What about all that math and science education we're supposed to be promoting?

Paul Krugman and Hendrik Hertzberg, among others, lauded the president’s budget speech on Tuesday April 11 and the way Obama conveyed dignified exasperation over the notorious Ryan plan. Paul Krugman was fairly sanguine about the direction it pointed in, though he did sound a note of caution that if Obama’s position became the “left pole” from which the Administration would move farther to the right to reach “bipartisan” compromise, it would be better to do nothing at all. 

Unfortunately, it looks like we’ve been had—again—and this time it goes way beyond the Administration ceding ground to the Austerity Brigade.  

In recent weeks we’ve been told:

1. We need to emphasize science and math education so we can “win the future” and “outcompete the world”. 

2. This is the time for austerity, which means cutting the budget for education and federal research support for math and science. 

For the record, I agree with Krugman: whoever came up with the phrase "win the future" should be sent to count yurts in Outer Mongolia. 

More to the point, the problem with this formula is that the NIH and NSF are the primary forces driving research, not to mention our much-vaunted science education. It is federal funding that supports all those wonderful scientists and mathematicians who are going to win the future, etc., etc.  

How much less funding are we talking about? Drawing from recent reports in Science, The Economist, and the House continuing resolution (CR), the upshot is this:

The House CR proposed cutting the NIH budget by $1.6 billion; the administration bargained this down to $260 million.  Since the average NIH grant is $250,000 per year, my back-of-the-envelope calculation is that this means ‘only’ 1040 grants will vanish instead of 6400. There are about 600 research universities in the US; there are roughly 30,000 NIH-funded PI's or "principal investigators", the most successful of whom have an average of 1.2-1.4 NIH grants at a time. By this rough estimate, cutting 6400 grants would have meant over 1 in 5 academic scientists would have lost most of their funding. 

The CR cut the NSF budget by $75 million; the administration bargained this down to $53M.  In FY 2010 there were over 40,000 NSF grants with a median annual award size of about $127,000. The original CR would have cut 590 grants; now only 427 will vanish. (Note that health-related research is generally much more costly than research in the hard sciences.)

The Centers for Disease control budget will be cut by $730 million (instead of $1.4 billion in the CR).

The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science will be cut by $35 M (instead of $901M in the CR).

The CR also cut the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (the part of DOE that funds research on climate physics, bioenergy, and initiated the Human Genome Project) by 49%, effectively shutting it down the rest of the year. I can find no information on whether the Obama administration negotiated a less severe cut.

In sum:              

                 House CR cut       Newly negotiated cut           

 NIH            $1.6 B                         $260 M

 NSF            $75 M                           $53 M

 CDC           $1.4 B                         $730 M

 DOEOS     $901 M                          $35 M

Remarkably, these figures represent a miniscule percentage of the multi-trillion dollar budget deficit, and even a relatively small portion of the budgets of these federal offices. What we must realize, however, is that research lab budgets are very streamlined, and every penny must be accounted for on a yearly basis. Young investigators receive support from their university departments, but by their mid-career stage, scientists are expected to cover the costs of their research programs with their own grant dollars. The average biomedical science graduate student is paid $22-25,000 roughly $20-30K (2009-2010), and the grant also covers their health insurance and other overhead, bringing the total cost for a student to about $35-45K. (Note that medical and graduate schools waive tuition for PhD students, which is another sizeable chunk of change that universities swallow for the good of the community.) A post-doc might cost $35-45 40-60K, not including overhead. Faculty salaries vary widely by region, but range from $80K at the low end for young assistant professors to over twice or thrice that amount for the most successful. So one grant might cover the salary of the faculty member, a postdoctoral fellow or a student, some necessary equipment, materials (which easily run thousands of dollars per month), modest travel costs to a conference, and publication costs (the balance depends on the individual lab and other sources of support, and yes, scientists have to pay journals for color figures in their papers and other sundry publication costs). If successful NIH-funded scientists average 1.2-1.4 grants annually (each grant lasts five years, with the possibility for competitive renewal), then to lose 1040 grants means that a thousand scientists, and their postdocs and students, will be out of a job unless they can quickly find another source of support through philanthropy (which is tough to get and doesn’t provide overhead for the university) or industry (which comes with many strings attached, to the benefit of the company rather than the university lab). 

It's also crucial to realize that federally funded research drives the engines of the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, whose main function is to take discoveries made in university and medical school research labs and scale them up into marketable drugs and devices. These industries do not, by and large, conduct fundamental research. (How could they? They exist to turn profits, like all businesses.)

