Tuesday Reads

Good Morning!

The usual bunch of warmongers and profiteers have not failed to disappoint on the Iran Nuclear Deal.     It’s just amazing to me that so many folks seem so ready to kill our young people unnecessarily. But, it is what it is.  Pat Johnson called Israeli PM Bibi Cheney yesterday. I am inclined to agree.

To explain Benjamin Netanyahu’s frenzied reaction to the Geneva agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, let me begin with the stack of brown cardboard boxes under my wife’s desk.

Each of the five cartons contains a gas mask and related paraphernalia for a member of my family to use in the event of a chemical-weapons attack. They were delivered last January, as part of the gradual government effort to prepare every household in Israel for a rain of Syrian missiles. I suppose that having “defense kits” in the house could be macabre, but what we usually notice is that they’re a nuisance: another thing on which to bang your toe in an overstuffed city flat.

What’s more, they’re apparently an obsolete nuisance. A couple of weeks ago, the usual nameless military sources told the local media that the Defense Ministry would recommend ending production of  gas masks for civilians. According to the leaks, intelligence assessments said that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons was successfully reducing Syria’s poison-gas arsenal.  In other words, the U.S.-Russia agreement on Syria’s chemical weapons is working, and one result is a significant improvement in Israeli security.

To put it mildly, this isn’t what Prime Minister Netanyahu expected in September when President Barack Obama opted for a diplomatic solution rather than a punitive attack on the Assad regime for using chemical arms. Back then, Netanyahu barely concealed his view that American weakness was both a catastrophe and a betrayal that would encourage Iran to develop nuclear arms. At a military ceremony, he proclaimed that Israel could depend only on itself. “If I am not for myself, who is for me?” Netanyahu said, quoting the first half of an ancient Jewish maxim, without the second part, which says that someone who is only for himself is nothing. “We are for ourselves!” he declared. A nameless senior official, making the prime minister’s warning more explicit, said that “a diplomatic failure in Syria without [an American] military response” might force Israel to attack Iran. The failure of diplomacy was virtually a given; the only question was what would come after.

The Syria agreement was the warm-up act for the interim accord with Iran. This time the hostile Middle Eastern state is a greater regional power, and the weapon of mass destruction to be tamed is nuclear rather than chemical. Pressure was exerted through American-led economic sanctions, rather than deployment of American forces for a military offensive. No one can yet be sure that the interim deal will lead to a full agreement to keep Iran from getting a bomb. But theimmediate steps promise an improvement in Israeli security. Among other measures, Iran has obligated itself to a complete halt in developing the Arak reactor, which potentially could produce plutonium, and has agreed to tight inspections to insure that it is keeping the deal.

That of course, is the lead up to GERSHOM GORENBERG‘s diagnosis and explanation of “Bibi’s Agreement Anxiety Disorder”.  It sounds like something he contracted from the Republicans in our country.  Why is it two countries with such reasonable people can get such out there elected officials?  We’ve gotten two solid days of  bomb, bomb, bomb Iran from our unreluctant belligerents. 

Republicans are opposed to President Obama’s deal with the Iranians — whatever it is.

A couple of minutes after 9 p.m. on Saturday, word crossed the news wires that negotiators in Geneva had reached an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. Then, at 9:08 p.m. — before any details of the pact were known — Ari Fleischer delivered his opinion on the agreement, via Twitter.

“The Iran deal and our allies: You can’t spell abandonment without OBAMA,” he wrote.

This is the sort of trenchant judgment Fleischer was known for as chief spokesman for President George W. Bush at the start of the Iraq war. His anagram analysis was so relevant to the topic that it deserves application to his name, too. Turns out you can’t spell “Re: Chief Liars,” “Hi, false crier,” “Hire Sir Fecal” or “I relish farce” without ARI FLEISCHER.

