Collins, Cohen and Kristof

Ms. Collins, in “That Was the Year That Was,” says it is good to bid farewell to 2009. And imagine how President Obama must feel. Every problem was a long, grueling slog.  Mr. Cohen says somebody must “Change Iran at the Top.”  He says a ruler transplanted from heaven is not what Iranians want; a moral guide, rooted in the ethics of Persia, may well be.  Mr. Kristof, in “Sparking a Savings Revolution,” says there’s evidence that one of the most effective tools to fight global poverty may be savings accounts.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Wow, what a long year.

Just think. At the beginning of 2009, George W. Bush was still in charge of the country, talking about how time had flown since he first ran for president.

“Just seemed like yesterday,” he reminisced.

This was a sentiment the rest of us did not entirely share. I felt as if Bush had been running things since the Mesozoic Age.

But now it also feels as if Barack Obama has been president forever. I’m beginning to wonder if in the 21st century, White House years are going to be like dog years in reverse. Every one is equivalent to seven or eight in the normal human calendar.

I personally think Obama has been doing a good job, all things considered. The economy is still depressing, but that’s an improvement over mind-bendingly terrifying. The rest of the world likes us better, and whenever the president goes overseas he seems to be able to nudge the other countries toward a little progress on some issue on which they had been hopelessly stuck.

And health care reform. Extremely big deal. Really could pass. Eventually.

No matter how difficult the issue, Obama has been sensible, deliberative. Just look at Dick Cheney swooping around like a dementor from Harry Potter, and you have to appreciate how much things have improved.

But Lord, is it good to bid farewell to 2009.

And imagine how Obama must feel. Every problem is a long, grueling slog. Even in the last minutes of the year, he was stuck trying to get out of the hole that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano had dug when she used the fatal phrase “the system worked” after the failed plane bombing in Detroit.

Napolitano’s statements were more nuanced than we’re currently giving her credit for, but that doesn’t matter. What she said was ill advised on so very many levels, only one of which was the matter of the system not working.

In a time of crisis, you cannot make any sweeping statements defending the performance of the Department of Homeland Security. In a bureaucracy that big, somebody is screwing up somewhere.

Napolitano should have said something like: “Well, we were so happy that the Swiss guy tackled the underwear bomber. Let’s give him a shout-out! Now excuse me, but we have a lot of work to do.”

Maybe the problem is that the Department of Homeland Security is just too big to function. We know that creating it was a bad move since it was Senator Joseph Lieberman’s idea. (This will undoubtedly be a chapter in my upcoming book, “How Joe Lieberman Ruined Everything.”)

Remember how hopeful everybody was last winter? Remember when Obama had the bipartisan Super Bowl party? I wonder who he’ll invite this time. Captain Sully Sullenberger appears to be the only person left in the country who everybody likes. But the way things are going, we’ll probably hear tomorrow that Sully was driven out of his home on New Year’s Eve by an angry spouse wielding a hockey stick.

For Obama, one of the plusses of the first few months of 2009 was that the opposition was so inept. This gave the president momentum while also providing the troubled nation with much-needed entertainment.

Remember Obama’s first speech to a joint session of Congress? The one that the Republicans followed with a speech by Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who attacked “wasteful spending” on monitoring volcano eruptions in Alaska?

And when Arizona State University refused to give Obama an honorary degree because “his body of work is yet to come?” That was in April. And in October, he got the Nobel Peace Prize. Take that, Sun Devils!

But things really slowed down when we got to health care. Remember the Blue Dog Democrats holding the bill hostage in the House? The bipartisan panel of six senators who spent the summer sending back reports on what a great conference call they had had last Tuesday?

Remember Olympia Snowe? Whatever happened to her?

Remember the Ben Nelson crisis, and the Joe Lieberman crisis, and the plan from the freshman Democrats, and the plan from the moderates, and the revolt of the conservative Democrats and the revolt of the progressive Democrats? Boy, those were fun times. I bet Majority Leader Harry Reid is reliving them right now while he spends New Year’s Eve on the floor of his bedroom in a fetal position.

The job of governing jumped from difficult to impossible after those right-wing tea parties last summer, which eliminated any Republican notions that if a president won a big election victory and large majorities in the House and Senate then that might be a sign of the American people wanting him to succeed.

No more. This might allow one to theorize that Glenn Beck wrecked our year if we did not already know it was Joe Lieberman.

Here’s Mr. Cohen:

It has come to this: The Islamic Republic of Iran killing the sons and daughters of the revolution during Ashura, adding martyrdom to martyrdom at one of the holiest moments in the Shiite calendar.

Nothing could better symbolize Iran’s 30-year-old regime at the limit of its contradictions. A supreme leader imagined as the Prophet’s representative on earth — Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s central revolutionary idea — now heads a militarized coterie bent, in the name of money and power, on the bludgeoning of the Iranian people. A false theocracy confronts a society that has seen through it.

The emperor has no clothes.

Still, let us give this theocracy credit. It has brought high levels of education to a broad swathe of Iranians, including the women it has repressed. In a Middle East of static authoritarianism, it has dabbled at times in liberalization and representative governance. It has never quite been able to extinguish from its conscience Khomeini’s rallying of the masses against the shah with calls for freedom.

The result, three decades on from the revolution, is precisely this untenable mix of a leadership invoking transplantation from heaven as it faces, with force of arms and the fanaticism of militias, a youthful society far more sophisticated than the death-to-the-West slogans still unfurled.

