Opinion - Opinionator

The Conversation January 2, 2013, 1:09 pm

The Fiscal Riff

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

Gail: Happy New Year, David! How do you think we’re doing so far? I guess if you’re going to plunge over a cliff, it’s better to hop back up again before the end of the long holiday weekend.

David: I would say so far the start of 2013 has given new meaning to the word inauspicious. If I’d been in the House I would have been sorely tempted to vote against the fiscal cliff bill. The measure was supposed to improve our fiscal situation. It was supposed to be balanced between tax hikes and spending cuts, like the president promised. It has some tax hikes but effectively no spending cuts. In other words the law fails to fulfill both of its primary objectives. When a law fails to achieve its objectives, aren’t you supposed to vote against it?

Gail: Well, not if you’re on a cliff. I was disappointed that the White House rolled over on the $250,000 bar for tax cuts. Give me a break. It should have been $75,000 from the beginning. But we’re all supposed to make compromises, right?

I must admit that my evil side was hoping for a House rebellion. Partly because it would confirm my longstanding theory that no matter how great the political divide between the parties, the biggest hate-hate relationship in Washington is the chasm of loathing between the House and the Senate. Also, it would have been nice to see the entire nation joining in the conviction that the House Republican majority is composed of crazy people. But instead we have a triumph of reason and another disaster averted.

David: Not averted. Postponed. We’ve got another catastrophe coming in a couple of months with the return of sequestration. And by the way how is anybody in government actually supposed to plan a budget when the whole thing may blow up again in 60 days?

Gail: Wow, you really are unhappy. To be honest, I haven’t seen much serious budget planning since the Republicans took control of the House after the 2010 elections and grabbed onto the Senate filibuster. It’s not the White House’s fault that John Boehner couldn’t deliver on a bigger deal. So they’ll handle the next crisis when they get to it.

David: And by the way, the calamity for liberalism is permanent. As Ross has pointed out, liberalism now has a cataclysmic problem. Liberals need revenue to fund existing government programs, let alone any future ideas they might have. And yet at this moment, with a newly re-elected president and with Republicans in utter disarray, they could only come up with an extra $60 billion a year. They ended up with less than half of the revenue Obama hoped for and much less than Boehner reportedly offered.

The events of the past week show that even at their most powerful, Democrats cannot tax the middle class. That means no money for any future liberal projects. Republicans looked awful this week, but Democrats suffered the biggest defeat.

Gail: Sorry, that speaks to me more of the current state of the Republicans, who can’t even approve a farm bill reform their agriculture committee liked. But tell me who you think were the heroes and non-heroes of this adventure. I know you don’t like to call people villains.

On the hero side, I have to give props to Vice President Biden, who worked out the Senate deal.

David: Biden was outstanding. He was certainly more effective than President Obama, whose public announcement on Monday lobbying for a deal that was very much in doubt in the House was one of the most inept bits of governance I’ve seen in a long time. Who holds a pep rally insulting Congress at the very moment you are trying to work out a deal with them?

Biden wins points because he understands that disdain is not really the greatest negotiating technique.

Gail: It makes me think that we should have national political tickets that always include one statesman and one pol. A little like the British with their king/queen plus prime minister. You want one great national figure — that would be President Obama. And one guy who works the legislature. I am prepared to admit that when it comes to dealing with the House and Senate leaders, Obama is terrible. But he’s great with the public. Which hates the House and Senate as much as he does. And then there’s Biden, who absolutely adores all the lifetime pols, being one himself.

David: The weird thing is that Obama is a lifetime pol, too. He seems to have chosen a profession he doesn’t intrinsically love.

Gail: And double weird that he seemed to discover he loathed politics only after he left the Illinois state legislature.

David: He’s actually a bit like a senior cabinet member, who does the policy but disdains the politics. I’m reminded again of Peggy Noonan’s line that he sometimes seems to regard politics as an unpleasant duty on his path to greatness.

Gail: What does all this say about the Republicans in the House? For a minute it looked as if Eric Cantor, the deeply irritating Majority Leader, was trying to overthrow Speaker John Boehner by dramatically announcing he was opposed to the cliff-averting bill. And for a while there, Boehner did seem to be screwing up everything. But in the end, Boehner got it done – admittedly with Democratic votes.

David: The core thing it says about them is that they want to reform entitlements and cut spending, but they can’t actually propose any plans to do these things because it would be politically unpopular. This is a terrible problem for them.

Gail: My nominee for non-hero is Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. One of the tiny handful of senators who voted against the compromise. And you know it was because he thought it was safer for his presidential aspirations. He’s probably right – everybody knows you don’t get in trouble for things you vote against. But as a leader, he looked like a total weenie.

David: I have a lot of sympathy for people like him and Democratic Senator Michael Bennet, whom Maureen wrote about. At least they have their eye on the big picture, which is the country’s economic survival. If this posture helps Rubio in the primaries, sign me up.

Gail: Well, it’s only the first week of the new year. In comes a new House and Congress. On to the debt ceiling crisis and the will-the-government-shut-down crisis. By the time warm weather comes, will we feel as if the country is ungovernable? Or that we’ve turned the corner and learned how to make this thing work again? Or maybe just that we’ve gotten really good at disaster avoidance?

David: Again I’m much more glum. I’d say we’ve accelerated our trip to disaster. My big puzzle is why young people are not in the streets. They are really being hosed, sentenced to a living standard much lower than their parents because of boomer greed. I guess it’s hard when you are 25 to imagine the tax bill and the benefit cuts that will hit when you are 40, but someday interest rates will return to their normal levels and it will all come crashing down.

Gail: For years I’ve been hearing 20-somethings say they don’t expect Social Security to be around when they hit 65. Eventually, I came to realize that they really mean that they just don’t expect to be 65. Or 40. Neither did I, when I was 22. So I’m afraid it’s something that we’re going to have to work out on their behalf. Give global warming to the youth and let the creakier part of the population figure out the entitlement problem. We’ll create an entitlement cliff! Something to look forward to next New Year’s Eve.

January 1, 2013, 7:52 pm

Fixing Our Food Problem

By MARK BITTMAN

Mark Bittman on food and all things related.

Nothing affects public health in the United States more than food. Gun violence kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. Heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes kill more than a million people a year — nearly half of all deaths — and diet is a root cause of many of those diseases.

And the root of that dangerous diet is our system of hyper-industrial agriculture, the kind that uses 10 times as much energy as it produces.

We must figure out a way to un-invent this food system. It’s been a major contributor to climate change, spawned the obesity crisis, poisoned countless volumes of land and water, wasted energy, tortured billions of animals… I could go on. The point is that “sustainability” is not only possible but essential: only by saving the earth can we save ourselves, and vice versa.

The Grove of Gladness

By BLAIN ROBERTS and ETHAN J. KYTLE

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

As dawn broke across a cloudless New Year’s Day sky over the South Carolina Sea Islands, Charlotte Forten, a black Pennsylvania missionary who had come south to teach local freed people, set out for Camp Saxton, a waterside settlement on Port Royal Island, near the town of Beaufort. After a short ride on an old carriage that was pulled by “a remarkably slow horse,” Forten boarded a ship for the trip up the Beaufort River.

A band entertained the white and back passengers on the warm winter morning as they steamed toward the headquarters of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment made up of former slaves. By midday a crowd of thousands — comprising not only teachers like Forten but also Union soldiers, northern ministers and ex-slaves — had gathered in the largest live-oak grove Forten had ever seen. Located on a plantation a few miles outside of Beaufort, Camp Saxton was, according to Thomas D. Howard, another Northern missionary teaching in the Sea Islands, “ideal for the occasion.”

Why had they come? It was the first day of 1863, yes, but more important, it was the day that Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was scheduled to take effect. It was, in other words, the moment in which Sea Island bondspeople — indeed, nearly all of the more than three million slaves who resided in rebellious Southern states — were to be officially declared “thenceforward, and forever free.” Read more…

Draft December 31, 2012, 9:30 pm

Make Me Worry You’re Not O.K.

By SUSAN SHAPIRO

Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

When Kenan, the Bosnian physical therapist treating my back injury, saw me grading student papers between leg lifts, he asked, “What I did on my summer vacation?”

I told him that, actually, the first piece I assign my feature journalism classes is something a little more revealing: write three pages confessing your most humiliating secret.

“You Americans.” He laughed. “Why would anyone reveal that?”

“Because they want to publish essays and sell memoirs,” I said.

During my next session, Kenan handed me 900 words chronicling his Muslim family’s betrayal by their neighbors during the Balkan War. It led to his first clip and a second career.

Over 20 years of teaching, I have made “the humiliation essay” my signature assignment. It encourages students to shed vanity and pretension and relive an embarrassing moment that makes them look silly, fearful, fragile or naked. Read more…

Steven Rattner December 31, 2012, 7:43 pm

America in 2012, as Told in Charts

By STEVEN RATTNER

Steven Rattner on economic policy, finance and business.

The weak economy, widening income inequality, gridlock in Congress and a presidential election: Those were perhaps the dominant economic and political themes of 2012. To supplement the torrent of rhetoric, I offer charts to help provide facts and context for the debate around these important issues. Below are nine of my favorites from the past year.

