Kevin Drum

I guess today is the day for either catastrophic news (sea levels rising faster than we thought, GDP growth worse than we thought) or else political news that just makes me laugh. Earlier this morning I passed along the comical news that Republicans refuse to tell anyone what entitlement cuts they allegedly want to make, and now I learn from MoJo's own Erika Eichelberger that our good friends at ALEC have finally gotten the comeuppance they deserve. ALEC is a conservative group that writes model bills for friendly state legislatures, and although they sometimes branch out into things like voter ID laws, most of their focus is on anti-tax and anti-labor bills.

Every year they write a report extolling the virtues of their work and ranking all 50 states by how slavishly they follow ALEC's recommendations. But they mostly use statistical comparisons that would embarrass an eighth-grader. They cherry pick, showing the performance of one particular state vs. another. They show only the top seven, or nine, or five states compared to the bottom seven, or nine, or five. They weight every state equally, so big growth in tiny states counts as much as sluggish growth in big states. And guess what? Using their carefully invented measures, states with high ALEC scores always turn out to perform better than states with low ALEC scores. Amazing!

Well, this year someone finally called their bluff and simply produced a bog-ordinary scatterplot that compared ALEC scores vs. economic performance for all 50 states. And guess what? It turns out that high ALEC scores are correlated with negative employment growth, negative income growth, negative government revenue growth, and no difference in state GDP growth. Erika has all the charts here. Enjoy.

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A few weeks ago I linked to a piece Chris Mooney did for us about the effect of climate change on Hurricane Sandy. Chris made the point that although you can argue about whether climate change is responsible for any particular hurricane, there's no question that climate change is responsible for a rise in sea level, which makes the damage from hurricanes much worse than it otherwise would be. And that includes Hurricane Sandy. "There is 100 percent certainty that sea level rise made this worse," sea level expert Ben Strauss said. "Period."

Well, it turns out the news is even worse than that. A new study using satellite data suggests that, if anything, forecasts of sea level rise in the most recent IPCC reports have been too low. Global warming is about where the predictions say it should be, but the amount of warming we're getting is increasing sea level a lot faster than we thought it would. The chart below shows the difference between reality and the two most recent IPCC forecasts.

This unexpected rise isn't due to medium-term variability, and it's not due to a temporary release from Greenland's ice sheets. The most likely explanation is simply that sea level rise is more sensitive to global warming than we thought. Congress—along with all the skeptics who argue that it's cheaper to pay the price of climate change than it is to stop it—should think about this when they're considering the $100 billion in disaster funds that northeastern states are requesting to clean up after Sandy.

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Here's some grim news, courtesy of Brad DeLong. We all know that the economy is operating well below its potential, a problem that congressional Republicans, to their eternal dishonor, are flatly unwilling to allow anyone to deal with. But things are worse than that: the economy's potential has been going down too. The chart below shows the evolution of the CBO's estimate of potential GDP between 2007 and now 

Add up both the drop in potential GDP and the fact that we're operating well below even that, and the American economy is running at about $2.5 trillion under its forecast from only a few years ago. Congressional action probably can't fix this entirely, but it could sure fix a lot of it. It's scandalous that we're wasting our time talking about invented nonsense like Benghazi and the fiscal cliff instead.

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Matt Steinglass passes along some good news from the Big Apple:

New York City went a day without a murder on Monday, which according to police was the first time anyone could remember that happening. Overall, the city's murder rate this year is down 23%, reaching levels last seen in 1960. This is a milestone in the 20-year-long decline of violent crime in the Big Apple. It's cause for celebration, and Reuters reports that crime expert Tom Repetto attributes the success in part to the city's aggressive policing strategies, the famous "broken windows" tactics that got started in the 1990s under Ray Kelly, the police chief, and have more recently included the controversial stop-and-frisk policy.

Hmmm. Broken windows. Really?

But hold on a minute. Up in Boston, they also had tremendous success in cutting murder rates in the 1990s. But they didn't focus on the broken-windows strategy, stop-and-frisk, or going after petty offenders. Instead they launched a project called "Operation Ceasefire" to cut gang violence.

Gangs? Okey dokey.

But hold on another minute! What's that you say, Eric Tucker of the Associated Press? Washington, DC is likely to see its first year in decades with less than 100 murders? Wow! In the late 1980s and early 1990s Washington had over 500 murders per year. Why the decline? No single factor, says Mr Tucker. A little of this, a little of that, a little of something else you probably never even thought of.

Matt suggests this means we shouldn't look for simple answers:

What's the takeaway message? I'd say there are two of them. First of all, beware of takeaway messages! Lots of things in life, maybe most things, often the most important things, don't have explanations that can be packaged as a simple, coherent thesis. Second, given our inability to explain definitively why the crime rate is falling, we may need some scepticism about the recent push to demand scientifically valid evidence for the effectiveness of social betterment programmes. Random controlled trials might very well have found that the broken-windows strategy doesn't prevent crime, "Project Ceasefire" doesn't prevent crime, reducing rates of single motherhood doesn't prevent crime, family planning doesn't prevent crime, banning lead doesn't prevent crime, and so on and so forth; there might have been no statistically significant difference one could isolate for any of these things. And yet it seems extremely likely to me that most or all of these were good things to do! The drop in violent crime probably has to do with all of them.

