my doubts about an increase of this magnitude, although I think a smaller increase is pretty well justified. But regardless of my own view, which is open to change in either direction, this is a debate I'd really, really like to see us have. It gets straight to the heart of a question that our political leaders, Democrats and Republicans alike, have been tap dancing around ever since 9/11: what are our future military plans in the war on terror?

George Bush does indeed talk about this being a task of generations, but he has consistently refused to risk public opinion by proposing the kind of military that this kind of commitment obviously requires. After all, that might scare off some of his supporters who think this is just happy talk. For his part, John Kerry did support an increase of 40,000 troops during the campaign and congressional Democrats reiterated their support for that earlier this week. At the same time, though, they've never really said what they want to do with those extra troops.

No one should be allowed to posture endlessly about America's enduring commitment to freedom if they don't have the guts to say clearly whether this means a military commitment — and troop strength is a concrete issue that requires everyone to put their cards on the table. Do you think the war on terror requires large number of American troops to be deployed overseas for long periods or don't you? Do you think we're likely to be involved in another Iraq sometime in the future or not?

This is far more important than trivia like "saving" Social Security, a program that's solvent for at least the next 40 years, or pandering to the Christian right over gay marriage and cartoon rabbits. It's a real issue, and it's one we ought to be dealing with now.

FIVE EASY PIECES....For the past few days I've been wondering what's going to happen next in the Social Security battle. What I mean is this: it now looks pretty certain that George Bush's private account plan isn't going to fly. Democratic opposition is pretty firm and it increasingly looks like too many Republicans are backing away from private accounts for Bush to pull out a victory. So what's the backup plan?

I haven't blogged about this for two reasons. First, it seems a little like looking past this week's game to the big game coming up next. That's a big no-no in sports and, I imagine, a big no-no in politics too. Still, if you can't noodle aimlessly about stuff like this on a blog, where can you noodle aimlessly about it?

The second reason I haven't blogged about it is a little more serious: I don't really have any ideas. Working on the assumption that Bush and his advisors understand the political reality as well as anyone, I figure they know they probably can't win and have something else up their sleeves. But I don't know what.

But today I want to take a guess. A couple of weeks ago Jon Chait wrote a long and informative article in the New Republic about tax reform. Here's how he describes a Republican strategy called "Five Easy Pieces":

The Five Easy Pieces strategy postulates that the long-time conservative goal of a sweepingly radical tax overhaul, such as replacing the income tax with a flat tax or a national sales tax, runs too much political risk. Instead, [longtime tax lobbyist Ernest] Christian has argued, conservatives can achieve the same goal by doing five things: cutting marginal tax rates, eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends, allowing more generous treatment of business investment, doing away with the estate tax, and establishing tax-free personal savings accounts. The three major Bush tax cuts to date have achieved the first four pieces, partially or completely.

I wonder if the final phase of this strategy is behind Bush's Social Security posturing? Maybe the plan looks something like this:

1. Bush proposes private accounts for Social Security.

2. As expected, Democrats go to the mattresses in opposition. However, in an effort to demonstrate reasonableness they all agree — almost in passing — that of course they have nothing against encouraging savings, but that it should be done in addition to Social Security, not in place of it.

3. After pretending to give it a good try, Bush counts noses, realizes he can't win, and reluctantly agrees to settle for tax-free private accounts on top of Social Security, just like the ones Dems say they have nothing against. Of course, this will be the Republican version of tax-free private accounts — big, unrestricted ones that mostly help the well off — but by now the Dems can hardly oppose a compromise like this, can they?

4. Part 5 of Five Easy Pieces is now enshrined in law.
   

Is this right? I don't know. But there has to be something going on that's not obvious on the surface. Bush has smart people advising him, and they must realize that the odds of getting Social Security privatization passed is virtually nil. My guess is that it can't even pass the House, and there's zero chance of it getting enough votes to cut off a filibuster in the Senate. So why expend so much political capital on such a quixotic venture? There's got to be something else going on.

Any other ideas?