But Fleischer’s instant and reflexive response — even knees don’t jerk as quickly as he did — set the tone for Republicans. Three minutes after Fleischer’s tweet came one in agreement from Ron Christie, another veteran of the Bush administration. “Precisely,” he wrote, also without the benefit of knowing what was in the agreement. “A disgraceful deal.”

An hour later — still before Obama detailed the accord in a statement from the White House — John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, had analyzed the administration’s motives in reaching the deal.

“Amazing what WH will do to distract attention from O-care,” he tweeted at 10:15 p.m., 19 minutes before the president spoke.

Aha! So the agreement to suspend Iran’s nuclear program, negotiated over several months, was actually a clever (and prescient) ruse to turn attention away from problems with the health-care law, which surfaced in the past several weeks.

And of course, John Bolton considers any one that doesn’t want to bomb Iran to be a surrender monkey.  Isn’t he irrelevant?  Do we have to hear from him?  I mean REALLY?  (Right Wing Source Alert!)

John R. Bolton, ambassador to the United Nations in President George W. Bush’s administration, isn’t pulling punches about the United States’ forged agreement with Iran: It’s a poor deal.

In his own words: It’s an “abject surrender by the United States,” he said in a commentary penned for The Weekly Standard. It’s a “Hail Mary” agreement that comes at considerable U.S. costs, he said. But that’s what happens with an administration that would rather have any deal than no deal, he said. “The inescapable conclusion is that … the White House actually did prefer a bad deal to the diplomatic process grinding to a halt,” he said, The Hill reported.

The biggest problem for the United States is that the deal doesn’t ban Iran from enriching uranium — and Capitol Hill lawmakers agree on that point, he said.

The deal includes a ban on weapons-grade enrichment.  It does not include banning the kind that is used in medicine and energy production.

The U.S. acknowledges that Iran is enriching and will continue to enrich uranium – whether under mutual agreement, as is the case under the interim agreement struck in Geneva this weekend, or in the future, under a permanent, comprehensive agreement.

Of course, if there is no comprehensive deal, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Iran will continue to enrich as it has for years, in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions and international sanction.

“As part of a final resolution,” Rhodes said under persistent questioning, “you could have a mutually agreed-upon state in which Iran’s program is much different than it is today – they’ve dismantled elements of that program, they’ve accepted constraints, limitations, verification measures, and have a very limited enrichment capacity on Iranian soil.”

The Obama Administration and its negotiating partners are hoping to finally curtail Iran’s nuclear program to being limited and entirely peaceful in exchange for a wholesale lifting on sanctions.

There has been some other good news besides the talks with Iran.  It appears there are charges that have been filed in the Steubenville rape case against enabling adults.  These charges should send a strong notice to any adults enabling sexual assault and underage drinking  including coaches.

Four school employees, including the superintendent and an assistant football coach, were indicted by a grand jury investigating a possible coverup in the Steubenville rape case.

The charges were announced Monday by the state’s top prosecutor, who decried “blurred, stretched and distorted boundaries of right and wrong” by students and grown-ups alike.

“How do you hold kids accountable if you don’t hold the adults accountable?” Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine asked.

Superintendent Michael McVey, 50, was charged with tampering with evidence and obstruction of justice in the aftermath of the incident at the center of the case: the sexual assault of a drunken 16-year-old girl by two high school football players after a booze-fueled party in August 2012.

An assistant coach, Matthew Belardine, 26, was charged with allowing underage drinking, obstructing official business and making a false statement.

Two school employees, strength coach Seth Fluharty, 26, and elementary-school principal Lynnett Gorman, 40, were charged with failure to report child abuse.

More than a few economists are arguing for some improvement in the lives of the middle class. Paul Krugman argues we should expand social security.

Before I get there, however, let me briefly take on two bad arguments for cutting Social Security that you still hear a lot.