In some ways, scientific labs are like small businesses, which can flourish only when there is robust infrastructural support. Consider our most successful corporations.  They spring up in areas where there's running water, reliable electricity, good roads for transportation, not to mention easy access to educated people. It would be hard to imagine Microsoft, Apple, GE, or Bristol-Myers Squibb achieving greatness from humble beginnings in, say, Afghanistan or Sierra Leone—which is why corporations should be paying taxes instead of getting billions of dollars in rebates.

Every commentator who has lamented these draconian and senseless cuts has thrown up their metaphoric hands and concluded that Republicans must simply hate science.  A few probably do hate the science that provides a rationale for curbing corporate excess—it’s no surprise they wanted to shut down the Office of Biological and Environmental Research, which studies climate physics and bioenergy, among other things—but I don’t think that this is the real motivation.

First, they’re a particularly technophilic bunch when it comes to their own health. 

Second, there is no inherent contradiction between conservatism and science. In fact, among those holding doctorates, scientists and physicians are more likely to be Republican than historians, philosophers, and others in the humanities. In the 112th Congress, for example, there are 20 doctors, only two of whom are Democrats. (Republicans do disdain the humanities, but that's because they see value only in economic terms. Cf. "Ceding the Premise.")

Third, let’s consider what happens to mathematicians and scientists who cannot fund their academic research. Biomedical researchers go to Big Pharma. But what part of the business world most warmly embraces mathematicians and physicists, i.e., those at the top of our scientific hierarchy? 

Why, the financial sector, of course. 

Mathematicians and PhDs of various stripes were the ones who created the algorithms that allow hedge fund managers to shave off a fraction of a penny for each Wall Street transaction and thereby amass untold fortunes while siphoning wealth from the entire economy without anyone noticing.  It's a nifty trick: you can’t teach it in school, you need the combination of unbridled greed and utter contempt for the hoi polloi that comes with constant exposure to the amoral world of economics/finance, in which rationality itself is defined as acting in one's own best economic interest, without any impulse to take into account other systems of value.

Now we know who loses when “we” win the future: us.

Not incidentally, we also know why the Obama administrations seems unable to shake up DC business as usual: it’s all about business in the first place.

If we allow politicians to slash federal education and research programs, our best and brightest (as they define them—scientists and mathematicians) will have no choice but to work for corporate titans to make them even more ridiculously wealthy than they already are, to transform them from the top 1% to the top 0.01%.

This is not an entirely new predicament. The idea that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, has been around since the Romans. (And look what happened to them.) As with so many other contemporary trends, however, the pace of destructive changes is accelerating because of feedback mechanisms within the system. 

Thankfully, there is an alternative.

What an honest, workable budget looks like—and the challenge to getting there

Eighty members of the House Progressive Caucus put together The People’s Budget, which would eliminate the deficit and create a surplus by 2021 in an efficient and fair way, largely by curbing military spending, raising tax rates on giant corporations, and wrestling healthcare costs under control by offering a public option—three mechanisms that a majority of the population have favored.

Check out the People’s Budget and if you like what you read, sign on here.  There is hope for genuine change that allows all of us to flourish, but it will take a little effort to educate ourselves.

This will be an uphill battle, however. To make clear just how difficult it is to wrest money from corporate interests, take the recent prank by US Uncut, a burgeoning movement to pressure corporate tax cheats like GE to pay their fair share.  Earlier this week they posted a fake news release praising GE for returning their legal, if ethically reprehensible, tax refund of $3.2 billion.  Several media outlets ran the story as if it were true, and the result was that GE stocks dropped .6% (far more than the value of the supposed return) until it became clear the press had been duped, at which point the stocks recovered.


As US Uncut rightfully concludes, GE can't be expected to do the right thing voluntarily because its stock would plunge—that's why we have to work to change the laws.  We can argue that a company's priority should not be to keep its shareholders happy, but that's where we are these days.

Further reading:

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize-winning economist, in the current issue of Vanity Fair. 

The Economist's Democracy in America blog has an excellent post for those curious about the effects of cuts to the federal research budgets (see particularly the links).

Reading the fine print: EPA still in danger

The Clean Air Act

Many of us were relieved when it appeared that Republican plans to curtail the EPA’s power to regulate air pollution were forestalled.  

