Tag Archives: budget

Louisiana Republicans Wondering Why Bobby Jindal Doesn’t Call Them Anymore

by LazaroFairweath Posted on May 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has a new health care reform plan, a new political non-profit, and dreams of running for president in two years. But for the time being, he’s still governor of Louisiana.

Sort of.

Even as the legislature wrestles over hot-button issues—including a bill to rein in the Common Core math and English standards and a proposal to prevent parishes from suing oil companies for coastal land loss—the second-term governor has been largely AWOL from Baton Rouge. He’s as likely to pop up at the DC speech circuit (or in an early 2016 primary state) as he is to pick up the phone to hammer out legislation. And according to Louisiana-based investigative reporting site The Lens, Republicans back home are starting to take it personally:

Pearson said he finds Jindal’s detachment “a little disheartening.” The Slidell Republican said he has seen the governor twice this session: on opening day and at a committee chairman’s lunch.

“We have big problems with the budget. It looks like we’re kicking the can down the road for the next one or two years,” Pearson said, adding, “God, it would be nice to see his face on the House floor.

“He’s the governor, the leader of the state. It’s like being on a battlefield and seeing your general to know he’s there and cares about the troops,” Pearson added. “He should want to be here, be engaged. I don’t see any evidence that he is.”

Unease over Jindal’s frequent out-of-state visits has been simmering for a while now among conservative allies. (Previously, The Lens explored the governor’s failure to build to relationships with GOP lawmakers, with more than a dozen on-the-record critiques.) When I profiled Jindal for the magazine in March, I was struck by just how little love was lost between the boy-genius governor and the rank-and-file of his state party. As GOP presidential primary season creeps closer, those tensions aren’t likely to go away.

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Louisiana Republicans Wondering Why Bobby Jindal Doesn’t Call Them Anymore

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Republicans Would Rather Blow Up the Budget Than Admit That Global Warming Is Real

by Fay4232lippdzs Posted on May 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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It seems like every year we have lots of wildfires out west, and every year there’s not enough money to fight them. How come? Brad Plumer provides the nickel explanation:

The first key fact to note here is that US wildfires have gotten much bigger over the past three decades. There’s some variation from year to year, but the overall trend is upward. One recent study in Geophysical Research Letters found that wildfires in the western United States grew at a rate of 90,000 acres per year between 1984 and 2011. What’s more, the authors found, the increase was statistically unlikely to be due to random chance.

….Put it all together, and many experts and politicians have argued that the way Congress plans for wildfires has become obsolete and counterproductive. Right now, Congress gives agencies like the US Forest Service a budget for fire suppression that’s based on the average cost of wildfires over the previous 10 years. Of course, if wildfires are getting bigger over time, that’s going to create constant shortfalls.

The problem should be pretty obvious. If you take a look at the chart above (to which I’ve added the handy trend line), you can see that the average of the past ten years is going to be where the line was around 2008. That’s roughly 5 million acres. But the trend line keeps going up, and in 2014 you can figure that it’s likely to be around 6 million acres.

Obviously there’s a large amount of variability, and even if you plan rationally you’re still going to fall short some years. Still, at least you’d come closer. So why not do it?

I’ll take a guess: Aside from the fact that members of Congress always prefer rosy forecasts so they can pretend their budgets are more balanced than they really are, there are the reasons that wildfires keep getting bigger and deadlier. One culprit is poor forestry practices. There are invasive species. And there’s global warming.

Oh yeah: global warming. That’s the big one. If Republicans in Congress acknowledged that wildfires were getting steadily bigger over time, it would be tantamount to admitting that global warming is real. And we can’t have that, can we?

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Republicans Would Rather Blow Up the Budget Than Admit That Global Warming Is Real

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Medicaid Expansion Now an Even Better Deal For States

by LuciaUmbagai Posted on April 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Need some more good news on Obamacare? How about some mixed news instead? Here it is:

Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates released last week show that health reform’s Medicaid expansion, which many opponents wrongly claim will cripple state budgets, is an even better deal for states than previously thought….CBO now estimates that the federal government will, on average, pick up more than 95 percent of the total cost of the Medicaid expansion and other health reform-related costs in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) over the next ten years (2015-2024).

