Charlie’s Challenge

This week, David Ignatius has a wonderful column in the Washington Post about this magazine's founder, Charles Peters, who recently turned 80. Last month, former and current editors of the magazine gathered in New York for a dinner in his honor. As Ignatius points out, the Washington Monthly's impact is often measured by the success Peters' young editors achieved after they left the magazine, and the event was something of a Who's Who of American journalism. True to form, though, Charlie wasn't about to let the occasion pass without issuing a challenge designed to make his accomplished alumni feel a little uncomfortable.

Journalists, he lamented, all too often become complacent about their own status, writing about the concerns of their privileged peers instead of the far more pressing problems of those further down the socio-economic scale. So in the spirit of Charlie's challenge, this week's Scoop addresses a piece of recent news that received only a glancing mention from the press. Last week, the Bush administration announced a proposal to increase the fees that immigrants pay to apply for citizenship or permanent residency by up to 86 percent. Under the Bush plan, the cost of a citizenship application would rise from $330 to $595, and a green-card application would jump from $325 to $905. The existing charges might not sound like much. But for many immigrants, they can be formidable—especially when combined with a hefty bill from a lawyer (practically essential for de-coding the impenetrable immigration bureaucracy) and other assorted expenses like fingerprinting fees and travel costs. The new fees—particularly for immigrants who apply as families—will at best be a serious hardship, and at worst may prove prohibitive.

Writing for the Monthly back in 2004, Jonathan Rowe dubbed this kind of price hike a “Freedom Tax” a levy that penalizes aspiring Americans for doing exactly what the country ostensibly values most—working hard and observing the law—at precisely the moment when they can least afford it. It's certainly true that the dysfunctional and unaccountable system that currently grants legal status to immigrants needs a lot more money. But, as Rowe points out, the administration has been steadily raising immigration fees since Bush came to office "like a greedy plywood salesman before a hurricane," and the system hasn't become noticeably more efficient as a result. Even if the increased funding from the new fees might somehow magically transform the application process, requiring future immigrants to pay for years of willful neglect and mismanagement hardly seems like a fair solution.

There's a two-month public comment period before the fee increases take effect, but unfortunately this proposal isn't likely to meet a lot of energized opposition. Elected officials don't stand to gain much from helping people who can't vote, and so far, media coverage of the fee hike has been cursory at best. That's a shame, because this issue is about a lot more than visa fees. President Bush talks a good game about wanting to make sure that everyone who works hard and plays by the rules has a shot at the American Dream. Making life harder for those who are trying to be here legally hardly advances that goal.

Rachel Morris is an editor of the Washington Monthly.

Job Evaluations: When is positive, positive?

Last week, the Bush administration ousted six respected and effective US attorneys. Critics contended that the firings were political maneuvers designed to replace independent operators with loyal White House allies—a charge denied by the Bush administration, which cited “performance related” issues. Now, Marisa Taylor of McClatchy Newspapers reports that at least five of the six had been given positive job evaluations before getting canned.

February 14, 2007

Duly Noted

"In presenting it, I was not endorsing its substance."

- Douglas Feith, Former under-secretary of defense explaining why he shouldn’t be held responsible for faulty intelligence, produced by his office, suggesting a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

SOURCE: Washington Post

Poll Talk: Attacking Iran

“Which comes closer to your opinion? Iran is a threat to the United States that requires military action now. Iran is a threat that can be contained with diplomacy now. OR, Iran is not a threat to the United States at this time.”

Military Action Now	21%
Diplomacy Now	57%
Not a Threat	14%
Unsure	8%

-CBS News poll, conducted Feb 8-11, 2007:

What We're Reading

• Crack investigative reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele—who were let go by Time last year—have a fascinating piece in this month’s Vanity Fair about SAIC, the obscure behemoth of government-contracting firms that has far more contracts than well-known outfits like Halliburton. The piece investigates some of SAIC’s more dubious work on intelligence and Iraq, and also opens a valuable window onto the workings of the private welfare state that is federal contracting.

• In a New Yorker piece that’s making waves, Jane Mayer shows that soldiers in the field are being directly influenced by the torture methods used on FOX’s primetime terror drama “24,” with predictably worrying results.

Blogging Animal: Kevin Drum

MILEAGE STANDARDS....You know that something has changed when even Ted Stevens is in favor of raising fuel mileage standards for cars. The Los Angeles Times reports:

"I'm trying to protect my state," said Stevens, who recently called climate change "more apparent in Alaska than anywhere else."

The 83-year-old senator's change of heart illustrates how the landscape has shifted in Congress, and could signal a turning point in the long campaign by environmentalists -- successfully fended off by Detroit -- to toughen fuel-economy standards.

"There is clear bipartisan agreement, for the first time in 30 years, that Congress is going to have to act to increase fuel economy standards," said Philip E. Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust.

This is one of those subjects that's a big deal among traditional liberal environmental groups but gets surprisingly little love in the blogosphere, which (to the extent it cares at all) seems to favor higher gasoline taxes as the best way to reduce gasoline usage. This is odd, since CAFE standards have a clearly demonstrated capacity to reduce gasoline consumption while higher gasoline prices have a very modest effect. What's more, gasoline taxes hurt the poor far more than the rich and are probably even less likely than higher mileage standards to make it through the legislative meatgrinder. Higher CAFE standards ought to be a slam dunk for anyone who cares about global warming, cleaning up the air, and reducing our dependence on oil.

Of course, that's not to say that we shouldn't favor higher gasoline taxes too. After all, we can do more than one thing if we're serious about this stuff. A broad-based carbon tax is the backbone of any decent energy policy, partly because it reduces consumption and partly because (unlike CAFE standards) it raises money that we could use to fund other mitigation programs. I'm also a fan of a gas guzzler tax/credit scheme, which taxes low-mileage cars while providing refunds to purchasers of high-mileage cars. This can be revenue neutral if desired; it incentivizes the purchase of efficient cars; and it's strongly progressive since rich people tend to buy expensive, low-mileage cars. And if we ever do impose higher gasoline taxes, a refund for small cars would help offset the impact of the tax on the poor and working class.

As for CAFE standards themselves, I don't really understand George Bush's proposal to make them "attribute-based" (i.e., different targets for different classes of cars). Everyone agrees that the goal of increased mileage standards is to improve average fuel consumption, so why not just mandate that, maybe add in a credit-trading scheme, and then let the car manufacturers comply any way they want? Creating extra rules and extra complexity is just an invitation to a bigger bureaucracy and provokes attempts to game the system by automakers. Why not funnel that energy into making better cars instead?

Read more from Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog.