Intellectual Ore

I’m on vacation in San Francisco and Seattle until the 25th.  I’m having a great time out here, and we’re taking lots of pictures.

If you agree with xkcd #411 (the one about the techno song), or if you’re like my girlfriend who says “That stuff all sounds the same”, I urge you to listen to an hour of Groove Salad on SomaFM. I have absolutely no idea how I would have gotten through the spring semester in 2008 without Rusty and his 11 (now 14) stations of pure bliss. It’s to his credit that I discovered Ulrich Schnauss (featured in a 2008 Super Bowl commercial), Kruder und Dorfmeister / Peace Orchestra (featured in Traffik: Die Macht des Kartells), Bebel Gilberto’s “Tanto Tempo” (Kruder’s remix is incredible), Arling and Cameron, dZihan & Kamien, and countless other stars of downtempo, ambient electronic dance music.

Give it a chance - you won’t be disappointed.

I’m a sucker for politics — I’ve been watching the campaign for the American presidency since it started back in March 2007. Over the past 14 months, the issues on which the candidates have stumped have changed enormously. Early in the campaign, the war in Iraq was crucial as the right courted defense, one leg of the traditional “Republican tripod” alongside business and values voters. The left’s reaction was more varied, with Obama touting his “ideological purity”, having never voted for the use of force in Iraq. Clinton’s support for the war hung like a weight around her neck, although she did a commendable job of not letting it define her campaign.

In any case, the war in Iraq has all but faded from the political landscape. $120/barrel oil and its $3.50/gallon gasoline has caused Americans to start wondering what the candidates will do to cure “the pain at the pump”.

John McCain and Hillary Clinton both favor eliminating the 18.4 cent/gallon federal excise tax on gasoline. Eliminating the tax on gasoline represents wrongheaded, economically unsound policy, and proves these candidates will stop at nothing just to pick up a few votes. An open letter signed by over 100 academic economists explains why cutting the tax is a bad idea. In the first place, the excise tax funds infrastructure necessary to support “the American love affair with the automobile” (my father’s expression). Repealing the tax is yet another way of living beyond our means as a nation, ransacking the future to pay for the present. Additionally, the tax cut would increase demand for gasoline, which the economists explain would push prices up to their taxed levels. We really, really shouldn’t eliminate the gas tax.

I give Barack Obama all the credit for having the “testicular fortitude” to stand up for what’s right on this issue. As my research paper explains, today’s high gas prices are squarely due to long-term fundamentals. As a nation, we have to do something about our dependence on gasoline, and the sooner we do it, the better. I still remember my small fit of rage after reading this uber-pander, courtesy of John Edwards: that high gas prices “are just another example of corporate greed squeezing the middle class” — what a tool.

The policy spat around the gas tax puts me in a hard place politically. Paul Krugman, professor of economics at MIT, writes in his book “The Age of Diminished Expectations” that

The well-being of the economy is a lot like the well-being of an individual. My happiness depends almost entirely on a few important things, like work, love, and health, but everything else is not really worth worrying about–except that I usually can’t or won’t do anything to change the basic structure of my life, and so I worry about small things, like the state of my basement. For the economy, the important things–the things that affect the standard of living of large numbers of people–are productivity, income distribution, and unemployment. If these things are satisfactory, not much else can go wrong, while if they are not, nothing can go right. Yet very little of the business of economic policy is concerned with these big trends.

I’m really sick of the idiotic social programs pushed by big-government policymakers on both sides of the aisle. (The best social program out there is an NGO: Teach for America, an organization committed to fixing educational inequality in the United States.) I usually support the Republican party, because their small-government wing appeals to me, but even that’s losing credibility with all the war spending and the “fiscal stimulus”. Interestingly, it’s far from clear that the President matters the slightest in the policymaking process. So what I really want this election cycle is a president that’s a good figurehead, frankly, an actor, someone who can make a clean break with the past, and who represents everything good in this country; I’m not even sure if policy matters, I just want someone who will stop the cycle of pandering to get votes. I think Obama can deliver as a president, but I think we should leave the serious policymaking to the small-government guys, who typically sit on the right side of the aisle…what a conundrum.

UPDATE: Another quote from Krugman: When something gets as expensive as health care in the United States, it is a natural reaction to imagine that it is because someone — insurers, owners of private hospitals, drug companies — is profiteering. Does this sound like what’s happening with oil?

UPDATE 2: THE race for the White House has been a depressing experience for anyone foolish enough to have hoped for a rational debate about economic policy. John McCain, who is at least in favour of free trade, admits to being an economic illiterate, while Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama have been united in their remorseless, largely baseless bashing of foreigners (especially the Chinese) and big business. Ordinary Americans may be the main beneficiaries of global capitalism, but it is more likely to be celebrated in Beijing than on America’s hustings. — The Economist (ouch)