Deficit spending is about who's doing it

After mulling it over, I think we need a third party presidency for budget deficit reduction to become a sustained, acted upon priority.

Pew has tracked public prioritization of reducing the nation's federal budget deficit for nearly twenty years, and from someone whose default position is one of starving the beast, looking at how partisan positions flip flop depending on which party controls the presidency makes for depressing viewing. The following graph shows the percentage of survey respondents indicating that budget deficit reduction (from '02 onward; prior to that the query was on paying off the national debt, which, while not the same thing, captures similar sentiments) should be a top governmental priority. Results come from surveys conducted in January of each year:

During Clinton's presidency, Republicans cared more about cutting the deficit than Democrats did. Under Bush that flipped, and during Obama it flipped back again. It makes sense if you're all for redistributive spending so long as your guy is the one doing it. It doesn't make so much sense if your party is putatively the one opposed to leviathan's accretion, however.

It's often said that reducing the deficit and restoring fiscal sanity is important in determining the world that older generations will leave to their kids and grandkids, but those kids care less about it than their elders do. Of the 21 issues examined, the only one with a wider old-young (50+ and 18-49 years, respectively) gap is "securing social security", for obvious self-interested reasons.

There might be some reason for cautious optimism, though. Over the last decade, the trend has been upward across the political spectrum, and the GOP now has a high profile champion or two on the issue.

Pivoting to provide Republican pols with political advice, how about emphasizing opposition to gun control? While it's politically savvy, it's not pusillanimously appeasing--a state's gun ownership rate is one of the strongest predictors of how it votes. The higher the rate, the redder the state. And of the 21 issues Pew asked about prioritizing, gun control garnered the highest "should not be done [at all]" response rate of all.

Opposition to restrictions on firearm capacities and ownership is highest among the young, the wealthy, and the well educated, while support for increasing restrictions is highest among the old, the poor, and the uneducated. Excepting the political angle, contemporary demographic trends on the questions of gun control and same-sex marriage are pretty similar. Unlike a lot of other 'social issues' that see the conservative standing athwart history yelling "stop" (which, while I'm personally sympathetic to, is usually portrayed and conceived of in the popular consciousness the antithesis of being hip and forward-thinking), the right to bear arms is important to people who are going and who have gone places in their lives.

We can spare the state department, but that's it

Rand Paul is spitting into the wind. Unfortunately so from my perspective, but it's what he's doing all the same.

Pew recently released the results of a survey in which respondents were asked whether they would increase, decrease, or maintain current spending levels across 19 different expenditure categories if they were writing up the federal government's budget. The following table shows the public appetite for spending increases (decreases) by category, computed by simply taking the percentage of respondents who indicated they would increase spending in an indicated area and subtracting from it the percentage who said they'd decrease it (and letting be the percentage who wanted to keep it the same). The first numerical column shows the broader public's predilections. The three subsequent columns show results by partisan affiliation:

Spending up (down) on...	Total	Rep	Dem	Ind
Education	50	31	70	47
Veterans' benefits	47	48	45	47
Social security	31	18	46	25
Combating crime	27	24	42	19
Natural disaster relief	22	3	33	21
Roads and infrastructure	21	7	25	27
Medicare	21	3	45	15
FDA inspections	19	(5)	38	17
Scientific research	17	(10)	37	17
Health care	16	(28)	51	11
Energy	15	(5)	34	13
Agriculture	14	2	23	11
Anti-terrorism defenses	13	26	18	1
Environmental protection	11	(28)	44	10
Military defense	8	37	(4)	1
Aid to needy in the US	3	(40)	30	3
Unemployment assistance	(8)	(47)	28	(12)
State department	(20)	(26)	(13)	(20)
Foreign aid	(27)	(63)	8	(33)

Statism is alive and well in the US. Combined spending for unemployment benefits, the state department, and foreign aid--the three areas for which there is more desire for attrition than accretion--constituted less than 5% of all federal government spending in 2012. While there is some aversion to sending our pooled money overseas, the masses want it gathered up and spread around by a federal apparatus at home.

Even self-identified Republicans want spending increases in more areas than they want decreases, and more importantly, in the three gargantuan spending categories--social security, defense, and medicare--they want the federal government to spend more, not less, than it's currently spending. In 1980, Reagan's platform included abolishing the department of education. Today, only one in ten Americans (and barely one in seven Republicans!) say they'd like to see federal spending on education cut, let alone abolished entirely.