Nowhere else today in the Middle East does anything resembling the people power of Iran’s Green movement exist. This is at once a tribute to the revolution and the death knell of an ossified post-revolutionary order.

Something has to give, someone has to yield. If the Islamic Republic is incapable of honoring both words in its self-description — that of a religious and representative society — it must give way to an Iranian Republic.

The former course, of reform rather than overthrow, would be less tumultuous and so, I suspect, more attractive to a people weary of tumult and flanked by mayhem in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yes, something has to give. Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, whose death this month carried heavy symbolism in a land where symbols are potent, intuited the revolution’s unsustainable tensions two decades ago. It was then that the cleric once designated as Khomeini’s successor lambasted an earlier round of bloody repression and then that he began to criticize the office of the supreme leader.

Montazeri had been instrumental in 1979 in the creation of the system of Guardianship of the Jurist, or velayat-e-faqih, placing a leader interpreting God’s word atop circumscribed republican institutions. But he later apologized for his role in the establishment of the position and argued that he had conceived of it as exercising moral rather than executive authority.

His anger came to a head after the June 12 election, hijacked by the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Montazeri then declared: “Such elections results were declared that no wise person in their right mind could believe, results that based on credible evidence and witnesses had been altered extensively.” He lambasted what he called “astonishing violence against defenseless men and women.”

I witnessed that violence — a putsch in the spurious name of God’s will grotesquely portrayed by Khamenei as a glorious democratic moment — and it was clear at once that Iran’s leadership had taken a fatal turn. It had shunned the pluralistic evolution of the Islamic order in favor of a lockdown by the moneyed cadres of the New Right, personified by the Revolutionary Guards with their cozy contracts and pathological fears of looming counter-revolutions of the velvet variety.

You can do many things to the Iranian people but you insult their intelligence at your peril. The astonishing, taboo-breaking cry of “Death to Khamenei” echoing from the rooftops of Tehran signaled a watershed.

It is time to rethink the supreme leader’s office in the name of the compromise between religious faith and representative governance that the Iranian people have sought for more than a century. It is time for Iran to look West to the holy Shiite cities in Iraq, Najaf and Karbala, places from which Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani exercises precisely the kind of moral authority and suasion — without direct executive authority — that Montazeri favored for Iran.

If the Guardianship of the Jurist can be rethought through compromise the Islamic Republic can move forward. If not, I cannot see the current unrest abating.

The Green movement is a loose coalition of divergent aims — much like the revolutionary alliance of 1979 — but is united in its demand for an end to the status quo.

A commander-in-chief transplanted from heaven is not what the Iranian people want, not after June 12; a moral guide, rooted in the ethics and religion of Persia, a guarantor of the country’s independence, may well be. It is time for a Persian Sistani.

The sons and daughters of disappointed revolutionaries do not seek renewed bloodshed. They seek peaceful change that will give meaning to the word “republic.” Khamenei, bowing to superior learning, in the best tradition of Shiism, should listen to the wisdom of Iran’s late turbulent priest.

Iran would thereby preserve its independence, the proudest achievement of the revolution, while better reflecting the will of its people, who overwhelmingly favor normalized relations with the United States.

It is time to retire the stale slogans of a bygone era. It is time for Iran to follow China’s example of 1972 in adapting to survive. Perhaps Khomeini, like Mao in Deng Xiaoping’s famous formula, was 70 percent right — and some brave Iranian leader could say that. He would thereby open the way for one of the Middle East’s most hopeful societies to move forward.

Speaking of tired slogans, it is also time for the United States — and especially Congress — to set aside formulaic thinking on Iran. Shiite Iran is not America’s enemy; Sunni Al Qaeda is, whether in Yemen, Nigeria or Pakistan. New sanctions against Tehran would only throw a lifeline to Khamenei and further enrich the Revolutionary Guards. President Obama’s outreach is still the smartest approach to Iran, a nation whose political clock has now trumped its erratic, wavering nuclear clock.

Back in February, I wrote: “The Islamic Republic has not birthed a totalitarian state; all sorts of opinions are heard. But it has created a society whose ultimate bond is fear. Disappearance into some unmarked room is always possible.” That was too much for the Iran-as-Nazi-incarnation-of-evil school, who cast me as an appeaser.

I also wrote that, “The irony of the Islamic Revolution is that it has created a very secular society within the framework of clerical rule. The shah enacted progressive laws for women unready for them. Now the opposite is true: Progressive women face confining jurisprudence. At some point something must give.”

With the birth of the Green movement, and in the spirit of Montazeri, something has given. The further, critical “giving” has to come in the supreme leader’s office, where the 30 percent error of 1979 has entrenched itself and so denied Iran the governance and society its vibrant population deserves.

Finally, here’s Mr. Kristof, writing from Estelí, Nicaragua:

There’s an old saying about poverty: Give me a fish, and I’ll eat for a day. Give me a fishing rod, and I’ll eat for a lifetime.

There are many variations in that theme. In Somalia, I heard a darker version: If I buy food, I’ll eat for a day. If I buy a gun, I’ll eat every day.

But these days, there’s evidence that one of the most effective tools to fight global poverty may be neither a fishing rod nor a gun, but a savings accounts. What we need is a savings revolution.

