Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

A Senator Walker would also be an insult to reason, rationality, and decency.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

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E.D. Kain wrote for Balloon Juice from 2010-12.

E.D. Kain

How Jimmy Carter also saved the trucking industry

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I realize that beer is way more interesting than trucking, but someone has to deliver all that hoppy goodness. And thanks to Jimmy Carter, we have a much less regulated trucking industry as well. Before Carter signed that deregulation into law, trucking companies were not only exempt from antitrust laws which created a severely anticompetitive industry, but faced bizarre and apparently abstract commodity restrictions and even stranger routing policies which were byzantine at best. For instance:

In some instances, carriers are required to take an indirect route or travel through a designated “gateway city” to reach their destination. For example:

—Denver, Colorado and Albuquerque, New Mexico, are connected to each other via Interstate 25, a distance of 442 miles. Garrett Freight Lines is permitted to haul freight from Denver to Albuquerque—but only if it goes by way of Salt Lake City, a distance of 730 miles.

—In 1974, during the height of the energy crisis, Consolidated Freightways was denied a request to travel directly between Minneapolis-St. Paul and Dallas. The carrier’s route authority required it to travel 37% extra miles on trips between the two points. Despite the company’s desire to eliminate excessive mileage and save fuel, the ICC denied the request because the new service would harm carriers already serving the route.

Circuitous routings, like regulations which require trucks to travel empty, waste precious fuel and increase costs and prices.

Carter’s deregulation was significant:

The legislation I am proposing provides that:

—All backhaul restrictions are removed immediately.

—All prohibitions on making intermediate stops between authorized points are removed immediately.

—All route restrictions, including requirements that a carrier take a circuitous route or pass through a designated gateway city, must be removed no later than December 31, 1981.

—All restrictions limiting the types of commodities a carrier may haul must be removed no later than December 31, 1982.

—All other restrictions must be removed no later than December 31, 1983.

—The ICC is directed to adopt liberal standards and expedited procedures for carrier petitions for removal of individual restrictions prior to the statutory deadlines. Opponents to carriers’ petitions have the burden of proof to show why a restriction should not be removed.

—The ICC is directed to develop a program allowing existing carriers to increase each year their operating authority by a limited amount without ICC approval. The ICC program shall emphasize increased opportunities to serve small towns.

Interestingly, Carter coupled these deregulations with improved safety standards and increased penalties for safety violations. Commenters in the beer thread pointed out that there are different kinds of deregulation. Economic regulations are not the same as environmental or safety regulations even if those can have economic impacts. I think this is important to keep in mind. Similarly, a government can have very little economic regulation and still provide a generous welfare apparatus. If you glance over at the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, you’ll notice that plenty of countries with generous safety nets and high tax rates are nonetheless very economically liberal. These are not mutually exclusive concepts.

Carter also began deregulation of other freight and transportation industries, including rail and airline deregulation. Reagan is often credited for getting Americans on the deregulation bandwagon, but it was Carter who got the ball rolling in a very significant way.

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What did the five fingers say to the face?

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DougJ: I honestly don’t know why people at official publications are so excessively polite to one another (perhaps they save it for the listserves?).

True/Slant quite explicitly stated that we were not to insult other True/Slant writers. I don’t agree with that policy one iota, but there it is.

I can’t really speak for other publications.

But I do imagine that a lot of writers and bloggers who actually live in the same area, go to the same parties, and run in similar social circles, might temper their writing a little to keep the peace. I don’t know. At The League we had a specific mission in mind: to engage in conversation, attempt to see things from other perspectives, and get past the noise of typical political dispute. But I’m not sure that means you have to be polite, or can’t tell someone when they’re being really bloody stupid.

There are certainly plenty of places around the internet where you can find good ol’ fashioned brawls. Much of the right-wing blogosphere is dominated by sneering and name-calling. I suppose a fair portion of the left-wing blogosphere is, too.

I’ve had my moments of invective myself – and to be honest, it’s just not my cup of tea. Maybe a lot of these publications say it’s not their cup of tea either. I can do it, and sometimes I think I even do it fairly well, but I always end up feeling a sense of futility at the end of a good polemic. The trick is doing it well. If you can’t make your invective entertaining, what’s the point?

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A quick note on Prop 8

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Time will tell where all this goes, but for now the overturning of Proposition 8  is a huge victory for civil rights and for civil equality in this country. Whether or not a victory by popular ballot would have been better or more democratic is a fair question, and others are right to point out that there’s always the possibility of backlash – but when it all comes down, a minority group of Americans are now viewed as equal citizens under the law in California. And that’s a good thing no matter how you spin it.