The good news is obvious: the Medicaid expansion is an even better deal for states than we thought. The federal government will pick up nearly the entire cost of expansion, and when you account for money that states will save from reduced amounts of indigent care and greater help with mental health costs, the net cost of expansion gets very close to zero.

The mixed nature of this seemingly good news comes from the reason for CBO’s more optimistic budget projection: it’s because they think the program will cover fewer people than they previously projected. There had always been a fear among states that lots of people who were already eligible for Medicaid—but had never bothered applying for it—would hear the Obamacare hoopla and “come out of the woodwork” to claim benefits. Since these folks weren’t technically part of the expansion, states would be on the hook to cover the bulk of their costs.

CBO now believes this fear was overblown. Apparently most people who didn’t bother with Medicaid before Obamacare took effect aren’t going to bother with it now either. That’s good for state budgets, but obviously not so good for all the people who could be getting medical care but aren’t.

For what it’s worth, this is a tradeoff we’re going to see a lot of. Unless the actual cost of medical care comes down, the budget impact of Obamacare is always going to depend on how many people benefit from it. If lots of people sign up, that’s good for public health but costly for taxpayers. If fewer people sign up, then government spending goes down but fewer people receive medical care. There aren’t very many ways around this iron law.

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Medicaid Expansion Now an Even Better Deal For States

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The Pentagon’s Phony Budget War

by Bart Jameson Posted on March 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Washington is pushing the panic button, claiming austerity is hollowing out our armed forces and our national security is at risk. That was the message Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel delivered last week when he announced that the Army would shrink to levels not seen since before World War II. Headlines about this crisis followed in papers like the New York Times and members of Congress issued statements swearing that they would never allow our security to be held hostage to the budget-cutting process.

Yet a careful look at budget figures for the US military—a bureaucratic juggernaut accounting for 57 percent of the federal discretionary budget and nearly 40 percent of all military spending on this planet—shows that such claims have been largely fictional. Despite cries of doom since the across-the-board cuts known as sequestration surfaced in Washington in 2011, the Pentagon has seen few actual reductions, and there is no indication that will change any time soon.

This piece of potentially explosive news has, however, gone missing in action—and the “news” that replaced it could prove to be one of the great bait-and-switch stories of our time.

The Pentagon Cries Wolf, Round One

As sequestration first approached, the Pentagon issued deafening cries of despair. Looming cuts would “inflict lasting damage on our national defense and hurt the very men and women who protect this country,” said Secretary Hagel in December 2012.

Sequestration went into effect in March 2013 and was slated to slice $54.6 billion from the Pentagon’s $550 billion larger-than-the-economy-of-Sweden budget. But Congress didn’t have the stomach for it, so lawmakers knocked the cuts down to $37 billion. (Domestic programs like Head Start and cancer research received no such special dispensation.)

By law, the cuts were to be applied across the board. But that, too, didn’t go as planned. The Pentagon was able to do something hardly recognizable as a cut at all. Having the luxury of unspent funds from previous budgets—known obscurely as “prior year unobligated balances”—officials reallocated some of the cuts to those funds instead.

In the end, the Pentagon shaved about 5.7 percent, or $31 billion, from its 2013 budget. And just how painful did that turn out to be? Frank Kendall, who serves as the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, has acknowledged that the Pentagon “cried wolf.” Those cuts caused no substantial damage, he admitted.

And that’s not where the story ends—it’s where it begins.

Sequestration, the Phony Budget War, Round Two

A $54.6 billion slice was supposed to come out of the Pentagon budget in 2014. If that had actually happened, it would have amounted to around 10 percent of its budget. But after the hubbub over the supposedly devastating cuts of 2013, lawmakers set about softening the blow.

And this time they did a much better job.

In December 2013, a budget deal was brokered by Republican Congressman Paul Ryan and Democratic Senator Patty Murray. In it they agreed to reduce sequestration. Cuts for the Pentagon soon shrank to $34 billion for 2014.

And that was just a start.

All the cuts discussed so far pertain to what’s called the Pentagon’s “base” budget—its regular peacetime budget. That, however, doesn’t represent all of its funding. It gets a whole different budget for making war, and for the 13th year, the US is making war in Afghanistan. For that part of the budget, which falls into the Washington category of “Overseas Contingency Operations” (OCO), the Pentagon is getting an additional $85 billion in 2014.