Leviathan loves the tacit agreement between Demopublicans and Republicrats to allow for increases in international defense offense defense spending in return for acquiescence to increases in domestic spending back home. Consequently, the only outlay category that voters in both parties express a desire for cuts in is the state department (with a $0.030 trillion budget from the $3.746 trillion the federal government spent last year). What percentage of Americans even know what the state department does? Besides being derelict in attacks on diplomatic missions in places like Benghazi, that is. Heh, maybe that's why they aren't overly eager to give it more money.

I'm not qualified to proffer financial advice, but every day that passes sees me becoming more and more satisfied with the investment strategy I've been employing for the last few years--buying gold and silver, exclusively. In retrospect, I wish I would've started when I hit legal adulthood in 2002. Better late than never, though, I guess.

Gypped by Japan

As an addendum to Half Sigma's paean to Japan, a reason I'm a favorably inclined comes from the WVS. The fifth and most recent wave includes a question querying respondents on how they feel about their respective countries providing foreign aid. Specifics aren't given, and the amount is simply .1% of each respective country's "national income" (stated on a per capita basis so as not to skew the results towards a larger population leading to less putative generosity), so it's basically a measure of magnanimity towards the rest of the world at the expense of the homeland's fiscal health. The following table ranks countries in which the question was asked (the affluent ones plus, oddly, Thailand) by what I'll call a sucker index, computed by simply taking the percentage of people who think that defined amount is "too low" and subtracting from it the percentage who deem it "too high":

Country	Sucker score
1) Andorra	70.5
2) Switzerland	45.9
3) Spain	45.5
4) Sweden	43.6
5) Norway	38.3
6) Australia	31.0
7) Finland	29.5
8) Canada	27.4
9) Germany	20.6
10) Thailand	9.9
11) United States	8.5
12) Japan	(1.6)

Germany's nicer than we are and they still get called Nazis by Greeks with their hands out. Time for us to start listening to Rand Paul and for the West to start sharing more of the Japanese sentiment.

WVS variables used: V175

I never win. I just know I will this time, though. I'm due!

Tonight, a multi-state lottery game with a jackpot payout of $640 million took in $1.5 billion, most of it flowing into state coffers (retail cuts are generally 5% on the sale and nothing on the payout, except the big winner). I'm being genuine when I say I'm surprised by how much I've heard people talking about it in public over the last week, rationalizing their ticket purchases with obnoxious cliches like "can't win if you don't play". But their taxes are too high, of course!

The libertarian in me says it's a voluntary tax, and a regressive one at that, so let it be. Allow people to impoverish themselves if they want to do. People do irrational things all the time--we're hardly a rational species. In a partially socialized society like we have in the US, however, there are externalities that others who have no part in the explicit cost end up having to pay.

For God's sake, AE, it's just a lottery! People drop $10 to in exchange for the ability to fantasize about being rich for a few hours before probability hits them upside the head. That's a reasonable amount of utility for the cost. What's the big deal? Is it any worse than going to see a movie or ordering a couple of beers?

No, it's not that big of a deal. But I see the mentality surrounding it, emblematic of the contemporary West though it may be, as poisonous--being rewarded for doing nothing worthy of reward, idly dreaming about abundant material wealth while squandering a bit of the meager pile one has managed to scrape together, the errant belief that one's odds are better than everyone else's are, etc. What a lazy, flabby, impulsive people we are!

Anyway, two of my favorite lottery aphorisms:

- Lottery is the ignorance tax--the dumber you are, the more you pay. (First heard from my high school AP English teacher, though I've seen it attributed to Adam Smith among others)

- Lottery: The process of taking money from a bunch of poor people and giving it to one formerly poor person. (John Stewart and co.)

Parenthetically, if lottery ticket purchases are part of your routine and that helps you get through your days, more power to you. Yeah, the unexamined life isn't worth living, but if I'm not careful, I might find that finger pointing right back at me!

A random day's worth of whining about media bias

Instead of just speaking to the walls as I work out while listening to the news, I'll mix it up by soiling this blog a bit by griping about a few examples of the media's sins of omission. In my personal life I'm hesitant to moan about this kind of thing not so much for fear of the censure it provokes (it's not like talking about differences in IQ or athleticism, where egalitarian sacred cows are butchered left and right--I'm just after fair, objective reporting is all!) as from an ethos from which taking offense, soliciting pity, or feeling sorry for oneself are precluded. I suppose I'm a throwback in that regard, playing by a hidebound set of self-imposed rules that an increasing number of people in the West have no concept of, let alone any intention of imposing on themselves.