Right now, the world’s poor almost never have access to a bank account. Cash sits around and gets spent — and, frankly, often spent badly.

“We used to buy a three-liter bottle of Coke every day,” recalled Socorro Machado, a 49-year-old homemaker in a village here in northwestern Nicaragua. That was a bit less than a gallon, and the cost of $1.75 consumed a large share of the family’s budget.

Then Catholic Relief Services, an aid organization, arrived in the village with a new program to promote savings. It provided a wooden box with a padlock and organized savings groups of about 20 people who meet once or twice a month, typically bringing 50 cents or $1 to deposit in the box.

Some of the money is lent out to start a small business, but the greatest benefit of these programs seems to be that they provide a spur to save.

“Now we buy a bottle of Coke just once a week, and we put the money in savings,” Ms. Machado said. She saves about $5 a month in her own name and another $5 a month in her son’s name and has plans to buy a computer for him eventually.

Some people in the development world argue that microlending has been oversold, and there has been a bit of a backlash against it lately — including a “no pago” movement here in Nicaragua. This “don’t pay” effort has been orchestrated by the leftist government of President Daniel Ortega.

I don’t agree with the criticisms of microloans, for I’ve seen how tiny loans can truly transform people’s lives by giving them the means to start small businesses. Even so, there’s evidence that the most powerful element of microfinance is microsavings, not microloans.

One of the ugly secrets of global poverty is that a good deal of suffering is caused not only by low incomes but also by bad spending decisions. Research suggests that the world’s poorest families (typically the men in those families) spend about 20 percent of their incomes on a combination of alcohol, cigarettes, prostitution, soft drinks and extravagant festivals.

In one village here in Nicaragua where children were having to drop out of elementary school because they couldn’t afford notebooks, a midwife, Andrea Machado Garcia, estimated to me that if a man earned $150 working in the mountains as a day laborer during the coffee harvest, he might spend $50 on alcohol and women and bring back $100 to support his family.

One challenge is that those men don’t have a good, secure way to save money, and neither do poor people generally. It just sits around, itching to be spent. It’s also vulnerable to theft, covetous family members and demands for loans from relatives.

In West Africa, money collectors called susus operate informal banks but charge an annualized rate of 40 percent on deposits. Yes, you read that right. You pay a 40 percent interest rate on your savings!

In Kenya, two economists conducted an experiment by paying the fees to open bank accounts for small peddlers. They found that the peddlers who took up the accounts, especially women, enjoyed remarkable gains. Within six months, they were investing 40 percent more in their businesses, typically by buying more goods to be resold.

Many aid groups including CARE and Oxfam now offer savings programs in some form, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is studying how best to promote financial services for the poor. A Web site, www.matchsavings.org, lets donors match a poor person’s savings to increase the incentive to build a savings habit.

So it’s time for a global microsavings movement. Poor countries should ease the regulations (such as requirements for banking licenses) that make it hard for nonprofits to operate microsavings programs.

Hugh Aprile, a Catholic Relief Services official here, noted that savings schemes are very cheap to start because no capital is used to provide loans. “It’s people using their own money,” he said, “to build far more than they ever thought they could.”

Maybe it’s hard for us to believe considering how much animus there is toward fat-cat bankers in the United States, but the world’s poor might benefit hugely from the ability to bank their money safely.

Happy New Year, folks!  Here’s hoping that 2010 is better than 2009 was.

MoDo, solo.

The Moustache of Wisdom is off, so MoDo has the stage to herself.  In “As the Nation’s Pulse Races, Obama Can’t Seem to Find His” (I think it’s a winner for longest title) she shrieks that in his usual inspiring/listless cycle, President Obama once more appeared chilly in his response to the chilling episode on Flight 253. Here she is:

I was walking through a deserted downtown on Christmas Eve with a friend, past the lonely, gray Treasury Building, past the snowy White House with no president inside.

“I hope the terrorists don’t think this is a good time to attack,” I said, looking protectively at the White House, which always looks smaller and more vulnerable and beautiful than you expect, no matter how often you see it up close.

I thought our guard might be down because of the holiday; now I realize our guard is down every day.

One thrilling thing about moving from W. to Barack Obama was that Obama seemed like an avatar of modernity.

W., Dick Cheney and Rummy kept ceaselessly dragging us back into the past. America seemed to have lost her ingenuity, her quickness, her man-on-the-moon bravura, her Bugs Bunny panache.

Were we clever and inventive enough to protect ourselves from the new breed of Flintstones-hardy yet Facebook-savvy terrorists?

W.’s favorite word was “resolute,” but despite gazillions spent and Cheney’s bluster, our efforts to shield ourselves seemed flaccid.

President Obama’s favorite word is “unprecedented,” as Carol Lee of Politico pointed out. Yet he often seems mired in the past as well, letting his hallmark legislation get loaded up with old-school bribes and pork; surrounding himself with Clintonites; continuing the Bushies’ penchant for secrecy and expansive executive privilege; doubling down in Afghanistan while acting as though he’s getting out; and failing to capitalize on snazzy new technology while agencies thumb through printouts and continue their old turf battles.

Even before a Nigerian with Al Qaeda links tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines jet headed to Detroit, travelers could see we had made no progress toward a technologically wondrous Philip K. Dick universe.

We seemed to still be behind the curve and reactive, patting down grannies and 5-year-olds, confiscating snow globes and lip glosses.