ZARQAWI UPDATE....AP is reporting that Iraqi forces think they're close to capturing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi:

Authorities in Iraq have arrested three close associates of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, officials said Friday, claiming to be close to capturing the al-Qaida-linked terror mastermind himself two days ahead of historic elections that extremists have vowed to subvert.

....Asked by reporters if authorities were close to arresting al-Zarqawi himself, [Deputy Prime Minister Barham] Saleh replied: "We are getting close to finishing off al-Zarqawi and we will get rid of him."

We've heard this before from the Iraqis, and it hasn't been true yet. Still, here's hoping it pans out this time.

CHENEY AT AUSCHWITZ....The Washington Post's Robin Givhan complains today that everyone was dressed properly at yesterday's gathering to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz except for Dick Cheney:

The vice president, however, was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower.

Cheney stood out in a sea of black-coated world leaders because he was wearing an olive drab parka with a fur-trimmed hood. It is embroidered with his name. It reminded one of the way in which children's clothes are inscribed with their names before they are sent away to camp. And indeed, the vice president looked like an awkward boy amid the well-dressed adults.

Like other attendees, the vice president was wearing a hat. But it was not a fedora or a Stetson or a fur hat or any kind of hat that one might wear to a memorial service as the representative of one's country. Instead, it was a knit ski cap, embroidered with the words "Staff 2001." It was the kind of hat a conventioneer might find in a goodie bag.

This is not the biggest deal in the world, but it sure is peculiar — especially since, as the bottom picture from a ceremony today shows, Cheney had a dark overcoat with him. It's not like he accidentally left it at home or something. I wonder what the deal was?

FIDGETING FOR LIFE....Many years ago I remarked to my sister-in-law that I was impressed by her ability to sit so still. When I sit I'm always fidgeting. Today, though, we learn that fidgeting is good for you:

The most detailed study ever conducted of mundane bodily movements found that obese people tend to be much less fidgety than lean people and spend at least two hours more each day just sitting still. The extra motion by lean people is enough to burn about 350 extra calories a day, which could add up to 10 to 20 pounds a year, the researchers found.

"There are these absolutely staggering differences between people who are lean and people who are obese," said James A. Levine of the Mayo Clinic, who led the research being published in Friday's issue of the journal Science. "The amount of this low-grade activity is so substantial that it could, in and of itself, could account for obesity quite easily."

Perhaps more importantly, Levine and his colleagues also discovered that people appear to be born with a propensity to be either fidgety or listless, indicating that it will take special measures to convert the naturally sedentary into the restless -- especially in a society geared toward a couch-potato existence.

Need to lose weight? Fidget!

THE CATO CALCULATOR....Matt and Jesse have been having fun with the Cato Institute's Social Security Calculator, a handy piece of agitprop designed to convince you that private accounts will make us all as rich as Croesus. However, just in case you actually take this kind of thing seriously, figuring that even Cato has to calculate compound interest honestly, keep in mind the assumptions behind the "Calculate" button:

• It assumes a 60-40 Stock-Bond fund that returns 5.27% per year. This means they're assuming a long-term real stock return of about 7% and a bond return of about 3%. This is absurdly high.

• It assumes real wage growth throughout your life of 4% per year. In other words, if you're 30 years old and making $30,000 per year, they figure that by the time you retire at age 67 you'll be hauling in $128,000 in 2004 dollars. If you're a 30-year-old stock broker, there's a chance that will happen, but if you're a 30-year-old grocery checker there isn't.

• They blithely assume away "debt service costs that could arise from financing the residual obligations of the current Social Security system." Cato's plan is a very expensive one, and its transition costs would probably be in the range of $20 trillion or so over 75 years. That's a lot to assume away.
  

Bottom line: the Cato calculator is a crock. Always remember to read the fine print.

UNION BUSTING....Back in 2002, President Bush complained that Senate Democrats didn't care about national security because they wouldn't approve his plans for the new Department of Homeland Security. Of course, the thing Democrats disapproved of wasn't DHS itself, which was their idea in the first place, it was Bush's plans to gut civil service protections for DHS employees.