From yesterday's All Things Considered (a misnomer if I've ever heard one) comes a report on protests against high housing costs in a posh area of Tel Aviv. More recently, these inclusive protests have expanded to take in other malcontents. The addition of Jewish settlers from the 'West Bank' appears to be an especially sore spot for many of the original protesters:

SHEERA FRENKEL [correspondent]: The settlers want the government to solve the housing issue by expanding the settlements. And they have secured the backing of 42 members of the Knesset, Israel's parliament. But the arrival of the settlers incensed Assi Rothbard, who has been living in the protest camp for the past week with his three young children.

ASSI ROTHBARD [protester]: They are doing the smartest thing that they can do because they want to destroy the protest. So the best thing they can do is build a tent here. Because these lunatic extreme settlers, I have nothing with them.

FRENKEL: Rothbard notes that the settlers have already received subsidized housing. Figures published by Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics show that Israel spends 15 percent of its housing budget on the settlements, though less than 4 percent of Israelis live there. Haim Ramon, a liberal lawmaker, says the government spends twice as much per capita on the settlers as it does on other Israelis. Rothbard says the issue is one of priorities. [emphasis added]

Without pretending to have a firm grasp on the dynamics of Israeli society, the open pronouncement of such statistics is something to be envied by those of us on the other side of the Atlantic. It's difficult to imagine HUD publishing similar stats on per capita federal subsidization by race for housing in the US. It's equally difficult to imagine a media organ like NPR seeking such data out even if it did (or even 'considering' criticism of disproportionate spending blacks or Hispanics in the first place).

Orthogonally, the five New Orleans police officers who were charged with, among other things, multiple civil rights violations in the notorious Danziger Bridge killings are quite the diverse bunch (two whites, two blacks, and one Hispanic). That the victims are black is made clear in the same NPR program's story on the convictions, but nothing descriptive about the officers is offered--not even their names, as Anthony Villavaso distorts the images of the crooked cops that listeners are supposed to have in their heads:

Of course, nothing was to be heard about the racially-motivated attacks against whites at the opening night of Wisconsin's State Fair, where one white boy under the age of 16 was severely beaten by a group of black 'youths', one of whom pushed a construction sign over on him before tossing him from the sidewalk into the bushes. And why would there be any coverage of such an incident, anyway? After all, what does could it possibly have to do with civil rights?

Example 3,441 of why the CPB (PBS and NPR) should lose its federal funding

From an NPR book review earlier this week:

Oreo is the story of a biracial daughter of an African-American woman and Jewish father... The vehicle towards humor is the quirks of language in Jewish and black culture [sic], and at every turn takes the reader deeper into the satire, and into the heart of American identity.

A story about the daughter of a black woman and a Jewish father who abandons them is at the heart of American identity? You really can't make this stuff up. It's so blatantly preposterous that it is beyond parody. A whopping 0.2% of married white men have a black spouse. Roughly 1 in 40 white men in the US are Jewish. Yep, right at the heart of American identity.

The afternoon news show's title, "All Things Considered", is a misnomer almost on par with Orwell's most notorious. There are far more factually and historically grounded attempts to get at the heart of American identity that would never be considered by government radio.

Colorado Congressman Doug Lamborn has reintroduced a bill first put forward in the 111th Congress for consideration in the 112th. If you're of the same mind, encourage your representative and Senators to support HR 68. It's as easy as emailing each of them a cut+paste message that identifies the legislation's name (either HR 68 or the bill to prohibit federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) and your opposition to funding a partisan organization using taxpayer dollars in an age of infinite media alternatives and an annual federal budget deficit approaching $2 trillion.

There is blood in the water. The time to act is now.

If you build them...

From the WSJ's What's News section:

Home builder are ramping up speculative construction to attract last-minute buyers who want to tap a soon-to-expire tax credit [the purchase must be signed by April 30 and closed on by June 30].

Houses were being built with reckless abandon a few short years ago, and times were good then. Clearly, we need the relentless construction to resume. Never mind that 2009 was yet another record year for home foreclosure filings:

Almost 3 million homeowners received at least one foreclosure filing during 2009, setting a new record for the number of people falling behind on their mortgage payments.

RealtyTrac, the online marketer of foreclosed homes, reported that one in 45 households -- or 2,824,674 properties nationwide -- were in default last year. That's 21% more than in 2008, and more than double 2007's total.

The dramatic, sustained increase occurred despite efforts, such as President Obama's Home Affordable Modification Program, to reduce foreclosure filings.

This will lead to the adjustments needed in the larger economy to purge malinvestment and direct resources to the most efficient uses possible. Government intervention into the market always has that effect, after all.