Alas, the rejoicing was premature. The New York Times reports that three-quarters of the proposed $1.6 billion dollars in cuts to the EPA budget would come from State and Tribal Assistance Grants (STAG)—which are what fund states to comply with new federal rules.  Here’s an excerpt from the article: 

Those cuts, along with a plan to rescind $140 million of unobligated grants from the STAG program, will be a blow to state agencies that are limping due to years of state budget cutbacks... The spending deal also rejects the administration's request for an extra $82 million in grants to help states implement new air pollution rules from EPA, and cuts another $10 million on top of that, he said. 

...Becker said it's "disconcerting" that many lawmakers want to shrink the federal government, but they are doing it by taking most of the money away from state and local agencies. For example, the spending deal zeroes out a $20 million program meant to cut air pollution in smog-choked areas of Southern California.

It isn't fair that "Congress asks the states to carry out the will of these environmental statutes, and then savages the funding required to do these tasks," Becker said. "We're trying to do the job that Congress asked us to do." 

While the cuts to EPA grant programs were mostly in line with the president's request [italics mine] for next year, the deal goes after the agency's own efforts by taking money from EPA scientists and the offices that design the agency's regulations. Scientific programs would get $815 million, down $42 million from fiscal 2010, and environmental programs would end up with $2.76 billion, down 8.8 percent from last year.

Climate change work by EPA and the Interior Department, which were House Republicans' main target on the environmental front, would end up with $49 million less than last year, leaving them $116 million below the president's request for fiscal 2011. But the programs would be allowed to continue, since the House-approved "riders" to stop greenhouse gas regulations and reporting rules were stripped from the bill.

The compromise also takes a slice out of EPA's budget for its hazardous waste cleanup program. The legislation would chop roughly $23 million from the Superfund budget, reducing it from $1.31 billion to $1.28 billion for the remainder of the fiscal year..... it wasn't much to give away for President Obama, who asked for $1.24 billion for the program in his budget request for fiscal 2012. [italics mine]

In other words, the President had nearly sold the store already.

In sum: we really didn't save the Clean Air Act, as there isn’t enough muscle to enforce it. No surprise, really, when you consider that the EPA has already been crippled by funding cuts that forced it to drop thousands of legal actions against companies dumping toxic pollutants into our waterways.


Economic orthodoxy has triumphed again.

Reactive Democrats

I was dismayed to be asked to vote on the next bumper sticker slogan for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. First, I don't have a car and thus no need for a bumper sticker. Second, when I had a car, I still had no need for bumper stickers.

But that's all beside the point. Here are the top five slogans offered up by (one assumes) Democrats:

1. We've got your back, Barack

2. Had enough tea? Repeal Republicans 2012!

3. GOP: not my cup of tea

4. No tea for me, please, I prefer progress.

5. GOPuleeeeeez

#1 has the virtue of rhyme and rhythm, but most liberals I know are kinda disappointed that ol' Barack hasn't shown much back the past two years, even right after the election, when he had abundant popular support.

#s 2-4 are all about the Tea Party, more specifically, standing against it. But the Tea Party is about populism. (At least the parts that aren't directly funded by Koch Industries.) With all that has been going on in Wisconsin—not to mention Egypt, Libya, etc.—don't we want to take that populism and run with it? The current crop of Republicans isn't promoting any policies that are going to help the "other 98%" of us who aren't mega-rich. Why not give voice to the legitimate gripes of the tea party, thereby diminishing their need to maintain paranoid psychological defenses by fixating on birth certificates, death panels, etc.?

#5 I found amusing, but I'm certain that the the GOP would read it as, "GOP, Please!" Too easy for them to appropriate that one.

Instead of just reacting to our perceived opponents and taking an adversarial stance, why don't we start standing up for things like, I dunno, fairness (the justice system)? shared responsibility (corporations can't pollute and run)? respect toward one another (support for early education that is rigorous and assumes the kids will one day be thinking, feeling citizens of a democracy)? sensitivity toward other species, the environment (global warming; this can even be couched in religious terms of stewardship)? job creation (green industries)? not wasting money on corporate subsidies (Big Ag, ethanol, the oil industry)?

"Liberté, egalité, fraternité" is already taken, but it's the right idea for a slogan.

Is the auto industry crisis due to overpaying auto workers?

The NY Times ran an Op-Ed piece today that astonished me in its blinkered view of the GM crisis.  (One Roadblock too Many for GM.)