Instead of modernity, we have airports where security is so retro that taking away pillows and blankies and bathroom breaks counts as a great leap forward.

If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?

We are headed toward the moment when screeners will watch watch-listers sashay through while we have to come to the airport in hospital gowns, flapping open in the back.

In a rare bipartisan success, House members tried to prevent the Transportation Security Administration from implementing full-body imaging as a screening tool at airports.

Just because Republicans helped lead the ban on better technology and opposed airport security spending doesn’t mean they’ll stop Cheneying the Democrats for subverting national security.

Congressman Pete Hoekstra of Michigan was weaselly enough to whack the president and “weak-kneed liberals” in his gubernatorial fund-raising letter.

Before he left for vacation, Obama tried to shed his Spock mien and juice up the empathy quotient on jobs. But in his usual inspiring/listless cycle, he once more appeared chilly in his response to the chilling episode on Flight 253, issuing bulletins through his press secretary and hitting the links. At least you have to seem concerned.

On Tuesday, Obama stepped up to the microphone to admit what Janet Napolitano (who learned nothing from an earlier Janet named Reno) had first tried to deny: that there had been “a systemic failure” and a “catastrophic breach of security.”

But in a mystifying moment that was not technically or emotionally reassuring, there was no live video and it looked as though the Obama operation was flying by the seat of its pants.

Given that every utterance of the president is usually televised, it was a throwback to radio days — just at the moment we sought reassurance that our security has finally caught up to “Total Recall.”

All that TV viewers heard, broadcast from a Marine base in Kaneohe Bay, was the president’s disembodied voice, talking about “deficiencies.”

Citing the attempt of the Nigerian’s father to warn U.S. authorities six months ago, the president intoned: “It now appears that weeks ago this information was passed to a component of our intelligence community but was not effectively distributed so as to get the suspect’s name on a no-fly list.”

In his detached way, Spock was letting us know that our besieged starship was not speeding into a safer new future, and that we still have to be scared.

Heck of a job, Barry.

MoDo, honey, here — have a Xanax.  That’s okay, wash it down with a bourbon.  You’ll feel better.  Take a deep breath, and unknot your panties.  NOTHING HAPPENED.  Remember Richard Reid?  W took six days (he was on vacation, doncha know) to make any public mention of him.  Do us all a favor, and if you really need to crap your pants do it in private.  Thank you.

Brooks and Herbert

Mr. Cohen is off today.  Bobo gives us “The Sidney Awards II,” and says it is time to highlight another batch of the best magazine essays of the year and hope the winners do not become corrupted by fame.  Mr. Herbert, in ” A Less Than Honest Policy,” says there is a middle-class tax time bomb ticking in the Senate’s version of President Obama’s effort to reform health care.  Here’s Bobo:

On Friday, I gave out the first batch of Sidney Awards for the best magazine essays of the year. Frankly, it was disappointing to see how quickly some winners were corrupted by fame. Several have already abandoned their families, accepted spots on reality shows and begun hanging out with Lil Wayne. I’m hoping today’s winners will do a better job of keepin’ it real.

Steven Brill’s essay, “The Rubber Room,” in The New Yorker generated a lot of discussion. It’s about the room where New York City schoolteachers who have been dismissed for incompetence sit for years on end and continue to collect their six-figure salaries for doing nothing. The word Dickensian doesn’t fully describe the madness of a system that cannot get rid of bad teachers.

Brill takes readers inside the room, and describes the arbitration hearings for teachers who want to be reinstated. One hearing, with clear-cut evidence against the teacher, stretches on 50 per cent longer than the O.J. trial.

Few essays are as ruthlessly honest as Bethany Vaccaro’s piece, “Shock Waves,” in The American Scholar. Vaccaro’s brother Robert suffered a brain injury, caused by an I.E.D. explosion in Iraq in January 2007.

Vaccaro describes her first glimpse of him weeks after the explosion at Bethesda Naval Hospital. “Robert was swollen and bloated; his skin was puffy and enamel white. He looked worse than dead and somehow a bit reptilian.” But the real subject of the essay is the injury’s effect on her family. “Now it defines our daily existence. The ongoing process of rehabilitation since his injury has tenaciously enmeshed each one of us, altering our plans, our family structure and interactions, our ideas about life and sacrifice, and most resolutely our belief that if he would only make it back home, everything would be O.K.”

Robert’s injury, she writes, has “allowed him to come so close to being normal, and yet miss it altogether … He will frequently prattle away with wide-eyed seriousness and then collapse into silly laughter that is sweet and uninhibited but also sad coming from a 25-year-old man.”

After the Israeli incursion into Gaza, the U.N. produced the Goldstone Report, a tendentious and simple-minded account of Israeli tactics. But the report at least produced a sophisticated response, “The Goldstone Illusion,” by Moshe Halbertal in The New Republic.

Here’s a typical problem: Hamas fires rockets from apartment buildings. Israel calls the residents of the buildings to warn them a counterattack is coming. Hamas then escorts the residents to the roof, knowing Israeli drones will not fire on crowded roofs. Israel then deploys a “roof-knocking missile,” a weapon designed to scare people off roofs in preparation for an attack. Halbertal wrestles with the moral boundaries that should guide this kind of warfare.

On the big think front, Josef Joffe has a bracing essay, “The Default Power,” in Foreign Affairs, puncturing the claims that America is in decline. William M. Chace wrote “The Decline of the English Department” in The American Scholar on why fewer and fewer college students major in the humanities.