And this is where something funny happens.

That war funding isn’t subject to caps or cuts or any restrictions at all. So imagine for a moment that you’re an official at the Pentagon—or the White House—and you’re committed to sparing the military from downsizing. Your budget has two parts: one that’s subject to caps and cuts, and one that isn’t. What do you do? When you hit a ceiling in the former, you stuff extra cash into the latter.

It takes a fine-toothed comb to discover how this is done. Todd Harrison, senior fellow for defense studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, found that the Pentagon was stashing an estimated extra $20 billion worth of non-war funding in the “operation and maintenance” accounts of its proposed 2014 war budget. And since all federal agencies work in concert with the White House to craft their budget proposals, it’s safe to say that the Obama administration was in on the game.

Add the December budget deal to this $20 billion switcheroo and the sequester cuts for 2014 were now down to $14 billion, hardly a devastating sum given the roughly $550 billion in previously projected funding.

And the story’s still not over.

When it was time to write the Pentagon budget into law, appropriators in Congress wanted in on the fun. As Winslow Wheeler of the Project on Government Oversight discovered, lawmakers added a $10.8 billion slush fund to the war budget.

All told, that leaves $3.4 billion—a cut of less than 1 percent from Pentagon funding this year. It’s hard to imagine that anyone in the sprawling bureaucracy of the Defense Department will even notice. Nonetheless, last week Secretary Hagel insisted that “sequestration requires cuts so deep, so abrupt, so quickly that…the only way to implement them is to sharply reduce spending on our readiness and modernization, which would almost certainly result in a hollow force.”

Yet this less than 1 percent cut comes from a budget that, at last count, was the size of the next 10 largest military budgets on the planet combined. If you can find a threat to our national security in this story, your sleuthing powers are greater than mine. Meanwhile, in the non-military part of the budget, sequestration has brought cuts that actually matter to everything from public education to the justice system.

Cashing in on the “Cuts,” Round Three and Beyond

After two years of uproar over mostly phantom cuts, 2015 isn’t likely to bring austerity to the Pentagon either. Last December’s budget deal already reduced the cuts projected for 2015, and President Obama is now asking for something he’s calling the “Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative.” It would deliver an extra $26 billion to the Pentagon next year. And that still leaves the war budget for officials to use as a cash cow.

And the president is proposing significant growth in military spending further down the road. In his 2015 budget plan, he’s asking Congress to approve an additional $115 billion in extra Pentagon funds for the years 2016-2019.

My guess is he’ll claim that our national security requires it after the years of austerity.

Mattea Kramer is a TomDispatch regular and Research Director at National Priorities Project, which is a 2014 nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. She is also the lead author of the book A People’s Guide to the Federal Budget.To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

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The Pentagon’s Phony Budget War

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Paul Ryan’s Superficial Critique of Federal Poverty Programs

by DorethaMoo Posted on March 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), chairman of the House budget committee, has apparently decided that by pretending to volunteer in a soup kitchen during the 2012 presidential campaign he didn’t do enough to prove he’s serious about anti-poverty policy. So he and his aides spent about a year examining federal anti-poverty programs and the congressman issued a report on their findings. The study, heralded in the Washington Post as a document likely to inform the GOP budget proposal expected later this month, is hefty, weighing in at more than 200 pages. It seems designed to bolster Ryan, a possible contender for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, as his party’s top dog on policy. But as any student who’s padded a paper knows, length doesn’t equal depth. And in this case, Ryan’s report is essentially an overview of existing federal poverty policies, itemized with a few citations to some research indicating how well they may or may not work. It’s a little like Federal Poverty Programs for Dummies, without any policy alternatives to be found. Instead, the report relies on cherry-picked data points to justify slashing entitlements.

Take the report’s description of the Child Care and Development Fund, a federal program that provides a miniscule amount of money to help low-income people afford child care so they can go to work. On the work part, Ryan seems to approve. He notes that data show that single mothers who get a childcare subsidy are—surprise!—more likely to go to work or go back to school. However, the data show that the childcare subsidy also encourages married women to go to work, and here, it’s clear, the GOP does not approve. The report suggests that when poor, married women get jobs thanks to the childcare benefit, their kids get totally neglected. Not only that, it asserts that such programs can cause “lower-quality parental relationships.” Of course, the the kids of single moms are also supposedly harmed by the subsidy, according to the report, which warns that childcare subsidies are related to increased health and behavioral problems in children, poor school performance—and it makes them fat.