Mr. Holstein's bias is evident in the second paragraph when he says "While not every decision Mr. Wagoner has made was wise, over all he had been putting G.M. through a wrenching restructuring that tried to undo decades of management acquiescence to the United Auto Workers." He then applauds the decision to pay new workers only $15/hour. Let's think about this a minute. Wagoner walks away with $42 million. I don't know how much his last twenty years' salary adds up to, but consider an average worker. An average annual salary of $50K over 40 years is only $2 Million total, over an entire lifetime. Worse, this salary is, for reasons that escape me, subject to a higher income tax than salaries over $500K -- and blue collar workers don't have tax shelters, and may not be able to even take advantage of a simple mortgage deduction if they cannot buy a house. So Wagoner makes over twenty times as much just for being asked to resign as a guy or gal making $50k/year earns over a lifetime of hard work.

While we're on the topic of hard work, let me bring in another op-ed piece published last week, the letter of resignation from an AIG employee to the CEO Edward Liddy. (Dear AIG, I Quit! NYTimes Mar 24, 2009) Three times the writer, Jake DeSantis, mentions "hard work": for example, he says, "I know that because of hard work I have benefited more than most during the economic boom..." It was also hard work that led him to MIT and enabled him to "fulfill the American Dream." The assumption is that hard work invariably =good (or great!) pay. I don't doubt the author works hard during his 12-14 hour days. But I also do not doubt that professional auto workers, schoolteachers, janitors, nurses or construction workers work equally hard. Yet they earn averages of $16,000-80,000/year across the country, with no prospect of a bonus.

Mr. DeSantis feels cheated that AIG reneged on its contract to offer bonuses. But why are financial company's contracts considered sacrosanct, while contracts with regular folk are always up for renegotiation? Union workers are always having to renegotiate contracts. And just about everyone at one time or another has been offered a "fixed" interest rate contract with a credit card company, only to have them change the interest rate a few years later without asking permission.

Back to Mr. Holstein's complaint that union employees drove GM into the financial gutter. Let's imagine that 10,000 workers are getting paid $10 too much an hour. That's $400/week, $20,800/yr per worker - about $208M/year for all 10,000, or $570,000 per day. Yet GM has been losing 11 billion dollars a year -- almost $30 Million per DAY. So the worker "overpayment" in this case would amount to 0.0000518, well less than .01 percent, of the daily losses. Mr. Holstein's argument doesn't hold water.

The only real question is why the Obama administration is not being equally tough on the financial sector.

Bias or Confirmation?

I was both amused and exasperated by an article in the NY Times today about a study indicating "bias" on the part of the American Bar Association (ABA) in their ratings of Supreme Court nominees (Legal Group's Neutrality is Challenged).  Essentially, a series of studies (the most recent by Amy Steigerwalt at the University of Georgia -- no indications what her political leanings are) concluded that liberal nominees do better in the process than conservative ones.  John Ashcroft cited such a study to explain why the Bush administration didn't cooperate with the ABA.

The ABA says their ratings are based on "professional competence, integrity, and judicial temperament."  Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Samuel Alito, Stephen Breyer, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg all received the ABA's highest ratings.

"But," continues the article,  "Justice Clarence Thomas was given a split rating of 'qualified' and 'not qualified.'  Judge Robert H. Bork, whose nomination was rejected by the Senate in 1987, received a curious split decision, with the majority calling him 'well qualified' but four members saying he was 'unqualified.'"

Hmm.  Does any informed observer really think Clarence Thomas was a good nominee or has served any meaningful role on the Supreme Court? (He's written fewer opinions than any other justice, by an order of magnitude.) Or that we'd be better off if the Senate had confirmed Robert Bork? (Egads!)  Rather than indicating bias, is it not possible that this study confirms that certain administrations have less interest in qualified justices with competence, integrity and even-handedness in judicial temperament?

Where do journalists (and, apparently, political scientists) get the idea that unbiased means everything working out equally for two sides?  By those lights, the last election was biased because Obama won handily.  It couldn't have had anything to do with his qualifications, integrity or temperament...

If the ABA cannot find it in their collective heart to grant the highest ratings to men like Thomas and Bork, well, that is merely proof of their professional competence and integrity. Keep up the good work, folks.

