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Economic Growth Starting to Show Real Signs of Life

by AveryHuang Posted on November 25, 2014

Mother Jones

The latest numbers from the Commerce Department show that GDP increased faster than we thought in the third quarter of 2014. Growth clocked in at 3.9 percent, an increase from the original estimate of 3.5 percent. “The economy expanded at its fastest pace in more than a decade,” says the Wall Street Journal. “The combined growth rate in the second and third quarters was 4.25%, the best six-month reading since 2003.”

This is true, but a bit misleading since both quarters were making up for a dismal first quarter in which GDP fell by 2.1 percent. Still, even if you look at things in a more defensible way, economic growth is unquestionably picking up. The chart on the right uses a 5-quarter moving average to smooth out individual quarters that might be unusually high or low, and the trajectory of the economy is clearly on the rise. You still can’t really say that things are booming, and it continues to be true that the labor market is loose and wages are pretty stagnant. Nonetheless, since 2011 growth has increased from about 1.8 percent annually to about 2.8 percent annually. Things are picking up.

If Europe can ever manage to get its act together, we might finally start really digging ourselves out of the Great Recession. I’m not sure I see any signs of that happening soon, though.

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Economic Growth Starting to Show Real Signs of Life

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More Patents Does Not Equal More Innovation

by Mitchel123 Posted on November 25, 2014

Mother Jones

Via James Pethokoukis, here’s a chart from a new CBO report on federal policies and innovation. Needless to say, you can’t read too much into it. It shows the growth since 1963 of total factor productivity (roughly speaking, the share of productivity growth due to technology improvements), and there are lots of possible reasons that TFP hasn’t changed much over the past five decades. At a minimum, though, the fact that patent activity has skyrocketed since 1983 with no associated growth in TFP suggests, as the CBO report says dryly, “that the large increase in patenting activity since 1983 may have made little contribution to innovation.”

The CBO report identifies several possible innovation-killing aspects of the US patent system, among them a “proliferation of low-quality patents”; increased patent litigation; and the growth of patent trolls who impose a substantial burden on startup firms. The report also challenges the value of software patents:

The contribution of patents to innovation in software or business methods is often questioned because the costs of developing such new products and processes may be modest. One possible change to patent law that could reduce the cost and frequency of litigation would be to limit patent protections for inventions that were relatively inexpensive to develop. For example, patents on software and business methods could expire sooner than is the case today (which, with renewals, is after 20 years), reducing the incentive to obtain those patents. Another change that could address patent quality, the processing burden on the USPTO, and the cost and frequency of litigation would be to limit the ability to obtain a patent on certain inventions.

Personally, I’d be in favor of limiting software and business method patents to a term of zero years. But if that’s not feasible, even a reduction to, say, five years or so, would be helpful. In the software industry, that’s an eternity.

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More Patents Does Not Equal More Innovation

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Are Term Limits a Good Idea?

by Remona20Ax Posted on November 24, 2014

Mother Jones

Jim Newton, a longtime local politics reporter in Los Angeles, wrote his final column for the LA Times today. In it, he offered up “a handful of changes that might make a big difference,” and the one that resonates with me is his suggestion that both LA and California do away with term limits:

Elected officials who were popular with their constituents once held their seats for decades, building up experience and knowledge; now, with term limits in place, they’re barely seated before they start searching for the next office. That’s brought new faces but at great cost. Power has shifted from those we elect to those we don’t, to the permanent bureaucracy and to lobbyists. Problems get kicked down the road in favor of attention-grabbing short-term initiatives that may have long-term consequences.

Case in point: Why do so many public employees enjoy budget-breaking pensions? Because term-limited officials realize it is easier to promise a future benefit than to give raises now. The reckoning comes later; by then they’re gone.

Term limits locally were the work of Richard Riordan, who bankrolled the initiative and later became mayor. I asked him recently about them, and he startled me with his response: It was, he said, “the worst mistake of my life.”