Jim Manzi’s essay, “Keeping America’s Edge,” in National Affairs, explores two giant problems. First, widening inequality; second, economic stagnation, the fear that without rapid innovation, the U.S. will fall behind China and other rising powers.

Manzi investigates a dilemma. Most efforts to expand the welfare state to tackle inequality will slow innovation. Efforts to free up enterprise, meanwhile, will only exacerbate inequality because the already educated will benefit most from information economy growth.

In her Policy Review essay, “Is Food the New Sex?,” Mary Eberstadt notes that people in modern societies are freer to consume more food and sex than their ancestors. But this has produced a paradox. For most of human history, food was a matter of taste while sex was governed by universal moral laws. Now the situation is nearly reversed. Food has become enmeshed in moralism while the privacy of the bedroom is sacred. Eberstadt asks why, and provides a philosophical answer.

It’s become fashionable to bash Malcolm Gladwell for being too interesting and not theoretical enough. This is absurd. Gladwell’s pieces in The New Yorker are always worth reading, so I’ll just pick out one, “Offensive Play,” on the lingering effects of football violence, for a Sidney award — in part to celebrate his work and in part as protest against the envious herd.

There are, of course, many other essays that, in a less arbitrary world, would get Sidneys. Fortunately there are a few Web sites that provide daily links to the best that is thought and said. Arts and Letters Daily is the center of high-toned linkage on the Web. The Browser is a trans-Atlantic site with a superb eye for the interesting and the profound. Book Forum has a more academic feel, but it is also worth a daily read.

That first paragraph sums up better than just about anything he’s ever written how much of a horse’s ass Bobo is.  Here’s Mr. Herbert:

There is a middle-class tax time bomb ticking in the Senate’s version of President Obama’s effort to reform health care.

The bill that passed the Senate with such fanfare on Christmas Eve would impose a confiscatory 40 percent excise tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, which are popularly viewed as over-the-top plans held only by the very wealthy. In fact, it’s a tax that in a few years will hammer millions of middle-class policyholders, forcing them to scale back their access to medical care.

Which is exactly what the tax is designed to do.

The tax would kick in on plans exceeding $23,000 annually for family coverage and $8,500 for individuals, starting in 2013. In the first year it would affect relatively few people in the middle class. But because of the steadily rising costs of health care in the U.S., more and more plans would reach the taxation threshold each year.

Within three years of its implementation, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the tax would apply to nearly 20 percent of all workers with employer-provided health coverage in the country, affecting some 31 million people. Within six years, according to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, the tax would reach a fifth of all households earning between $50,000 and $75,000 annually. Those families can hardly be considered very wealthy.

Proponents say the tax will raise nearly $150 billion over 10 years, but there’s a catch. It’s not expected to raise this money directly. The dirty little secret behind this onerous tax is that no one expects very many people to pay it. The idea is that rather than fork over 40 percent in taxes on the amount by which policies exceed the threshold, employers (and individuals who purchase health insurance on their own) will have little choice but to ratchet down the quality of their health plans.

These lower-value plans would have higher out-of-pocket costs, thus increasing the very things that are so maddening to so many policyholders right now: higher and higher co-payments, soaring deductibles and so forth. Some of the benefits of higher-end policies can be expected in many cases to go by the boards: dental and vision care, for example, and expensive mental health coverage.

Proponents say this is a terrific way to hold down health care costs. If policyholders have to pay more out of their own pockets, they will be more careful — that is to say, more reluctant — to access health services. On the other hand, people with very serious illnesses will be saddled with much higher out-of-pocket costs. And a reluctance to seek treatment for something that might seem relatively minor at first could well have terrible (and terribly expensive) consequences in the long run.

If even the plan’s proponents do not expect policyholders to pay the tax, how will it raise $150 billion in a decade? Great question.

We all remember learning in school about the suspension of disbelief. This part of the Senate’s health benefits taxation scheme requires a monumental suspension of disbelief. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, less than 18 percent of the revenue will come from the tax itself. The rest of the $150 billion, more than 82 percent of it, will come from the income taxes paid by workers who have been given pay raises by employers who will have voluntarily handed over the money they saved by offering their employees less valuable health insurance plans.

Can you believe it?

I asked Richard Trumka, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., about this. (Labor unions are outraged at the very thought of a health benefits tax.) I had to wait for him to stop laughing to get his answer. “If you believe that,” he said, “I have some oceanfront property in southwestern Pennsylvania that I will sell you at a great price.”

A survey of business executives by Mercer, a human resources consulting firm, found that only 16 percent of respondents said they would convert the savings from a reduction in health benefits into higher wages for employees. Yet proponents of the tax are holding steadfast to the belief that nearly all would do so.

“In the real world, companies cut costs and they pocket the money,” said Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America and a leader of the opposition to the tax. “Executives tell the shareholders: ‘Hey, higher profits without any revenue growth. Great!’ ”

The tax on health benefits is being sold to the public dishonestly as something that will affect only the rich, and it makes a mockery of President Obama’s repeated pledge that if you like the health coverage you have now, you can keep it.

Those who believe this is a good idea should at least have the courage to be straight about it with the American people.