There's a tapeworm in the system

First, a brief update on the proposed tax cuts and why I'm so apopleptic about them. The current version of the bill before the Senate is split nearly 50-50 between tax cuts and stimulus spending.  Is this the best the Democrats could do?  Tax cuts simply, unequivocally do not yield the same return as federal spending. Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Economy.com—hardly a liberal site—calculates that permanent tax cuts bring only about 30 to 40 cents on the dollar back into the economy (people tend to hoard tax savings or use it to pay off debt, which is not stimulative), whereas spending on things like unemployment insurance benefits or investing in infrastructure yields a return of $1.50-1.73 for each dollar spent. Don't we usually prefer a larger return on our investments and seek to avoid outright losses?

Even more frightening is the little-publicized character of the tax cuts being promulgated: the Republicans want to make Bush-era tax cuts to corporations and the wealthiest 1% permanent.

But the most egregious political failure right now is the inability of the Obama administration to tie the money given (and about to be given) to the banks to regulations with real teeth. Capping salaries at $500K is almost beside the point--although it goes toward satisfying populist schadenfreude, it just doesn't have anything to do with how the financial system actually operates and therefore does nothing to address the real problem.  Attorney James Lieber gets to the origins of this mess in The Village Voice. In "What Cooked the World's Economy?" he relates hedge funds to their 19th century precursors, the "bucket shops":

Also sometimes known as "boiler rooms," bucket shops emerged after the Civil War. Usually, they were storefronts where people came to bet on stocks without owning them. Unlike their customers, the shops actually owned blocks of stock. If customers were betting that a stock would go up, the shops would sell it and the price would plunge; if bettors were bearish, the shops would buy.  In this way, they cleaned out their customers. Frenetic bucket-shop activity caused the Panic of 1907. By 1909, New York had banned bucket shops, and every other state followed.

In the mid-90's, though, the credit-derivatives industry was hitting its stride and argued vehemently for exclusion from all state and federal anti-bucket-shop regulations. On the side of the industry were Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and his deputy Lawrence Summers.  Holding the fort for the regulators was Brooksley Born, who headed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The three financial titans ridiculed the virtually unknown and cloutless, but brilliant and prophetic Born, who warned that unrestricted derivatives trading would "threaten our regulated markets, or indeed, our economy, without any federal agency knowing about it." Warren Buffet also weighed in against deregulation.

But Congress loved Greenspan - a/k/a/ "the Maestro" and "the Oracle" - and Clinton loved Rubin. The sleepy hearings received almost no public attention. The upshot was that Congress removed oversight of derivatives from the CFTC and preempted all state anti-bucket-shop laws.  Born resigned shortly afterward.   

Now we see why the choice of Rubin and Summers for Obama's team is so, well, wrong.  There is a tapeworm in our economy that has been draining the system for decades, and it is the unregulated rapacious greed of financiers—but our chief economic advisors are on the side of the worm. 

Tapeworms are furtive creatures whose presence can go undetected for years. They exist by diverting a large portion of the host's diet to their own belly. (Think credit derivatives.) As the tapeworm grows in size it demands more and more of the host; no matter how much the host organism eats, it cannot gain weight.  If the parasite is evolutionarily clever, it will tamp down its greed and coexist relatively peacefully with the host.  But our worm got cocky and let its greed run roughshod over us (all those junk mortgages).  Eventually the worm's energy demands are so great that the host begins to sicken and lose weight. We are that sick host. Simply pumping money into the banks will not work—it's merely feeding the implacable worm. The problem must be addressed at its root, and that means strict oversight and new laws to rein in rampant greed. 

Sorry, did I say 'new' laws? Heck, even the old ones will do.

Against tax cuts: the NYC example

The New York Times editorial board got it right today, in "Getting Tough in Washington:" Obama must be much more aggressive in defending the stimulus plan. At times, his desire for bipartisanship has seemed to be more an end than a means. But we are in no position to wait for the farthest-right Republican ideologues to step on the road to Damascus.  New York City, where I’ve lived for the past six years, provides a case study in the failure of tax cuts directed toward the wealthy to accomplish lasting good.  If supply-side economics was to work anywhere, it should have worked in the city boasting some of the deepest pockets in the world, right?