Term limits always sound good. The problem with the idea is that being a council member or a legislator is like any other job: you get better with experience. If your legislature is populated solely by people with, at most, a term or two of experience, it’s inevitable that (a) they’ll have an almost pathologically short-term focus, and (b) more and more power will flow to lobbyists and bureaucrats who stay around forever and understand the levers of power better.

For what it’s worth, I’d recommend a middle ground. I understand the problem people have with politicians who win office and essentially occupy sinecures for the rest of their lives. It’s often a recipe for becoming insulated and out of touch with the real-world needs of constituents. But short term limits don’t solve the problem of unaccountable power, they simply shift the power to other places. The answer, I think, is moderate term limits. Something between, say, ten and twenty years. That’s long enough to build up genuine expertise and a genuine power base, while still preventing an office from becoming a lifetime of guaranteed employment.

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Are Term Limits a Good Idea?

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One Man Should Not Dictate Immigration Policy

by Aaron Duff Posted on November 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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You know, the more I mull over the Republican complaint about how immigration reform is being implemented, the more I sympathize with them. Public policy, especially on big, hot button issues like immigration, shouldn’t be made by one person. One person doesn’t represent the will of the people, no matter what position he holds. Congress does, and the will of Congress should be paramount in policymaking.

Now don’t get me wrong. I haven’t changed my mind about the legality of all this. The Constitution is clear that each house of Congress makes its own rules. The rules of the House of Representatives are clear and well-established. And past speakers of the House have all used their legislative authority to prevent votes on bills they don’t wish to consider. Both the law and past precedent are clear: John Boehner is well within his legal rights to refuse to allow the House to vote on the immigration bill passed by the Senate in 2013.

Still, his expansion of that authority makes me uneasy. After all, this is a case where poll after poll shows that large majorities of the country favor comprehensive immigration reform. The Senate passed a bipartisan bill over a year ago by a wide margin. And there’s little question that the Senate bill has majority support in the House too. So not only is the will of Congress clear, but the president has also made it clear that he’d sign the bill if Congress passed it. The only thing stopping it is one man.

That should make us all a bit troubled. John Boehner may be acting legally. But is he acting properly?

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One Man Should Not Dictate Immigration Policy

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Has Obama Gone Too Far? Five Key Questions Answered About the Legality of His Immigration Plan.

by RenaGroves Posted on November 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’ve been paying only moderate attention to the whole issue of President Obama’s executive order on immigration, and it’s only over the past few days that I’ve started trying to learn more about the legal issues involved. And I confess that I’ve been a little surprised by what I’ve discovered. As near as I can tell, both liberal and conservative legal scholars—as opposed to TV talking heads and other professional rabble-rousers—agree that Obama has the authority to reshape immigration enforcement in nearly any way he wants to. Here are answers to five key questions about the legality of the immigration plan Obama announced tonight:

  1. The linchpin of Obama’s executive action is the president’s inherent authority to engage in prosecutorial discretion, and just about everyone agrees that this authority is nearly unconditional. Speaking to a meeting of the conservative Federalist Society, Christopher Schroeder said: “I think the roots of prosecutorial discretion are extremely deep. The practice is long and robust. The case law is robust.” Erwin Chemerinsky and Samuel Kleiner agree: “It has always been within the president’s discretion to decide whether to have the Department of Justice enforce a particular law. As the Supreme Court declared in United States v. Nixon, ‘the Executive Branch has exclusive authority and absolute discretion to decide whether to prosecute a case.'”
  2. OK, but exempting entire categories of people from prosecution? It turns out that current immigration law explicitly recognizes this. Margaret Stock, a Republican immigration lawyer and a Federalist Society member, says: “The Immigration and Nationality Act and other laws are chock-full of huge grants of statutory authority to the president. Congress gave the president all these powers, and now they are upset because he wants to use them. Other presidents have used the same authority in the past without an outcry.”
  3. But are those grants really broad enough? Apparently so. In fact, immigration law provides the president an unusually broad scope for executive action. Eric Posner writes: “The president’s authority over this arena is even greater than his authority over other areas of the law….In 2012, the Supreme Court recognized the vast discretion of the president over immigration policy. In the case Arizona v. United States, the court struck down several Arizona laws that ordered state officials to enforce federal immigration laws, on pain of state penalty….As Adam Cox puts it, in a recent academic article, the court’s reasoning “gives executive branch officials near complete control over the content of immigration law.'”
  4. Still, even if this is true in theory, is it really true in practice? As it turns out, yes, there’s plenty of prior precedent for exactly this kind of thing. As the LA Times reports, “Obama would not be the first president to push through immigration reform by working outside of Congress.” In fact, presidents from FDR through Bill Clinton have issued executive orders that deferred deportation for various categories of undocumented immigrants. And while it’s true that Obama’s action will likely affect more people than any of the previous ones, that’s a political issue, not a legal one. From a strictly legal viewpoint, Obama is doing something that has plenty of past precedent.
  5. Finally, what about work permits? Even if Obama can legally defer prosecution—a right conferred by both constitutional authority and statutory language—does that also give him the right to issue work permits to immigrants affected by his order? Surprisingly, perhaps, that has a long pedigree too—one that goes back not just to DACA (Obama’s 2012 mini-DREAM executive order), but well before that. David Leopold, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, explains: “The federal regulations governing employment under immigration law existed well before DACA. Under those regulations, any undocumented immigrant granted deferred action — under programs that preceded DACA or coincide with it — had already been able to apply for employment authorization….The president’s authority to grant work status long precedes DACA, and while it does apply to DACA and would apply to its expansion, it is not a direct outgrowth or creation of either.”

It’s an open question whether Obama’s actions are politically wise. It might force Republicans into an uncomfortable corner as they compete loudly to denounce Obama’s actions, further damaging their chances of appealing to Hispanics in future elections. Alternatively, it might poison any possibility of working constructively with congressional Republicans over the next couple of years, which might further degrade Democratic approval ratings. There’s also, I think, a legitimate question about whether liberals should be cheering an expansion of presidential power, whether it’s legal or not.

That said, Obama’s actions really do appear to be not just legal, but fairly uncontroversially so among people who know both the law and past precedent. Republicans may not like what Obama is doing, and they certainly have every right to fight it. But they should stop spouting nonsense about lawlessness and tyranny. That’s just playground silliness.

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Has Obama Gone Too Far? Five Key Questions Answered About the Legality of His Immigration Plan.

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Public Evenly Split on Immigration Action

by SamualBuvelot Posted on November 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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So how does the public feel about President Obama changing immigration rules via executive action? Pretty evenly split, it turns out. According to a USA Today poll, Democrats want action now; Republicans want him to wait; independents are split down the middle; and the overall result is slightly in favor of waiting, by 46-42 percent.

In other words, pretty much what you’d expect. Politically, then, this probably holds little risk for Obama or the Democratic Party. Especially in light of this:

On one more issue, Americans are in agreement: The elections two weeks ago aren’t going to make Washington work better. Just 15% predict Obama and the new Congress, now under solid Republican control, will work together more closely to reach bipartisan compromises.

The American public is pretty politically astute, I’d say. They may not be up to speed on all the details of policymaking, but when it comes to the big picture, they know a lot more than the Beltway pundits seem to.

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Public Evenly Split on Immigration Action

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Here’s an Interesting Twist on Social Security That Might Be Worth Trying

by Polly Browder Posted on November 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Matt Yglesias, here’s a fascinating little study in behavioral economics. It involves Social Security, which currently allows you to retire at age 62, but offers you a higher monthly payment if you retire later. For example, if you retire at 62, your monthly benefit might be $1,500, but if you delay a year, your monthly benefit might go up to $1,600. Given average lifespans, the total payout works out the same in both scenarios.

But what if you offered retirees a different deal? What if, instead of a higher monthly benefit, you offered them a lump sum payout if they delayed retirement? In the example above, if you delay retirement to 63, you’ll still get $1,500 per month, but you’d also get a $20,000 lump sum payout. Delay to age 70 and you’d get a lump sum of nearly $200,000. How do people respond to that?