One is that we should raise the retirement age — currently 66, and scheduled to rise to 67 — because people are living longer. This sounds plausible until you look at exactly who is living longer. The rise in life expectancy, it turns out, is overwhelmingly a story about affluent, well-educated Americans. Those with lower incomes and less education have, at best, seen hardly any rise in life expectancy at age 65; in fact, those with less education have seen their life expectancy decline.

So this common argument amounts, in effect, to the notion that we can’t let janitors retire because lawyers are living longer. And lower-income Americans, in case you haven’t noticed, are the people who need Social Security most.

The other argument is that seniors are doing just fine. Hey, their poverty rate is only 9 percent.

There are two big problems here. First, there are well-known flaws with the official poverty measure, and these flaws almost surely lead to serious understatement of elderly poverty. In an attempt to provide a more realistic picture, the Census Bureau now regularly releases a supplemental measure that most experts consider superior — and this measure puts senior poverty at 14.8 percent, close to the rate for younger adults.

Furthermore, the elderly poverty rate is highly likely to rise sharply in the future, as the failure of America’s private pension system takes its toll.

When you look at today’s older Americans, you are in large part looking at the legacy of an economy that is no more. Many workers used to have defined-benefit retirement plans, plans in which their employers guaranteed a steady income after retirement. And a fair number of seniors (like my father, until he passed away a few months ago) are still collecting benefits from such plans.

There’s also a few arguing still for single payer health care.

Even if its rollout becomes more expeditious, the Affordable Care Act does little to reduce the incentives that companies have to barricade themselves behind high information and transaction costs. In the financial sector, I previously noted, this perverse incentive is described as “strategic price complexity.”

A complicated new program applied to a complicated old industry makes it hard for everyone to figure out exactly what they will be getting relative to what they are paying. As a result, many ordinary people and small businesses fall prey to redistributional paranoia.

Accusations of ripoffs proliferate, along with assertions that the Affordable Care Act is unfair to young people or that it simply represents transfers from the affluent to the poor, or from whites to people of color.

The program clearly has redistributive impact, but much of it will be muted over the life cycle. People who pay more for their insurance will get more benefits in return. The biggest transfers will go from the healthy to the sick (who are sometimes poor precisely because they are sick) and from one part of the health care system (emergency room care) to another (insurance-covered routine care).

But the structure of the program seems unintentionally designed to intensify distributional conflict. Its highly means-tested subsidies create strongpolitical resentments and contribute to very high implicit marginal tax rateson lower-income families.

A single-payer insurance system, whether based on an extension of Medicare or on the Canadian model, promises many profoundly important benefits. Right off the mark, it promises simplicity.

And even a call for a guaranteed income.

‘Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult.” Reuters, 4 October 2013

How much is that?

It’s about £1,700 a month – over £20,000 a year.

Payable to whom?

Everybody, or at least, every adult citizen. It’s called a “basic income” and everyone gets it, no strings attached.

You have to be joking.

We’ll have to see whether the Swiss think it’s funny or not – they are holding a referendum, which is something they do quite a lot. But the idea of a basic income suddenly seems to be back on the radar after many years of being out of fashion. The New York Times announced recently that at the cocktail parties of Berlin there is talk of little else; US policy wonks are getting excited about it too.

This sounds like some communist plot. How can anyone take seriously the idea of paying people to sit around on their backsides?

The idea is endorsed not only by experts on inequality such as Oxford’s Sir Tony Atkinson, but by the late Milton Friedman, an unlikely communist. The idea of a basic income is one that unites many left- and rightwingers while commanding very little support in the mainstream.

What on earth did Friedman see in the idea?

He saw an alternative to the current welfare state. We pay money to certain people of working age, but often only on the condition that they’re not working. Then, in an attempt to overcome the obvious problem that we’re paying people not to work, we chivvy them to get a job. Our efforts are demeaning and bureaucratic without being particularly effective. A basic income goes to all, whether they work or not.

See?  There are sane people in the world and many are still working at making it a better place.  My suggestion is that there are a few we could just ship to the moon and do with out.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?