On Wednesday the plan for DHS was announced, and I think it highlights the difficult position facing unions today. According the the Washington Post, the new rules restrict the ability of unions to negotiate over "such matters as where employees will be deployed, the type of work they will do and the equipment they will use." Disputes will be arbitrated by an internal board instead of an independent agency, and the union claims that overall pay will also be reduced under the new rules.

These are all things that probably strike a lot of people as unfair, and if the union plays its cards correctly it might be able to build a fair amount of public sympathy for its position. But there's also this:

A raise or promotion -- moving up in a pay range or rising to the next one -- will depend on receiving a satisfactory performance rating from a supervisor, said officials with homeland security and the Office of Personnel Management.

...."They are encouraging a management of coercion and intimidation," said John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees. He added: "This is not a modern system. This is a step backward."

This is the point at which the public probably tunes out. Civil service protections were put in place to prevent political manipulation of government employees, not to guarantee endless promotions to mediocre workers regardless of their performance. If John Gage thinks that basing pay increases partly on the results of an annual review constitutes "a management of coercion and intimidation," public support for his union will evaporate. To most people, paying for performance sounds pretty reasonable.

I think this is one of the big dilemmas for old line unions like the industrial unions and the public employee unions. Most Americans support the idea that workers should be paid decently and treated fairly, and often support unions when those are the issues. But when the issue becomes a hardline defense of pure seniority or Byzantine work rules, it looks like unions are just defending the right not to work very hard. Nobody supports that, especially for people being paid with tax dollars.

This has the effect of reducing overall public support for unions, which in turn reduces the ability of unions to protect even the things where they do have public support. It's a vicious circle.

PRIVATIZATION IN CHILE....You really need to read all of Larry Rohter's article in today's New York Times about Chile's experience with Social Security privatization, but I can't resist one excerpt. As background, note that privatization was introduced in 1980 under the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet:

Chile spends about $2 billion a year to pay retirees from its armed forces, according to Mr. Scolari. The military imposed privatization on the rest of the country, but was careful to preserve its own advantages and exclude fellow soldiers from the system. Despite calls that the military be forced to give up its exemption, no civilian government has been prepared to pursue that.

There's too much other good stuff in the article to know where to begin. Just read the whole thing.

SOCIAL SECURITY BONDS....In 2018 (approximately), payroll taxes will no longer be enough to cover Social Security payments. To make up the difference, treasury bonds from Social Security's trust fund will be sold back to the government, and in order to pay for those bonds income taxes will have to be raised.

Is this fiscal Armageddon? Hardly. As I say in Thursday's Christian Science Monitor, middle-class workers have been subsidizing high earners for over 20 years as part of the bargain crafted in the Greenspan/Reagan reforms of 1983:

For more than two decades, low- and middle-income Americans have kept their part of the bargain, paying more in payroll taxes than Social Security needs and helping to keep income taxes low. In return, beginning in 2018, high earners are expected to start paying a bit more in income taxes in order to help keep payroll taxes low.

The key point here is that payroll taxes are mostly paid by middle and low income workers — and they've been overpaying for years. Income taxes are mostly paid by the well off, and the extra money from payroll taxes has allowed them to underpay for years. In 2018 that reverses, so paying back those bonds isn't just a moral obligation between generations, it's also a moral obligation between the wealthy and the middle class.

Here's an interesting addendum. During the editing of this piece the Monitor's op-ed editor asked me how much income taxes would have to be raised. There's no precise answer to this, but after a bit of mental noodling I told her it was in the neighborhood of 1% per year for 20 years starting in 2018, a total increase of about one-fifth compared to today's tax rates. This startled her because it seemed so high.

But here are some numbers to chew on:

• In 2004, Social Security had income of $653 billion and paid benefits of $500 billion.

• That amounts to a surplus of $153 billion. If workers weren't overpaying that amount, we'd have to make it up with higher income taxes in order to stay revenue neutral.

• Total personal income taxes in 2004 amounted to $765 billion. Raising an additional $153 billion would require income taxes to increase by one-fifth.
  

