Organizing Entropy

The Super Committee - WASF edition

So, the Super-Committee failed.  I suppose that's not surprising.  The sad thing, though, is that their mandate was only to reduce the deficit by about $1.5 trillion over ten years.  While that sounds like quite a lot, it's only about 12% of total projected deficit over the next decade - expected to be around $13 trillion.  Even if they were successful, we'd still have about $11.5 trillion to go.  If we can't agree on 10% of the problem, how are we going to tackle the other 90%?  WASF

Aghanistan, the Generals and the Colonels

Via Zenpundit comes a great debate on war, Afghanistan and leadership.  I offered my own thoughts in a comment at Carl Prine's Line of Departure, which I'll reproduce below.  It pretty much encapsulates my analysis of the political situation with regard to Afghanistan.  The two colonels mentioned at the end of my comment are the authors of the first two pieces in the debate - Col. Yingling and Col. Gentile.

 

The systemic problems with our military and political elites didn't just come into being by themselves, nor did the miasma that constitutes what passes for national security strategy. These troubles are rooted in our collective national culture working through domestic politics which, I think everyone agrees, is a mess. Underlying Afghanistan and Iraq is a collective belief that America must win - or at least we must be able to delude ourselves into thinking we didn't lose. In Iraq this is what the "Surge" did: It created the perception in the mind of the public that we had "won" Iraq. That perception provided the domestic political space for a "timetable for withdrawal” which was politically impossible only months earlier. The “surge” made a withdrawal strategy broadly acceptable and largely uncontroversial domestically simply because the withdrawal appeared to be the result of success and not bloody failure.

Similarly, Afghanistan today is a war about domestic US politics more than anything else. The deliberations and the decision in 2009 to try another surge was really a domestic political strategy. Biden’s strategy was comparatively politically risky for obvious reasons I won’t belabor here and that’s why it lost out over “surge II.” In short, the 2009 decision was an attempt to replicate the domestic political effects of the Iraq surge and provide the political space for a disengagement from Afghanistan under honorable conditions. There were lots of eager officers and political operatives at all levels who, knowing little of Afghanistan but buoyant with the “success” in Iraq, were eager to make it work. In their minds, all it took was the will and resources. Of course anyone who knew anything about Afghanistan at the time knew this strategy would fail and fail it has.

And so we muddle on, trying to “not lose” this war. The political and military elites are playing a game of musical chairs hoping they are not the one standing when the music finally stops. No one wants to take the political evisceration the public is sure to deal to our elites should they be held responsible by the public for the most powerful nation being defeated by a bunch of poorly trained and equipped irregulars in the so-called "graveyard of empires."

The reality is that Afghanistan is a null set. There is no winning, particularly through the military instrument – the best we can hope for is an honorable disengagement. The key to Afghanistan has always been Pakistan. The Coindinistas never had an answer for how to deal with the “safe-haven” there except for a lot of hand-waving (and the hand-waving is still failing after 10 years, who could have guessed that?) We can make the greatest Army in Afghanistan but it cannot survive without the support of its neighbor to the east. After 10 years, it should be clear that Pakistan isn’t about quit its desire to control Afghanistan in any way it can. Competent generals cannot change this equation. However, Generals with greater moral fortitude would point out this unpleasant fact to the political leadership. Generals with greater moral fortitude wouldn’t keep hand-waving about the Pakistani safe-haven and the centrality of Pakistan to the future of Afghanistan. Generals with greater moral fortitude would “arrange” to be called before Congress to be asked difficult questions and give difficult, career-ending answers (assuming one believes that retirement with full benefits a few years earlier than desired is actually “career ending” - a notion that's ludicrous to me.). Answering Congress is how GO’s can get out of the paradox of subordination to civilian control while publicly speaking necessary truth to power on the limits of military force. Has any GO done this for Afghanistan? Why not? Maybe two Colonels I greatly respect need to rise above their paygrade and do what our Generals won’t.

On NPR and Public Funding

Full disclosure:  I love my NPR.  I am of "member" (meaning I donate money to) my two local NPR stations.  I get most of my "what's going on in the world today" news from NPR.  I enjoy their weekend shows.  Their talk shows are generally much better than anything on TV. I probably consume 4-5 hours a day between the music and news programs.

 

The brouhaha from Jame's O'Keefe's undercover taping of NPR executives could well be the nail in the coffin for NPR's government funding.  It's sad it's come to this point and I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that NPR executives live in little bubbles like most executives do.  Hopefully new leadership will give the organization a new way forward after these latest debacles.

 

Despite my strong support for NPR, I'm against governmnt funding for NPR.  My reasons align with those given here and can be summed up by:

• NPR can survive and thrive without the funding - most NPR listeners are urban and relatively wealthy.
• The original reasons for government funding of public broadcasts no longer apply.

The thing is, however, I don't support the current GoP effort to cut off funding.   The reason is that I think it needs to be done responsibly and cutting it all off at once is not the responsible way to do it.  Cutting it all at once is going to cause problems for NPR and they will really have to scramble to their funding needs next year.  It would be an unneccesary shock to their finances.

The responsible way to cut NPR's funding is to phase it in over a period of time - say, five years.  Begin with a very modest cut this year and then ramp the cuts up until they are gone by year five.  That way, the organization and, especially, the smaller stations that do rely on that funding, have time to find money elsewhere or else cut their costs in other ways.