Krugman, solo

Oh, finally!  The Pasty Little Putz is off.  Prof. Krugman addresses “The Big Zero,” and says let’s bid a not at all fond farewell to the Big Zero — the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing.  Here he is:

Maybe we knew, at some unconscious, instinctive level, that it would be an era best forgotten. Whatever the reason, we got through the first decade of the new millennium without ever agreeing on what to call it. The aughts? The naughties? Whatever. (Yes, I know that strictly speaking the millennium didn’t begin until 2001. Do we really care?)

But from an economic point of view, I’d suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true.

It was a decade with basically zero job creation. O.K., the headline employment number for December 2009 will be slightly higher than that for December 1999, but only slightly. And private-sector employment has actually declined — the first decade on record in which that happened.

It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. Actually, even at the height of the alleged “Bush boom,” in 2007, median household income adjusted for inflation was lower than it had been in 1999. And you know what happened next.

It was a decade of zero gains for homeowners, even if they bought early: right now housing prices, adjusted for inflation, are roughly back to where they were at the beginning of the decade. And for those who bought in the decade’s middle years — when all the serious people ridiculed warnings that housing prices made no sense, that we were in the middle of a gigantic bubble — well, I feel your pain. Almost a quarter of all mortgages in America, and 45 percent of mortgages in Florida, are underwater, with owners owing more than their houses are worth.

Last and least for most Americans — but a big deal for retirement accounts, not to mention the talking heads on financial TV — it was a decade of zero gains for stocks, even without taking inflation into account. Remember the excitement when the Dow first topped 10,000, and best-selling books like “Dow 36,000” predicted that the good times would just keep rolling? Well, that was back in 1999. Last week the market closed at 10,520.

So there was a whole lot of nothing going on in measures of economic progress or success. Funny how that happened.

For as the decade began, there was an overwhelming sense of economic triumphalism in America’s business and political establishments, a belief that we — more than anyone else in the world — knew what we were doing.

Let me quote from a speech that Lawrence Summers, then deputy Treasury secretary (and now the Obama administration’s top economist), gave in 1999. “If you ask why the American financial system succeeds,” he said, “at least my reading of the history would be that there is no innovation more important than that of generally accepted accounting principles: it means that every investor gets to see information presented on a comparable basis; that there is discipline on company managements in the way they report and monitor their activities.” And he went on to declare that there is “an ongoing process that really is what makes our capital market work and work as stably as it does.”

So here’s what Mr. Summers — and, to be fair, just about everyone in a policy-making position at the time — believed in 1999: America has honest corporate accounting; this lets investors make good decisions, and also forces management to behave responsibly; and the result is a stable, well-functioning financial system.

What percentage of all this turned out to be true? Zero.

What was truly impressive about the decade past, however, was our unwillingness, as a nation, to learn from our mistakes.

Even as the dot-com bubble deflated, credulous bankers and investors began inflating a new bubble in housing. Even after famous, admired companies like Enron and WorldCom were revealed to have been Potemkin corporations with facades built out of creative accounting, analysts and investors believed banks’ claims about their own financial strength and bought into the hype about investments they didn’t understand. Even after triggering a global economic collapse, and having to be rescued at taxpayers’ expense, bankers wasted no time going right back to the culture of giant bonuses and excessive leverage.

Then there are the politicians. Even now, it’s hard to get Democrats, President Obama included, to deliver a full-throated critique of the practices that got us into the mess we’re in. And as for the Republicans: now that their policies of tax cuts and deregulation have led us into an economic quagmire, their prescription for recovery is — tax cuts and deregulation.

So let’s bid a not at all fond farewell to the Big Zero — the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing. Will the next decade be better? Stay tuned. Oh, and happy New Year.

Dowd and Kristof

The Moustache of Wisdom and Frank Rich are off today.  MoDo says “Oh, No!  Kevin’s Back!.”  She says if it’s Christmas, it must be time for her conservative brother to take over her column and turn it a blazing shade of red.  Given that this is MoDo and she’s prone to writing fantasies I have no earthly idea if she has a brother…  Mr. Kristof, in “Anybody Seen Pati?”, says a missing mother of four is a reminder that the most grievous victims of the global economic crisis aren’t just Americans.  Here’s MoDo (or maybe her brother):

As my brother Kevin headed off to Christmas Eve Mass in the Maryland suburbs, I asked him how he thought the first year of Barack Obama had gone.

He didn’t have to pray long over that one. “Fine,” he replied, “if you like unmitigated disasters like the Hindenburg and the Redskins season.”

If it’s Christmas, it must be time for my conservative brother to take over my column and turn it a blazing shade of red.

So without further ado, here is Kevin unplugged, offering a perspective from “the real America,” as one of his favorite Republican philosophers, Sarah Palin, likes to put it:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Who could have guessed on Nov. 4, 2008, that the mood this Christmas would be so festive? Yet a feeling of optimism pervades as we watch the old Christmas movies and marvel at the winter wonderland on the Mall illuminated by our national Christmas tree. (No offense to that ardent Catholic Nancy Pelosi, who would prefer “holiday tree.”)

The Republicans, of course, got exactly what they deserved in 2006 and 2008 mainly because they acted like Democrats. Deficit spending and sex scandals are not a good recipe for success.

But by forcing through a government takeover of health care, the auto industry and the banks, the president and his Congressional henchmen have brought us in a time machine to Russia 1917. These massive changes have been done in secret and along bullying, straight party-line votes.