So while a one-fifth increase in income taxes starting in 2018 might seem like a lot, income taxes would be a fifth higher right now today if the middle class weren't already overpaying payroll taxes by considerably more than a fifth. Compared to that, the phased in approach starting a decade from now looks pretty sweet, doesn't it?

UPDATE: Based on comments, "20%" changed to "one-fifth" throughout. Just to be clear, if you pay, say, 15% of your income in income taxes, a one-fifth increase means you'd pay 18% of your income in taxes.

SELF-ESTEEM....This wasn't online yesterday, but psychologist Roy Baumeister had an op-ed in the LA Times on Tuesday summarizing a literature review he did last year that examined the effects of self-esteem:

Here are some of our disappointing findings. High self- esteem in schoolchildren does not produce better grades....Self-esteem doesn't make adults perform better at their jobs either....Likewise, people with high self-esteem think they make better impressions, have stronger friendships and have better romantic lives than other people, but the data don't support their self-flattering views....It was widely believed that low self-esteem could be a cause of violence, but in reality violent individuals, groups and nations think very well of themselves....High self-esteem doesn't prevent youngsters from cheating or stealing or experimenting with drugs and sex.

There were a couple of benefits to high self-esteem ("It feels good and it supports initiative"), but that's it. His conclusion?

After all these years, I'm sorry to say, my recommendation is this: Forget about self-esteem and concentrate more on self-control and self-discipline.

Recent work suggests this would be good for the individual and good for society — and might even be able to fill some of those promises that self-esteem once made but could not keep.

My mother, who taught fourth grade for 30 years and became heartily sick of parents who insisted that she hand out high grades to undeserving kids in order not to damage their self-esteem, says "hear hear."

PRIORITIES....Margaret Spellings took over as Education Secretary on Monday. So what did she do on Tuesday?

Answer: she wrote a letter to PBS complaining that an episode of one of their children's shows included a passing reference to a gay couple:

"Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the lifestyles portrayed in the episode," Spellings wrote in a letter sent Tuesday to Pat Mitchell, president and chief executive officer of PBS.

"Congress' and the Department's purpose in funding this programming certainly was not to introduce this kind of subject matter to children, particularly through the powerful and intimate medium of television."

I'm glad to see Spellings has her priorities straight. I wonder what she'll do today?

(Via Sam Heldman.)

SOCIAL SECURITY AS A WEDGE ISSUE....Have you noticed that Republicans are now treating Social Security as a classic wedge issue? Off the top of my head, the following groups have already been targets of attempts to peel them off from the rest of the country:

• The elderly. They've been promised over and over that current retirees and those "close to retirement" won't be affected. The message is clear: there's no need to fight us on this since we aren't going to touch your benefits.

• The young. George Bush has tacitly endorsed the belief of many young people that Social Security will be bankrupt by the time they retire and that they'll never get a dime from it. This intergenerational fear is a key component of the private account sales job: after all, regardless of whether private accounts are a good idea, they're still better than nothing, right?

• Blacks. Bush met with black leaders on Tuesday to try to convince them that they get a raw deal from the current system because blacks have shorter lifespans and therefore don't collect their fair share of benefits. The fact that this isn't true had its usual effect on Bush's willingness to say it: none at all.

• The well off. Under the current Social Security system, the well off get relatively lower benefits (compared to contributions) than the poor. In other words, the well off probably would do better with private accounts than they do with the current system. The top 20-30% of income earners are the core wedge group the whole private account concept was built around in the first place.
  

Republicans are obviously trying to ignite open warfare by playing all of these groups off each other, and it's potentially a very effective strategy. After all, if you can get active support from the young, the well off, and blacks, while dulling opposition from the elderly, you've got quite a coalition. Tell them each different stories and then watch them fight it out with whoever's left.

(What's even more ironic is the obvious identity of "whoever's left": middle and working class white men, a group that's among President Bush's most enthusiastic supporters. You'd think Bush would show them a little more gratitude.)