It turns out that they delay retirement—or they say they would on a survey, anyway. Under the current scenario, people say they’d retire at 45 months past age 62, or 65 years and 9 months. Under the lump sum scenario, the average retirement age is about five months later. (A third scenario with a delayed lump sum payout motivates people to retire even later.)

Would people do this in real life if they were offered these options? Maybe. And it would probably be a good thing, as Yglesias explains:

Since the benefits would be actuarially fair, this would not save the government any money. But since people would be working longer, the overall size of the economy and the tax base would be larger. That extends the life of the Social Security Trust Fund, and helps delay the moment at which benefit cuts or tax increases are necessary. The overall scale of the change is not enormous, but it’s distinctly positive and it’s hard to see what the downside would be.

This is hardly the highest priority on anybody’s wish list, but it’s an intriguing study. And it would certainly be easy to implement. Maybe it’s worth a try.

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Here’s an Interesting Twist on Social Security That Might Be Worth Trying

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Congressional Democrats Back Obama on Immigration Reform

by RodrigoStanbury Posted on November 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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With the election safely over, congressional Democrats have regained their courage on immigration and are now urging President Obama to go ahead with an executive action on immigration reform. Here’s an excerpt from a letter that several Democratic leaders in the Senate sent today:

The principle behind most of what Obama plans to do falls under the category of “prosecutorial discretion,” which means he can decide where best to use the government’s limited law enforcement resources. Just like previous presidents, he can decide that resources should be directed in a certain way, which effectively means that certain immigrants will be free to stay in the country simply because no one will be targeting them for deportation.

We can argue about just how far presidents should be allowed to go down this road, but basically it’s something with a fair amount of precedent. This is clearly the focus of the letter from Senate Democrats, and although I’m not a lawyer, I’m pretty confident that the Justice Department will produce an adequate legal defense of Obama’s constitutional authority in this area.

But what’s probably most important goes unsaid—or perhaps merely implied—in the Senate letter: if you qualify for “deferred action,” you can also get a work permit and a Social Security number. I don’t quite understand the legal authority for this, but it’s part of the mini-DREAM executive action Obama signed in 2012, so apparently it’s on firm legal ground.

In any case, it now looks like Obama is not just firmly committed to this, but has the public support of key congressional Democrats as well. It’s coming whether Republicans like it or not.

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Congressional Democrats Back Obama on Immigration Reform

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America Is the Developed World’s Second Most Ignorant Country

by Nina55Twyeiebi Posted on November 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago Vox ran a story about a new Ipsos-MORI poll showing that Americans think the unemployment rate right now is an astonishing 32 percent—higher than during the Great Depression. The correct answer, of course, is about 6 percent. And this is not just a harmless bit of ignorance, like not being able to name the vice president. “It matters,” we’re told, “because the degree to which people perceive problems guides how they make political decisions.”

My first thought when I saw this is the same one I have a lot: how has this changed over time? After all, if Americans always think the unemployment rate is way higher than it is, then it doesn’t mean much. But I couldn’t find any previous polling data on this. I made a few desultory attempts in between football games this weekend, but came up empty.

Luckily, John Sides is a stronger man than me, and also more familiar with the past literature on this stuff. It turns out there’s not very much to look at, actually, but what there is suggests that this Ipsos-MORI poll is a weird outlier. Generally, speaking, most people do know roughly what the unemployment rate is:

In this 1986 article….two-thirds, stated that the unemployment rate was 10 percent, 11 percent, or 12 percent — a substantial degree of accuracy.

In this 2014 article….approximately 40-50 percent of respondents could estimate this rate within 1 percentage point.

In this 2014 article….most respondents gave fairly accurate estimates — which is reflected in the median.

So the whole thing is a little odd. In past polls, people weren’t too far off. In this one, they’re off by more than 25 points. Something doesn’t add up, but it’s not clear what. In any case, it’s worth taking this whole thing with a grain of salt.