It is stunning to watch rich lawmakers driving their own expensive cars off the cliff and signing on to such a socialist agenda. In dismissing the tea parties and pushing through plans the American people obviously don’t want, they have made the fatal disconnect between the representatives and the represented.

President Obama continues life in the H.O.V. lane, fawned over by the press and the crowned heads of Europe. In between apologies, the president should have reminded those pompous blowhards that without our interference, they would all be speaking German.

My dad was a D.C. policeman, and I would like to apologize (not “recalibrate”) to the Cambridge police for the president’s assumption that they “acted stupidly.” You would think that Mr. Obama would have afforded the police the same consideration he gave to the mass-murdering Muslim Army major when he said: “I would caution against jumping to conclusions.”

The Fort Hood massacre was a direct result of Army policy too concerned with political correctness and “celebrating diversity.” It was a terrorist attack by any definition and the government still cannot say it.

President Obama should remember that Icarus tried to fly to the sun because, as he said, “it is the only thing in the universe that can match my brilliance.” How did that work out?

Here are some reflections for 2009:

To President Obama: Thank you for saving the Republican Party and for teaching all of us that too much of anything is a bad thing.

To Bill Clinton: You did too much work on Northern Ireland for the Nobel committee. Next time, do nothing.

To Harry and Nancy: “The Twilight Zone” once had an episode where the town got the exact opposite of what it wanted. Farewell, Harry!

To John McCain: Thank you for your chivalry in banning Palin attack dogs — including my sister — from the campaign plane.

To Sarah Palin: Keep up the good work. Anyone who annoys Keith Olbermann that much is a friend to all of us.

To Glenn Beck: Thanks for being the only journalist interested in stories that used to win Pulitzer Prizes.

To Al Franken: So, 250 years of Senate tradition trashed. Stuart Smalley would have done better.

To Desirée Rogers: Get back to the gate. Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson can’t get in.

To the Salahis: Thank you for showing us that shame has no bottom.

To Valerie Jarrett: So much for the Olympic Village in Chicago. Whoops.

To Chris Dodd: The only thing lower than your polls is your mortgage interest rate.

To Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen: The military should be more interested in the men and women who serve than in celebrating diversity.

To the Democratic senators: Go last next time; the bribes are much bigger.

To Sheldon Whitehouse: You, senator, are an idiot.

To Dick Cheney: You, sir, are a patriot. Thanks for firing back.

To President Bush: Thank you for your dignity. Did you really start the plague in the 14th century? Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

To Hillary: Who knew how much you would be missed?

To Al Gore: A global warming conference in the middle of a Copenhagen blizzard is not a good visual.

To Max Baucus, Eliot Spitzer and John Edwards: Party on, dudes.

To John Ensign, Mark Sanford and David Vitter: Don’t party on, dudes.

Either MoDo doesn’t have a brother or stupid runs in her family.  Here’s Mr. Kristof, writing from Tegucigalpa, Honduras:

If anybody knows Pati Castillo in Houston, please tell her to phone home.

Pati is a 30-year-old Honduran whose children and other family members live in a gang-ridden slum here in the Honduran capital. Her mother, tearing up, says that nobody has heard from Pati in two months. Pati’s cellphone number never answers.

This family’s troubles offer a reminder that the most grievous victims of the global economic crisis — triggered in large part by American banking excesses — aren’t just Americans. They include residents of slums and villages in places like Haiti, Honduras and El Salvador — people who had nothing to do with derivatives or subprime mortgages.

The United Nations calculates that because of the economic crisis and continuing high food prices, the number of people going hungry around the world has risen to about one billion. Often, they include the 13 members of Pati’s family here.

The family members, including Pati’s four children, live in a one-room home on a steep hillside in the El Pastel slum. When I arrived a week ago, gang members were selling drugs on the street. And when I left, a boy was sniffing glue outside. Gang members have set up checkpoints and demand payment of a “war tax” to pass.

(A local priest, the Rev. Augustín Vásquez, escorted me in and glared his way through one gang checkpoint. “You ask money from a priest?” he asked indignantly. And he charged on through. Final score: God, 1; gangsters, 0.)

Pati’s mother, Iris, has a job at a music school that brings in about $100 a month, after commuting expenses. But that isn’t enough to keep everyone fed and clothed. So three years ago, Pati decided to sacrifice for her children’s future: She set out across Central America and Mexico for the United States.

After what her mother described as a brutal journey, Pati reached Houston. She found a job as a waitress in a restaurant there and shared a cheap apartment with several other Central American women. Every month, her mom said, she sent home $200 through Western Union.

With this regular windfall, the Castillo family began to live a better life — and overextended themselves. They bought a stove and refrigerator on an installment plan, assuming that Pati’s money transfers would continue indefinitely. “That was a big mistake,” Iris admits ruefully.

Then the economic crisis hit, and jobs began to disappear worldwide. Honduran, Salvadoran and Mexican garment factories that export to the American markets were crushed. Remittances, which amounted to about 22 percent of the Honduran economy, tumbled.

Pati lost her job in June. As an illegal immigrant, she found it impossible to find a new one, so she stopped wiring money home. “My daughter decided she will probably have to come back by herself,” Iris explained.

The last anybody heard from Pati was two months ago. Maybe she couldn’t afford her cellphone anymore; maybe she is en route back home; or maybe desperation pushed her to try something unsavory and to take risks — although her mom doesn’t believe that. “She’s well brought up,” Iris said. “I don’t think that she would do anything bad.”