Blame for the Deficit

From Andrew Sullivan via Phronesisaical, we get this:

But what you see, I think, is the impact of supply side madness. Eisenhower managed to reduce the debt burden by almost 2 percent a year. George W "deficits don't matter" Bush managed to add 1.6 percent a year without a significant downturn. And yet for some reason, the public still associated the GOP with fiscal conservatism. This is quite simply the biggest mass delusion I've witnessed in the quarter of a century I've lived in America.

I agree completely the GOP isn't really a party of fiscal conservatism.  Of course, neither are the Democrats, which is precisely the problem.  I'm less sure the public actually believes the GoP are, in reality, fiscally conservative.  Certainly the Tea Partiers don't, else there wouldn't be a Tea Party to begin with. 

What's more annoying, though, is how this is inevitably framed as a partisan issue.  Sullivan's chart is a case-in-point.  It apparrently shows how good or bad one political party is over the other.  Like many similar charts, it is deeply flawed.

First, it doesn't make much sense to attribute budgets to the Presidency, especially solely to the Presidency.  Presidents don't write the budget.  Presidents don't have a line-item veto to change the budget, nor can Presidents force amendments or alterations.  Presidents can only provide their ideal budget as a suggestion (which Congress never simply passes) and then draw red lines on certain items and threaten a veto if Congress chooses to cross them.  That budgets are rarely vetoed is not a surprise - it's rarely worth the effort politically. Ultimately, a President's only real power is to choose whether or not to sign what Congress passes.  Simply put, Congress has primacy when it comes to the budget.

So, one could make a chart (and indeed many have) showing the budget deficit depending on who controls Congress, or the Senate.  Such charts don't show either party in a particularly good light when it comes to fiscal responsibility.

The point of all this is that it takes three to tango when it comes to the budget - first the Congress, then the Senate, and finally the President.  Trying to figure out which party is "better" after factoring in who controls all three is a hopeless and pointless exercise except to demonstrate that neither party displays much in the way of fiscal responsibility.

So please, enough with the tired charts and enough with attributing to Presidents power that they don't possess.

Thoughts on the Election

The election is pretty much over and the news is that the GoP gained a huge, historically significant number of seats in the Congress.  A lot of people are trying to figure out why this happened and what it means.  I think it's safe to say, based on the historical pattern, that most partisans will reach the wrong conclusions, preferring instead the usually narratives which lack serious self-examination.

Dave Schuler gets to the heart of the matter with this:

The political parties are now fully obsolete, a sort of Weekend at Bernie’s proposition, being propped up because our political institutions support them, and something approximating a network model is taking hold. Think social media rather than smoke-filled rooms.

I think that is pretty much right - the two parties simply have not adapted to the realities of the 21st century yet they are entrenched to such an extent they haven't been forced to changed.  I would expect future election cycles will exhibit more of the ping-pong effect we've seen in recent election cycles as an increasingly frustrated electorate votes each party out of power in turn.

Most people are pointing to Nancy Pelosi as the biggest loser in all of this, but I think it may turn out to be President Obama.  GoP control of the Congress but not the Senate is probably the worst outcome of this for him politically.

The Danger of Overpromising

On this election day there's a lot of frustration among liberals and Democrats over the likely drubbing their party is expected to take today.  A common theme is expressed by Jason Sigger over at Armchair Generalist:

 

I still can't quite wrap my head around the idea that people are upset with President Obama because he didn't fix the massive train wreck caused by the last administration in two years. So these angry, fearful people are going to give the reins to the very asshole politicians who've been consistently obstructing our government's attempts to get back on the right track.

 

My sense is that the electorate is not voting GOP because they think the Republicans are better, but out of their frustration with the Democrat's handling of the economy. The unfortunate fact is that this Administration (along with Congressional Democrats), beginning in the campaign, over-promised and under-delivered on that one issue that matters most to people.  The Administration's predictions about what would happen in response to their policies were wrong, in some cases grossly wrong.  People, understandably in my view, don't want to hear the excuses and blame-shifting about why the predictions were wrong, nor do they believe the arguments about the stimulus "creating or saving" millions of jobs when unemployment remains close to 10%.  Maybe that's not fair and maybe their policies did prevent unemployment from reaching 11 or even 12%, but that is all politically irrelevant since the administration assured the public the stimulus would keep it under 8%.  The Administration persisted in overly-rosy projections with the "Recovery Summer" rhetoric which, again, failed to meet expectations.

 

The simple lesson here is credibility matters.  Credibility is a currency that is difficult to gain and easy to lose.  The quickest way to destroy credibility is to make promises and then fail to keep them.

 

Additionally, there is the perception, whether deserved or not, that the President and Congress moved off the economy too quickly and into health care.  The problems with the health care bill, both real and political, are compounding the negative view of Democrats and Congress.  The Democrats chose to push implementation back to 2014 in order to keep under the President's arbitrary cost limit of $900 billion.  That decision came with consequences in that the Democrats are suffering politically from all the legislation's negatives while not enjoying much in the way of positive benefits.

 

Finally, I think  it's important to point out that most people, especially "swing" voters are not ideologically in the bag for one party or another.  While it's obvious to point that out, it means that those voters aren't going to give the President and Congressional Democrats the benefit of the doubt for over-promising and under-delivering.  Those predisposed to the Democrats tend to believe that even if the policies didn't work, or didn't work as well as advertised, that the Democrats are a better choice regardless.  That's a view that I don't think is shared by most Americans which is why they are voting against Democrats this election.