In 2012, the slow recovery dominated both the economic news and the worries of most Americans, but the underlying components of the weak job market were not always fully dissected. In fact, job growth was so paltry in large part because it was so unbalanced. Since the recession ended in June 2009, three key sectors – government, construction and information – that together account for 22 percent of all employment lost more than 1 million jobs. Equally significantly, two of them, government and construction, generally add a disproportionately large share of jobs during a recovery. With government contracting and construction stalled, that did not occur.
Read more…

December 31, 2012, 7:05 pm

Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation

By THE EDITORS

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

In an op-ed, Eric Foner writes:

Soon after the Union victory at Antietam in September, Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, a warning to the Confederacy that if it did not lay down its arms by Jan. 1, he would declare the slaves “forever free.”
Lincoln did not immediately abandon his earlier plan. His annual message to Congress, released on Dec. 1, 1862, devoted a long passage to gradual, compensated abolition and colonization. But in the same document, without mentioning the impending proclamation, he indicated that a new approach was imperative: “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present,” he wrote. “We must disenthrall our selves, and then we shall save our country.” Lincoln included himself in that “we.” On Jan. 1, he proclaimed the freedom of the vast majority of the nation’s slaves.

Disunion December 31, 2012, 11:25 am

Rosecrans to the Rescue

By PETER COZZENS

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

There was no joy in the White House on Christmas day in 1862. December had been calamitous for President Abraham Lincoln and the Union war effort.

At Fredericksburg, Va., on Dec. 13, Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside suffered the most horrific Union defeat to date, losing nearly 12,000 men in a series of brutal and fruitless assaults against Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. In Mississippi, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had been forced to abandon an overland push against Vicksburg after Confederate cavalry destroyed his base of supplies. Democrats had badly beaten the president’s Republican Party in midterm Congressional elections the month before. The public was so war weary that the Republican governors of Illinois and Indiana feared open insurrection when the new Democratic-controlled state legislatures convened in the new year. Across the Atlantic Ocean, the specter of British and French recognition of the Confederacy loomed large.

Lincoln’s last hope of salvaging something in the waning days of 1862 rested with an enigmatic major general, William Starke Rosecrans. The 43-year-old West Point graduate possessed many qualities of genius: erudite, animated and indefatigable, he could also be intolerant and mercurial. He was a brilliant strategist, but the strain of combat caused him to issue more orders than necessary and expose himself recklessly to enemy fire. Read more…

The Stone December 30, 2012, 8:30 pm

Readers Respond to the ‘Armed Society’ Series

By THE EDITORS

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

After the massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., earlier this month, The Stone published a series of essays that examined the philosophical implications of the use, possession and regulation of weapons. Readers responded with thousands of thoughtful comments. Below is a selection of their writing.
— The Editors

Responses to ‘The Freedom of an Armed Society’ by Firmin DeBrabander
Good luck trying to address the subject of gun restrictions from a logical, philosophical basis. Much of the industry (the gun makers, the sellers, and the lobbyists) prospers by stoking irrational fears – fears of armed home invasion, fears of government conspiracies, fears of mob violence, fears of invaders from other countries, fears of Doomsday scenarios, etc., and by providing a false sense of security and control through their products. Perhaps the problem is that a fearful society has no chance of being a civil society.
— Rita, California

Mr. DeBrabander fails to understand the tenor of the phase “An armed society is a polite society.” The meaning of the phrase is not “You will be polite, because I have a gun.” The intention is actually that “I will be polite, for I hold the responsibility for the power of lethal force, and must conduct myself rationally, judiciously and, well… politely.” Read more…

Diane Ackerman December 29, 2012, 2:32 pm

The Power of a Hot Body

By DIANE ACKERMAN

Diane Ackerman on the natural world, the world of human endeavor and connections between the two.

As I waited with a throng of Parisians in the Rambuteau Metro station on a blustery day, my frozen toes finally began to thaw. Alone we may have shivered, but together we brewed so much body heat that people began unbuttoning their coats. We might have been penguins crowding for warmth in Antarctica’s icy torment of winds. Idly mingling, a human body radiates about 100 watts of excess heat, which can add up fast in confined spaces.

Heat also loomed from the friction of trains on the tracks, and seeped from the deep maze of tunnels, raising the platform temperature to around 70 degrees, almost a geothermal spa. As people clambered on and off trains, and trickled up and down the staircases to Rue Beaubourg, their haste kept the communal den toasty. Read more…

Things I Saw December 29, 2012, 2:18 pm