It didn’t. The NYC budget report released from Mayor Bloomberg’s office on January 30, 2009 unwittingly offers proof that tax cuts do significant damage over the long term to infrastructure and public services—the very areas that, not surprisingly, most need our investment now. The report read in part: “Wall Street firms are expected to lose a total of $47.2 billion in 2008 and further losses are expected in 2009. Those losses can be carried forward, potentially exempting those firms from paying business taxes for potentially [sic] years to come.”  The report then details all the areas our Mayor is cutting back: the numbers of policemen and firemen (job losses), children’s services (child welfare positions, “low priority” child care services and foster care), senior center funding, parks, and libraries. (As if the publishing business isn’t hurting enough already— now people who can’t afford to buy books won’t be able to read them in public libraries, either). These cuts amount to $142M, a small percentage of the revenue that would be brought in annually if not for the tax cuts that have relieved corporations and the extremely wealthy of their civic duty for the past few decades.

Not convinced? Here is recent news from the Manhattan Transit Authority: “The MTA is facing ...in 2009, a projected US$1.2 billion shortfall... The deficit was caused by fallen revenues from real estate and corporate taxes.” Meanwhile, MTA services are being cut, trains are packed beyond capacity, infrastructure repairs are delayed, and the fourth busiest subway system in the world is increasingly prone to flooding from ordinary rainfalls. As the bridges in Minneapolis, the levees in New Orleans, and the report of the American Society of Civil Engineers indicate, we are hardly alone in our decrepitude. But the worst of it is that the consequences of the spending cuts on our services and infrastructure disproportionately (and sometimes exclusively) affect the middle class and the poor, and not just through job losses. Civic goods such as schools and hospitals, parks and libraries, subways and potable water are preconditions for civic life. Without them, we destroy communities, and the very possibility of community. 

Civic goods cannot, and should not, depend on cause-specific philanthropy to thrive.  What billionaire really wants his name plastered across the entrance to a sewage treatment plant? The fact is, there are some things that only governments can do well.  Opposition to the stimulus package is not economic but political: it stands for a theory of government that has been derided for so long that the public (and, apparently, some Democrats) need to be re-educated. President Obama should play to his strengths: he needs to proclaim his philosophy of good government to the public in the same inspiring way he spoke of race. Then he needs to look over the 2008 budget, figure out how much federal support went to the red states, face those Republican ideologues who maintain they don’t want government handouts and say:

Okay.  Then give it back.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Related articles from The New York Times, Friday Feb 6, 2009:

A terrific piece by the Netflix CEO: "Please Raise My Taxes"

Paul Krugman: "On the Edge"

A Modest Proposal for the Obama Administration

Considering the fact that 36 out of 41 Republican senators just voted to nix the idea of a stimulus package entirely and instead pledged their allegiance to a package that consisted entirely of tax cuts (!), I would like to make a modest proposal to President Obama. Actually, there are two versions. He can pick whichever he likes best.

The Obama Administration needs to craft a stimulus package that will actually stand a chance of halting our economic free-fall, go directly to the people with a half-hour speech/econ 101 lesson—Paul Krugman could be his TA—and say, “This is what we believe is our best chance for survival. We gave Republican ideology a go, and it turns out that prosperity does not, in fact, trickle down. The evidence is in: tax cuts for the wealthy, rampant de-regulation, and eviscerated government programs have produced misery on a global scale. [Points to scary graphs in Nobel Laureate’s hands.] So let us experiment. We in this Administration are willing to put ourselves on the line for a progressive agenda. If we fail, you can vote for a different approach in four years.” Along with this, the Democrats would stop yielding ground to the Republicans over this economic plan, and those quivering souls who are doubting the idea of stimulus spending would get a grip and remember November 4th: the public voted for a progressive economic philosophy, so the Dems can always blame their constituents if things go bad.

Alternatively, the Administration could say that all the states that went blue in this last election get full stimulus-package treatment—investment in infrastructure, child healthcare, unemployment insurance, library subsidies, education programs, you name it— while those states that were solidly red (or who elected hard-right Republicans like John Boehner) can continue experimenting with their tax cuts and shrinking government programs. In four years, we’ll re-evaluate which states have fared better and are overall happier, wealthier, smarter, closer to achieving eudaimonia (human fulfillment). This plan has two distinct advantages: 1) if 21 states didn’t receive federal funding, more could go to the rest of us, and 2) it combines a certain libertarian, laissez-faire, we-won’t-force-you-to-pass-Econ-101-if-you-don’t-want-to coolness with that Republican you-made-your-bed-now-you-must-lie-in-it attitude toward personal responsibility. (I’m sure Phil Gramm, for example, would love to be able to boast that Texas didn’t take any government handouts.) If the Republicans are ideologically consistent, they should love this idea.

Hmmm. The more I think about it, the more I favor Option #2…