I suspect this strategy won't work, because in the end these groups won't rise to the bait. Still, it's something to watch out for. It's a very cynical wedge strategy, something that Republicans have gotten very, very good at over the past few decades.

MEDIA KUDOS....Since the press gets a lot of bashing in the blogosphere, and occasionally right here on my own blog, it's worth commending them for their coverage of the CBO budget report yesterday. Despite the confusing array of numbers on offer, the major papers all got both the story and the headline right: namely, that in an apples-to-apples comparison, the budget deficit is getting worse.

The New York Times headline said "Budget Deficit Will Rise Again," and the story included the excellent graphic reproduced above. The LA Times headed their story "Budget Deficit to Set Record," and noted in the second paragraph that "congressional analysts forecast a generally worsening budget outlook, saying the federal deficit would become a knottier problem in the next 10 years." The Washington Post headline read "Record '05 Deficit Forecast."

Social Security reporting has been getting more accurate too, even if more and more reporters are buying into the administration's Orwellian language decrees about "personal accounts" vs. "private accounts." So maybe there's hope after all.

UPDATE: Needless to say, the Wall Street Journal editorial page refuses to go along with the crowd. Their record of egregious intellectual dishonesty remains unbroken.

BAD STUFF....Did the Iraqi police really arrest terrorist thug Abu Musab al-Zarqawi but then let him go seven hours later because they didn't recognize him? Please tell me this isn't true.

GOOD STUFF....I've been out all evening and don't have time to blog now, but Josh, Matt, and Atrios have lots of good stuff up.

THE BUDGET FANTASYLAND CONTINUES....Hot on the heels of the CBO's projections, the White House made their own budget projections today:

President Bush will ask Congress for an extra $80 billion next month, mostly to cover costs of the war in Iraq, and White House officials predicted this afternoon that the budget deficit would hit a new record of $427 billion this year.

....White House officials said today that they were still on track to fulfill President Bush's campaign promise of reducing the budget deficit in half by 2009.

So last year's deficit was $412 billion, and this year's deficit will be $427 billion, but they're still "on track" to cut the deficit in half.

Clap your hands!

24 TRIVIA....This is completely off topic, but 24 fans may have noted that in last night's episode the Secretary of Defense's daughter — who is apparently her father's ideological soulmate — mentioned that a guy she had recognized was familiar because she had previously seen him at a Heritage Foundation shindig.

As I recall, it was never clear in previous seasons whether President David Palmer was a Democrat or a Republican. Sure, he was a black guy who was formerly a senator from California, but hey, who knows? California elected Arnold, after all. But this latest bit of dialog pretty clearly indicates that the Secretary of Defense's daughter, and therefore the Secretary of Defense as well, are the kind of folks who hang out at Heritage Foundation events and are therefore Republicans. In addition, the SecDef's son, who hates his father's politics, is some kind of lefty peacenik type.

Unless you require considerably more stringent standards of proof than I do in matters like this, I'd say that Palmer was clearly a Democrat and this season's president, who beat him in the election that took place in the off season, is a Republican. Whether that means we can expect a more kick butt executive response to terrorism remains to be seen.

RUMSFELD NOT WELCOME IN GERMANY?....This is fascinating: via Volokh, I see that Donald Rumsfeld has officially canceled a trip to the Munich Security Conference. Doug Feith will be going in his place.

The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights filed a complaint in December with the Federal German Prosecutor's Office against Rumsfeld accusing him of war crimes and torture in connection with detainee abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

Rumsfeld had made it known immediately after the complaint was filed that he would not attend the Munich conference unless Germany quashed the legal action.

The presumption here is that Rumsfeld is afraid of being arrested, although that's not entirely clear. German prosecutors are still examining the CCR complaint and haven't even decided to mount an investigation yet, let alone arrest anyone. Rumsfeld's nonattendance seems more likely to be motivated by a desire to pressure the German government than by an actual fear of arrest.

Still, who knows? I doubt this will go anywhere — at least, I hope it doesn't go anywhere, no matter how much I dislike Rumsfeld — but it's at least worth a post. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten any attention before.