But all is not lost. If you decide to take this poll seriously anyway, you might be interested to know that the unemployment results are merely one part of a broader report titled “Perils of Perception.” Basically, it’s an international survey showing just how wrong people in different countries are about things like murder rates, number of Muslims, teen birth rates, voting, and so forth. This is then compiled into a handy “Index of Ignorance.”

So who’s #1? Not us. We came in second to Italy. But that’s not too bad! We’re pretty damn ignorant, and with a little less effort we might take the top spot next year. Still, even though Germans and Swedes may feel smug about their knowledge of demographic facts, can they launch pointless wars in the Middle East whenever they feel like it? No they can’t. So there.

POSTSCRIPT: On a slightly more serious note, Sides tells us that not only is the Ipsos-MORI poll an odd outlier, but that his research suggests that ignorance of the unemployment rate has very little impact on people’s attitudes anyway. I’d say the Ipsos-MORI poll accidentally confirms this. The German public, for example, has a much more accurate view of the unemployment rate than the American public. So has that helped their policymaking? It has not. Over the past few years, Germany has probably had the worst economic policy of any developed country, while the US has had among the best. A well-informed public may be less important than we think.

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America Is the Developed World’s Second Most Ignorant Country

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Sunni Awakening 2.0? Don’t Hold Your Breath.

by BrittneCCPE Posted on November 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Back in 2007, the military success of the famous “surge” in Iraq was due largely to the fact that many Sunni tribal leaders finally turned against al-Qaeda and began cooperating with the American army. This so-called Sunni Awakening was a key part of the tenuous peace achieved a year later.

It was a fragile peace, however, and eventually it broke down thanks to the lack of a serious political effort to include Sunnis in the central government. By last year, the Sunni areas of Iraq had once again begun to rebel, and ISIS took advantage of this to storm into Iraq and take control of a huge swath of territory. If we want to regain this ground from ISIS, the first step is to once again persuade Sunni tribal leaders to cooperate with us, but it looks an awful lot like that particular playbook isn’t going to work a second time:

Officials admit little success in wooing new Sunni allies, beyond their fitful efforts to arm and supply the tribes who were already fighting the Islamic State — and mostly losing. So far, distrust of the Baghdad government’s intentions and its ability to protect the tribes has won out.

….Much of the Islamic State’s success at holding Sunni areas comes from its deft manipulation of tribal dynamics. Portraying itself as a defender of Sunnis who for years have been abused by Iraq’s Shiite-majority government, the Islamic State has offered cash and arms to tribal leaders and fighters, often allowing them local autonomy as long as they remain loyal.

At the same time, as it has expanded into new towns, the Islamic State has immediately identified potential government supporters for death. Residents of areas overrun by the Islamic State say its fighters often carry names of soldiers and police officers. If those people have already fled, the jihadists blow up their homes to make sure they do not return. At checkpoints, its men sometimes run names through computerized databases, dragging off those who have worked for the government.

“They come in with a list of names and are more organized than state intelligence,” said Sheikh Naim al-Gaood, a leader of the Albu Nimr tribe. The most brutal treatment is often of tribes who cooperated with the United States against Al Qaeda in Iraq in past years, mostly through the so-called Sunni Awakening movement supported by the Americans.

Obviously ISIS may overplay its hand here, or simply overextend itself. They aren’t supermen. At the same time, it’s obvious that ISIS is well aware of how the original Sunni Awakening played out, and they’re doing an effective job of making sure it doesn’t play out that way again. Sunni leaders are already distrustful of Americans, having been promised a greater role in governance in 2007 and then seeing that promise evaporate, and ISIS leaders are adding a brutal element of revenge to make sure that no one thinks about believing similar promises this time around.

All this is not to say that things are hopeless. But a replay of the Sunni Awakening isn’t going to be easy. Sunni leaders have already been burned once and were unlikely from the start to be easily persuaded to give reconciliation another chance. ISIS is reinforcing this with both deft politics and brutal retaliation against collaborators. It’s not going to be an easy dynamic to break.

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Sunni Awakening 2.0? Don’t Hold Your Breath.

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