It’s hardly a sophisticated analysis of the impact of childcare subsidies on poor families that might come from a real investigation of a federal poverty program—there are no voices from actual program users—but given the source, that’s no surprise. Ryan has been trying to convince the public for a while now that he really cares about the poor, and that, driven by his Catholic faith, he’s genuinely interested in trying to tackle entrenched poverty. But the proposals he’s offered up in the past—big budget cuts to poverty programs, block-granting Medicaid—have almost universally promised to make the suffering of the poor much worse, not better. His anti-poverty proposals have been so severe that he even earned the wrath of the conservative US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which found his ideas in direct conflict with the church’s teachings on social justice.

In his latest offering on the subject of poverty, Ryan does champion a few federal programs, namely the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. That’s the modern version of the old cash entitlement system for low-income single moms that was “reformed” in 1996 by turning federal assistance money over to the states to administer. The welfare reform bill made it much more difficult for low-income families to access the safety net by putting sharp limits on benefits and imposing stiff work requirements as a condition of receiving help. The Ryan report credits the 1996 welfare reform bill with bringing down child poverty rates and increasing workforce participation rates of single mothers, at least up until 2001, when poverty rates started to spike again. But again, he’s writing in a vacuum: The report fails to mention that the main reason for the big drop in poverty and employment rates during that time was a major economic boom that by 2000 had brought the unemployment rate down to 4.0 percent, one of the lowest rates in recorded history, which made it a lot easier for welfare moms to find work.

In addition, even as Ryan champions welfare reform as a poverty killer, he fails to mention that though some measures of poverty went down after the welfare reform law was passed in 1996, the number of households living in deep poverty—on less than $2 per day—has more than doubled since then. So has welfare reform really alleviated poverty? It’s complicated. One thing it did do, however, was slash the amount of federal money spent on the program. The welfare budget hasn’t increased since 1996, meaning that the $16 billion program has lost a third of its value thanks to inflation.

Meanwhile, the report blames Supplemental Security Income (SSI), the federal disability program that’s recently become a favorite target of GOP budget hawks, for preventing people from joining the workforce. It cites a decade-old report suggesting that the program reduces the labor supply—but only of people between the ages of 60 and 64. The Ryan report contends that the program is full of scammers, particularly the parents of disabled children who have an incentive to keep them out of the workforce to keep the disability checks flowing. It claims that SSI permanently prevents children who receive disability payments from joining the workforce after they hit 18, without considering the possibility that these people are on SSI because they’re actually disabled and can’t work, even if they want to. And critically, Ryan doesn’t explain how anyone gets by on $535 a month, the average monthly SSI payment, or how that teeny bit of government money would be preferable to taking even a minimum-wage job.

These are fairly small oversights compared to the report’s biggest and most obvious omission, namely any discussion of the current economy and its relationship to poverty. Even as it knocks various poverty programs for discouraging labor force participation, Ryan’s study fails to mention the single biggest reason people don’t work: not enough jobs. Today, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (which Ryan cites with some regularity in his report), if every last job available in this country were filled tomorrow with an unemployed worker, three out of every five unemployed people would still be out of work.

Without acknowledging this basic economic fact, Ryan’s superficial review of federal poverty programs looks suspiciously like a move to help his party justify big cuts to social welfare programs. It doesn’t offer any new ideas that might improve programs to help the poor. It’s a cheat sheet for GOP budget cutters looking for easy targets.

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Rescinding the Cuts to Veteran’s Pensions Was In the Cards From the Start

by Teofil1vo Posted on February 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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December’s budget deal between Paul Ryan and Patty Murray included a bit of relief from the 2011 sequestration cuts, with the relief split evenly between domestic and military budgets. That even split was one of the guiding principles of the deal. But part of the military relief was paid for by $7 billion in cuts to veterans’ pensions, something that immediately prompted a storm of protest and, eventually, a move to rescind the cuts. Jared Bernstein comments:

True, that’s not huge bucks in the scheme of things. But the violation of this budget principle should not be taken lightly. A key point of the budget machinations that brought us to where we are today is that automatic spending cuts should be split between evenly between defense and non-defense (forget for a moment, that it’s not the discretionary side of the budget that’s responsible for our longer term fiscal challenges anyway). If Congress starts stealing from domestic programs to boost defense, it will unfairly and unwisely exacerbate already unsustainable pressures on domestic spending.