URL UPDATE....Ezra Klein has decided to leave the cozy confines of Pandagon and move to a place of his own. However, he assures me that he and Jesse are still the best of friends. His new address is:

http://ezraklein.typepad.com

Update your bookmarks.

FUN WITH LUSKIN....Jesse points out today that Donald Luskin doesn't know anything about economics or even simple arithmetic. I guess that's not really news, but it's remarkable that Luskin keeps getting stupider over time. Here is Luskin complaining about the future total value of Social Security payments:

If payrolls are $295.5 trillion and the deficit is $10.4 trillion, that means Social Security’s anticipated payments to the infinite-horizon must, by definition, be $305.9 trillion....

Luskin is telling us that total Social Security payments will be higher than total payroll. This is a powerful mind at work.

Brad DeLong now calls Luskin "the stupidest man alive." Personally, though, I think this is unfair to stupid men. Luskin is in a class by himself.

And Brad is right to wonder, yet again, why National Review continues to print his stuff. It's one thing to employ economic writers who have conservative views, but it's another to employ economic writers who plainly have no clue what they're talking about. Don't they have any self respect left at all?

DEFICITS FOREVER....The CBO's latest deficit projections are out, and the press is accurately reporting that they show a reduced deficit for 2005 only because the CBO is projecting zero new expenses for the war in Iraq. Why? Because last year supplemental military appropriations totaled $115 billion and CBO is required by law to extrapolate that into the future. This year — so far — there have been no supplemental military appropriations, so CBO is now legally required to extrapolate that into the future.

No, this doesn't really make sense, but that's the way it goes. In reality, last year's deficit was $412 billion, and this year's deficit is not going to be $368 billion, it's going to be at least $400 billion and probably higher.

What's more, the 10-year deficit projection is even worse. The CBO report itself explains all this nicely if you're willing to wade through the text. If you're not, I've created a handy graphic below.

Bottom line for an apples-to-apples comparison: last September CBO was projecting a 10-year deficit of $861 billion not counting Iraq. Today, CBO is projecting a 10-year deficit of $1,364 billion not counting Iraq. In other words, the projected deficit sans Iraq has gone up 58%.

That's still a bit of a fiction, since it doesn't include reasonable assumptions about future tax cuts and spending increases. Those estimates come later in the report. But even without that, the bottom line is that deficit projections continue to get higher and higher. We may soon find out, as Dick Cheney is alleged to have said, whether deficits really matter.

UPDATE: Max has more, including his own estimate of future deficits compared to the official "baseline" estimates CBO is legally required to supply.

EQUAL TIME FOR PTOLEMY....How often do I get to link to a snarky Instapundit post that I completely agree with? Not often. But this one is right on the money.

YEAH, BABY!....Brad Plumer thinks the Democratic agenda announced today is too wimpy. Why not aim for the moon?

The Democrats, after all, have no hope of getting any of these things passed over the next four years. Especially since House Speaker Dennis Hastert has already declared that no bill will get by the lower chamber unless it has the support of a majority of Republicans. So the Democrats don't need to craft bills that hew closely to political reality. Like Pedro in Napoleon Dynamite, they can promise that "If you vote for me, all of your wildest dreams will come true." So on education, for instance, they could have proposed universal preschool. On voting reform, they could have promised to abolish the electoral college, or eliminate gerrymandering. On budget reform, they could have vowed to "end corporate pork as we know it". What? These things will never happen, you say? Who cares? The goal of an opposition agenda isn't to get stuff passed through Congress; the goal is to define what the opposition party stands for.

Arf!

FANTASTIC!....I went out to get my hair cut this afternoon at our local Fantastic Sam's (nothing's too good for me!), and as I was leaving a guy walked up to me and introduced himself.

"Hi, I'm Steve Freyer, the chairman of Fantastic Sam's. Did they treat you well in there?"

"Um, sure. Everything was fine."

"Do you come here often."

"Every four weeks or so."

"Just you, or does the rest of your fa