Meanwhile more gay couples will get married, more people will become familiar with these couples and will start to grow more comfortable with the idea of gay marriage. American culture will continue its inexorable shift.

And the sky will not fall.

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As American as a $1000-down mortgage

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[updated]

Annie Lowrey has an excellent piece on the reemergence of the $1,000 down mortgage:

“Buy new with $1,000 down,” the advertisement says, the words resting atop a trim green clapboard house offset by a bright blue sky. “The time has come. Stop wasting rent check after rent check and start building equity in your own home. And with only $1,000 down, affordable monthly payments and no private mortgage insurance required, the dream is closer than you think.”

It sounds too good to be true. But it is true. This offer does not come from a subprime lender, looking to reel in thousands of unqualified and ill-advised homebuyers, only to slap them with add-ons, fees and variable rates. It is not a teaser or a trick. The advertisement references a program initiated by the National Council of State Housing Agencies and Fannie Mae, the taxpayer-backed, government-sponsored enterprise that buys up mortgages from lending banks.

This next bit is almost funny it’s so obvious:

But there are concerns and problems intrinsic to purchasing a home with almost no money down. First and foremost, if the housing market turns down even a fractional amount, the homeowner will go “underwater” immediately. If the price of the house falls by even a bit, he will owe more on the mortgage than the house is worth. If he needs to sell it, he needs to come up with extra cash to pay the bank back. And the fact that the homeowner only had a thousand dollars to put down in the first place implies that he does not have much financial breathing room and might default.

[…]

“Haven’t they noticed what’s happened to the country in the past five years?” asks Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “You’re not necessarily helping if you’re helping them buy a home where they’re in the position they won’t be able to afford it. I don’t understand the logic of this. House prices are still going to fall. And when they do, we haven’t helped these people who are going to have to work like crazy to pay their mortgage off, or they’re going to default. If you’re in a situation where this is the only mortgage you can get, you shouldn’t be buying a house.”

Our uniquely American fascination with home-ownership is alive and kicking still it would appear, and tax dollars are being spent to maintain the obsession – in spite of the recent housing bubble and subsequent crash. As Yglesias notes, “Annie Lowrey’s story details the official reason why this time it’ll be different. As it always is. But I just didn’t expect this level of denial to re-emerge so quickly.”

Denial, alas, is as uniquely American as our obsession with home ownership, and just as unsustainable.

P.S.

Megan writes:

It’s true that this particular program is small–I don’t think the economy is going to be brought to its knees by several hundred houses.  The important thing, however, is that this is how the government thinks about housing.  The private bankers have at least reacted to their little scare by getting somewhat more conservative about the loans they offer–probably not conservative enough, but still, more conservative.  The FHA, on the other hand, is still out there offering 3.5% mortgages to anyone who can meet some fairly basic guidelines; those mortgages now account for almost 20% of all home purchases.  Yet so far, the FHA has cracked down in only one area:  it now requires a 10% downpayment from buyers with very bad credit.  On the other hand, it’s also expanded into pricier homes, so I’m not sure you can say the loan criteria have tightened overall.

I’m not sure it’s quite accurate to say “this is how the government thinks about housing”. This is how Americans think about housing. Or at least this is how Americans have thought about housing for a very long time, with the first few cracks in this particular mode of thought only showing up after the housing bubble popped.

A mortgage payment sits right at the beating heart of the American Dream. It’s not really surprising that politicians on both sides of the aisle constantly find new ways to get people into houses whether or not they can afford them. Not only is home ownership a driving force of the American economy, it’s part of our cultural mythos as well. Blaming government for this misses the underlying cultural factors which drive government’s actions in the first place. That doesn’t make the program at all better, and Megan may even be downplaying the risks a bit if the program really takes off in the future, but this is a problem that goes deeper than the actions of a few bureaucrats in the FHA.

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International Beer Day

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Today is International Beer Day (the site was down last I checked so here’s the wiki article). My favorite beer is Fat Tire. I like New Belgium both as a company and because they make lots of good brews. I also enjoy all the local breweries here, and going to local breweries when I’m on the road.

If you’re a fan of craft beer and microbreweries as opposed to say Bud Light or Coors, you should say a little thank you to Jimmy Carter. Carter could very well be the hero of International Beer Day.