I’d take a slightly different lesson from this: Democrats got snookered. Only a little bit, and they knew they were being played, but they still got snookered. It was obvious from the start that cuts to veterans’ benefits would be unpopular and unlikely to stand, but Democrats agreed to them anyway in order to get the budget deal across the finish line. Maybe that was the right thing to do, but it was no accident. They did it with their eyes wide open.

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Rescinding the Cuts to Veteran’s Pensions Was In the Cards From the Start

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Paul Ryan Votes Against the Debt Ceiling Increase

by KristinaRosenba Posted on February 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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With John Boehner finally crying uncle over the debt ceiling and dumping the whole thing on Democrats, the only suspense left was which members of the Republican leadership would suck it in and vote yes to get the bill over the finish line. Here’s the answer:

Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy voted for the increase. House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, on the other hand, voted against the bill.

There you go. Even Eric Cantor gritted his teeth and voted for the increase, but Paul Ryan didn’t. Kinda makes you think he might still be keeping a presidential run in the back of his mind, doesn’t it?

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In Rare Break With Tradition, Congress Might Actually Do Something Constructive Soon

by ArlenUAVqa Posted on February 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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In 1997, in an effort to rein in rising Medicare spending, Congress created a formula for paying doctors called the “sustainable growth rate” (SGR). Unfortunately, a few years later, this formula started calling not for sustainable growth, but for actual pay cuts. Doctors went ballistic, and Congress hastily passed a “doc fix” that deferred the scheduled cuts. Then they did the same thing the next year, and the year after that—and then in every year since then. At this point, the SGR is obviously deader than the proverbial doornail, but officially killing it would also officially count as a spending increase, which would officially increase the deficit by a lot. Nobody wants to face up to that, so every year Congress just passes a temporary extension to the doc fix and calls it a day.

But wait! In a rare display of constructive bipartisanship, Congress might actually do something about this. Sarah Kliff explains:

The problem with the sustainable growth rate is it isn’t sustainable at all….But because the doc-fix could cost as much as $300 billion to fix, legislators have stuck with [] short-term patches, which cost significantly less and are a whole lot easier to find offsets to pay for. The math changed this year, however, as health care cost growth has slowed, and the Congressional Budget Office has essentially cut in half the amount it thinks fixing the doc-fix would cost. Now, the CBO says it will cost $153 billion to repeal the sustainable growth rate, and legislators see that lower price tag as making it easier — although by no means certain — to pass legislation.

The proposal released Thursday is a thorough outline of the policies that would replace the doc-fix. What Congress wants to do differently this time around is, by 2021, put as much as nine percent of doctors’ reimbursements at stake if providers can’t hit certain quality standards. It would also include a bonus pool of $500 million for the doctors who do provide really great care.

This is no slam dunk. Congress still has to find $153 billion in offsets, after all. And it’s certainly possible to put a cynical spin on this: there’s no money available for the long-term unemployed, but for doctors? No problem! But I’d be less cynical. After all, it’s not as if doctors won’t get their current pay rates one way or another. This is just a matter of facing up to reality and admitting that SGR didn’t work and never will. That’s basic good governance, and we can use all of that we can get.

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In Rare Break With Tradition, Congress Might Actually Do Something Constructive Soon

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Senate votes to keep subsidizing flood insurance in flood-prone areas

by MicaelaL71 Posted on February 3, 2014

Senate votes to keep subsidizing flood insurance in flood-prone areas

By

Liz Roll / FEMA

Members of Congress have been clamoring for months to undo one of the most ambitious pieces of climate-related legislation they ever passed. The Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012 would force coastal property owners to pay full market rates for their flood insurance. The law barely mentioned climate change, but it laid the groundwork for a more sane approach to building — and rebuilding — along increasingly disaster-prone coastlines and riverbanks.

Last Thursday, however, the Senate voted 67 to 32 to approve the Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act, which would delay the phaseout of federally subsidized flood insurance by as many as four years. That would postpone flood-insurance hike shocks for Americans living in coastal and shoreline properties. But it would also mean that the federal government would continue to encourage homebuilding in vulnerable areas — with taxpayers picking up the tab following inevitable inundations.