I want to be careful here. Crime is a complex problem, and Matt is right that lots of things can affect both its rise and fall. I happen to believe that both "broken windows" and "Operation Ceasefire" programs are effective. And yet, I think he's 180 degrees off here. If you had lots of different cities with lots of different results, you'd be justified in thinking that lots of different things were responsible. But when you have lots of different cities all showing the exact same thing—a huge and completely unexpected drop in violent crime—does it really make sense that it's happening for a different reason in every city? It might! But that would sure be a monumental coincidence. More likely, there's some single factor underlying the decrease that affected the entire country. In fact, since drops in violent crime were also recorded in Canada during the past two decades, and elsewhere around the world during other time periods, it's probably some worldwide factor. And on that score, gasoline lead reigns supreme. There's really nothing else that persuasively explains a global rise and fall in violent crime that happens at different times in different countries. More on this later.

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This cracks me up. We all know that in the negotiations over the fiscal cliff, Democrats want some tax hikes and Republicans want some entitlement cuts. But what cuts do Republicans want?

A top Democratic official said talks have stalled on this question since Obama and congressional leaders had their friendly-looking post-election session at the White House. “Republicans want the president to own the whole offer upfront, on both the entitlement and the revenue side, and that’s not going to happen because the president is not going to negotiate with himself,” the official said. “There’s a standoff, and the staff hasn’t gotten anywhere. Rob Nabors [the White House negotiator], has been saying: ‘This is what we want on revenues on the down payment. What’s you guys’ ask on the entitlement side?’ And they keep looking back at us and saying: ‘We want you to come up with that and pitch us.’ That’s not going to happen.”

Well, of course they want the president to make proposals for both sides. Then they can reluctantly agree, and in 2014 run about a billion dollars worth of ads saying that Democrats raised your taxes and cut your Social Security.

This, of course, is yet more evidence that Republicans know perfectly well that cutting entitlements is unpopular. For some reason, however, they've lashed themselves to this particular mast, and now they have to figure out a way to wriggle out from beneath it. Their cunning plan is to make Democrats responsible for all the unpopular proposals and then paint themselves as the protectors of the middle class. But no matter what you think of Obama's negotiating skills, no one's a big enough idiot to agree to that.

Here in the real world, it's time for Republicans to put their cards on the table. You want to cut granny's Medicare? Let's hear your plans. If you want to cut the deficit in the medium term, that also means cutting benefits in the medium term, and that in turn means cutting benefits for current retirees. You can't use the old wheeze about leaving everything alone for everyone over 55.

The blowhard axis of the GOP has been complaining for weeks that Republicans would have won the election if only they'd stuck to Paul Ryan's guns on this stuff instead of muzzling him. Well, now they have a chance to find out. It's time to step up to the plate.

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The Washington Post reports on the latest in the Republican jihad against Susan Rice:

Even moderate Republican and onetime Rice supporter Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) declined to offer her backing after their 75-minute private session Wednesday....Collins told reporters she was “troubled” that Rice had “decided to play what was essentially a political role at the height of a contentious presidential election campaign” by appearing on five political talk shows to present the administration’s position.

Et tu, Susan? It's deeply depressing that even Susan Collins is endorsing this idiocy, and doing it with such transparent BS. I mean, her complaint is that Rice's mere appearance on the Sunday talk shows was somehow inappropriate? Seriously? She couldn't be bothered to invent anything more plausible than that?

The Post story suggests that nominating Rice "could cost the White House valuable goodwill with Republicans," but honestly, it's hard to see how. If you actually parse what they're saying about Rice, there's literally nothing there. They're simply rephrasing perfectly ordinary actions to make them sound somehow sinister. If even the moderates have decided to go along with this shabby travesty, it means there's not currently even a shred of goodwill among Republicans on this issue. It's hard to see how nominating Rice could reduce that any further.

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Ezra Klein talks to Chrystia Freeland about why the super rich dislike Obama so bitterly:

Klein: My experience is that the very rich are open to higher taxes in the context of a deficit deal....But they don't like the idea that their money should be redistributed simply because they have too much of it....And so that's part of the tension: They don't like why Obama is raising their taxes. And they certainly don't like the lack of admiration he's showing while trying to do it. They see it as punishing their success.

Freeland: I completely agree. I think Obama and the economists around him have a very sophisticated understanding of both globalization and the technology revolution and the impact they're having on the world economy and the way they're creating these winner-take-all spirals. The positive scenario, which I think is a bit pollyannaish, is all you need to do is improve the education system and change the skill set and all will be well. And even that takes a lot of investment and a lot of time. But there's actually the possibility that in order to have a healthy middle class, you're going to need to have a more redistributive society, at least for awhile. I think that's something the America