To make a long story short, prohibition led to the dismantling of many small breweries around the nation. When prohibition was lifted, government tightly regulated the market, and small scale producers were essentially shut out of the beer market altogether. Regulations imposed at the time greatly benefited the large beer makers. In 1979, Carter deregulated the beer industry, opening the market back up to craft brewers. As the chart below illustrates, this had a really amazing effect on the beer industry:

 

US_Brewery_Count_Biodesic-thumb-400x339

 

That’s the number of large and small-scale breweries in the US. You can see how the large brewers continued to consolidate and grow and absorb more and more market share right up to the point where Carter deregulated the industry.

Obviously not all deregulation is going to work this way, nor are all matters of regulation as relatively unimportant as beer. But this is a good example of how regulation can crowd out small businesses and local economies in favor of big corporations with ties to powerful legislators. If anything, it should be a reminder that regulation in and of itself is pretty meaningless. While requiring offshore drilling rigs to be equipped with some form of safety mechanism to prevent massive oil spills makes a great deal of sense, many regulations are actually written by the special interests who stand to gain most from their implementation, either by gaining special legal perks or by crowding out competition.

Maybe instead of using regulation or deregulation as starting points, we should look at ways to create more transparency in Washington and more oversight of the regulators themselves. I’m not sure how to close the many revolving doors between industry and Washington, D.C. I’m not sure it’s even possible. But when I talk about limiting government, this is partly what I mean – limiting the way that government and special interests (including powerful corporations) work together at the expense of the rest of the country.

*fixed the typo at the top

** ok NOW I fixed the typo (I hope)

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No Newt is good Newt

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DougJ – I can’t speak for Conor. We tend to disagree as much as we agree on anything. In any case, as far as Newt Gingrich is concerned I find him neither a candidate with a very good chance at winning, or someone who I’d be comfortable having in the Oval Office. It’s not his pandering over the Ground Zero Mosque that bothers me so much (though it does); or his rather laughable attempts to paint the Obama administration as a ‘secular-socialist machine’ and to repeat that phrase as often as he can; but rather his devotion to the warfare state which keeps me up nights imagining his presidency. Actually, that keeps me up nights when I imagine any number of candidates, from Hillary Clinton to Sarah Palin to our very own Barack Obama whose own devotion to the war in Afghanistan (or is it an Overseas Contingency Operation?) will likely be one of the great tragedies of his legacy.

I’m more of a Gary Johnson guy myself. I like Mitch Daniels, too, but I haven’t been paying close enough attention to his foreign policy to say for sure. I’d vote for Johnson over any other candidate out there.

I think some conservatives view Gingrich as a guy who knows what he’s doing – a policy expert, someone who can navigate Washington, beat the Democrats at their own games, etc. I think he’s a pretty standard, boiler-plate Big Government Conservative more interested in playing war than making government work effectively. The mosque business simply confirms this. But I think at one point a lot of conservatives viewed him as the moderate, rational, wonkish leader they’d like to have instead of say, Sarah Palin. That the two are becoming more and more indistinguishable is hardly surprising, but it certainly speaks to his character.

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Please allow me to introduce myself

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First of all, much thanks to John for inviting me to write at Balloon Juice. For those of you unfamiliar with my writing, I blog at a number of venues. Up until recently one of those was True/Slant. Currently I write at the group blog I helped launch a year and a half ago, The League of Ordinary Gentlemen; at my own personal blog, American Times; and at The Washington Examiner. I posted for a while at David Frum’s New Majority until he changed the name to FrumForum, whereupon I just couldn’t do it anymore.

I typically write about things like civil liberties, immigration, fiscal sanity, folk wisdom, healthcare policy, reforming conservatism, the war on drugs, transportation and urbanism, the culture wars, and fantasy and science fiction. Occasionally I drop some deep thoughts in 140 characters or less here. These days I mostly listen to The National and The Avett Brothers. I’m reading the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. I don’t own a television, but I’m a big fan of shows like Lost and The Office which I sometimes watch on my computer.

John alluded to me as a ‘sane conservative’ and I’m sure plenty of people would take issue with both descriptors, but I’ll take what I can get. I look forward to stirring the pot around here a bit with my perfectly lucid advocacy of free markets, limited government and fiscal discipline. You may also find that I’m anti-war, anti-torture, anti-stupid-arguments-against-building-mosques, and anti-death-penalty. Indeed, I’m pro-life across the board though I have little interest in immersing myself in the endless culture war debates.

I also have very little interest in bashing other conservatives or, for that matter, liberals. Bashing has very limited utility. And others are better at it in any case.

So thanks for having me! I’ll see you in the combox….

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