Unless, that is, the delays are blocked in the House, or vetoed by the president.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has said that the House won’t take up a bill delaying the rate hikes. Budget hawks in the House, along with insurance industry reps and environmentalists, point out that the National Flood Insurance Program will soon be nearly $30 billion in debt — the result of below-market rates and a string of hurricanes that have pummeled the coasts.

But pressure is mounting to call a “time-out” on the rate hikes, so FEMA has time to more thoroughly study the economic impacts.

If the legislation does manage to pass the House, a veto might still stop it. The White House put out a statement last week expressing its concerns about the Senate bill. “Delaying implementation of these reforms would further erode the financial position of the [National Flood Insurance Program], which is already $24 billion in debt,” it said. But the statement contained no veto threat.

So it might fall to the budget hawks in the House to decide. If they do salvage Biggert-Waters, it will be in the name of fiscal conservatism, not in the name of preparing for climate change. Still, call it what you want: The two are increasingly synonymous.


Source
Senate approves delay in higher flood insurance premiums, The Washington Post

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Senate votes to keep subsidizing flood insurance in flood-prone areas

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Is Our Robot Future Really All That Speculative Anymore?

by NanceeDundalli Posted on January 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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James Pethokoukis points us to a new working paper about economic growth released by the San Francisco Fed this month. Here’s a piece:

Even more speculatively, artificial intelligence and machine learning could allow computers and robots to increasingly replace labor in the production function for goods….In standard growth models, it is quite easy to show that this can lead to a rising capital share — which we intriguingly already see in many countries since around 1980 (Karabarbounis and Neiman, 2013) — and to rising growth rates. In the limit, if capital can replace labor entirely, growth rates could explode, with incomes becoming inï¬&#129;nite in ï¬&#129;nite time.

Pethokoukis comments:

The Fed paper is particularly amazing when you consider that when outgoing Fed chairman Ben Bernanke mentioned “robotics” in a commencement address last spring, he was the first US central-bank boss to use the word in a speech since Alan Greenspan in 2000. Expect more mentions from Janet Yellen.

Technological progress in AI and robotics — even short of the singularity — raises huge questions about the future of work, mobility, and inequality….What do we make of all those long-range economic and fiscal forecasts from folks at the Fed, Congressional Budget Office, and other expert groups? How do we plan for a future that may be just as revolutionary, if not more so, as the Industrial Revolution?

My long-form take on this is here. The thing that gets me is that so many people continue to think of this as wild speculation. I don’t mean the infinite incomes stuff, which is obviously hyperbole since we’ll always need more than just capital to make the economy run. I just mean the general idea that robots and AI are pretty obviously going to have a huge economic impact in the medium term future. This is something that seems so obvious to me that I’m a little puzzled that there’s anyone left who still doesn’t see it. Nonetheless, an awful lot of people still think of this as science fiction. I put the doubters into four rough buckets:

  1. Moore’s Law is going to to break down sometime very soon, and we’ll never get the raw computing power we need for true AI.
  2. There is something mysterious about the human brain that we will never be able to emulate with silicon and software. Maybe something, um, quantum.
  3. Meh. We’ve been hearing about AI forever. It’s never happened before, it’s not going to happen this time either.
  4. La la la la la.

#1 is at least plausible. I think we’re too far along for it to be taken very seriously anymore, but you never know. #2 is basically New Age nonsense dressed up as physics. #3 is understandable, but lazy. We heard about going to the moon for a long time too, but it didn’t happen until the technology curve caught up. We’re at the same point with AI. #4 is the group of people who kinda sorta accept that AI is coming, but for various reasons simply don’t want to grapple with what this means. Conservatives don’t like the idea that it almost inevitably will require a much more redistributive society. Liberals don’t like the idea that it might make a lot of standard lefty social programs obsolete.

As a liberal believer, I’ll put myself in the latter camp. I’m not willing to give up on the standard liberal social program because (a) I might be wrong about AI, (b) if I’m not, we’re still going to need variations on these programs, and (c) we still have to deal with the transition period anyway. I assume conservative believers might feel roughly the same way.

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Is Our Robot Future Really All That Speculative Anymore?

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