In the meantime, the Castillos are adjusting to a two-thirds drop in family income. They are bracing themselves for their stove and refrigerator to be repossessed, and they have cut back sharply on food. The adults and older kids get just beans and rice; only Pati’s baby niece gets milk; and the younger children get a few eggs for protein.

“Sometimes the kids go hungry, but I work as hard as I can to prevent that,” Iris said grimly.

Father Vásquez confirmed the Castillos’ story and said it is common since the fall in remittances and the collapse in the economy (in Honduras’s case, greatly aggravated by political instability after a coup last summer). “The recession in the U.S. is felt at a grass-roots level here,” he said. “I see a lot of kids who don’t get breakfast now before going to school.” Many children cope, he said, by sniffing glue.

Similar dramas are playing out in slums and villages around the world. In Haiti, I’ve seen a school nearly emptied of children because remittances stopped coming from relatives in Miami.

“One-sixth of the people on earth are hungry,” said Josette Sheeran, director of the United Nations World Food Program. “We’re seeing epidemics of child malnutrition.”

Ms. Sheeran notes that evidence has mounted that babies who are malnourished in their first two years of life are likely to suffer lifelong intellectual impairments that later feeding can never overcome.

Yet just as global needs are surging, the crisis is causing a faltering in the commitment to help.

So, Pati, wherever you are, good luck finding a job — and call home. Your family, and so many others, need comfort and help.

The Pasty Little Putz. Bah Humbug.

Everybody else has Boxing Day off, and we’re left with the coal at the toe of our Christmas stocking — The Pasty Little Putz.  In “The Obama Way” he opines that President Obama baffles observers because he’s an ideologue and a pragmatist all at once, and he prefers cutting deals to walking away from the negotiating table.  Here he is:

Every presidency is the subject of competing caricatures. But almost a year into his first term, there’s something particularly elusive about Barack Obama’s political identity. He’s a bipartisan bridge-builder — unless he’s a polarizing ideologue. He’s a crypto-Marxist radical — except when he’s a pawn of corporate interests. He’s a post-American utopian — or else he’s a willing tool of the national security state.

The press has churned out a new theory every week, comparing Obama to John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, to George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter — to every 20th-century chief executive, it often seems, save poor, dull Gerald Ford. But none of the analogies have stuck. We’re well into the Obama era, but neither his allies nor his enemies can quite get a fix on exactly what our 44th president really represents.

Obama baffles observers, I suspect, because he’s an ideologue and a pragmatist all at once. He’s a doctrinaire liberal who’s always willing to cut a deal and grab for half the loaf. He has the policy preferences of a progressive blogger, but the governing style of a seasoned Beltway wheeler-dealer.

This is a puzzling combination, for many, because we expect our politicians’ principles to align more neatly with their approach to governing. Our deal-making Machiavels are supposed to be self-conscious “centrists” (think Ben Nelson or Arlen Specter). Our ideological liberals and conservatives are supposed to be more concerned with being right than with being ruthlessly effective.

It’s also puzzling because Obama promised exactly the opposite approach while running for the presidency. He campaigned as a postpartisan healer who would change the cynical ways of Washington — as a foe of both back-room deals and ideology-as-usual. But he’s governed as a conventional liberal who believes in the existing system, knows how to work it and accepts the limitations it imposes on him.

In hindsight, the most prescient sentence penned during the presidential campaign belongs to Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker. “Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama,” he wrote in July 2008, “is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them.”

Both right and left have had trouble processing Obama’s institutionalism. Conservatives have exaggerated his liberal instincts into radicalism, ignoring the fact that a president who takes advice from Lawrence Summers and Robert Gates probably isn’t a closet Marxist-Leninist. The left has been frustrated, again and again, by the gulf between Obama’s professed principles and the compromises that he’s willing to accept, and some liberals have become convinced that he isn’t one of them at all.

They’re wrong. Absent political constraints, Obama would probably side with the liberal line on almost every issue. It’s just that he’s more acutely conscious of the limits of his powers and less willing to start fights that he might lose than many supporters would prefer. In this regard, he most resembles Ronald Reagan and Edward Kennedy. Both were highly ideological politicians who trained themselves to work within the system. Both preferred cutting deals to walking away from the negotiating table.

The upside of this approach is obvious: It gets things done. Between the stimulus package, the pending health care bill and a new raft of financial regulations, Obama will soon be able to claim more major legislative accomplishments than any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson.

The downside, though, is that sometimes what gets done isn’t worth doing. The assumption that a compromised victory is better than no victory at all can produce phony achievements — like last week’s “global agreement” on climate change — and bloated, ugly legislation. And using cynical means to progressive ends (think of the pork-laden stimulus bill or the frantic vote-buying that preceded this week’s Senate health care votes) tends to confirm independent voters’ worst fears about liberal government: that it’s a racket rigged to benefit privileged insiders and a corrupt marketplace floated by our tax dollars.

At the same time, Obama doesn’t enjoy the kind of deep credibility with his base that both Reagan and Kennedy spent decades building. When Kennedy told liberals that a given compromise was the best they could get, they believed him. Whether the issue is health care or Afghanistan, Obama’s word doesn’t carry the same weight.

This leaves him walking a fine line. If Obama’s presidency succeeds, it will be a testament to what ideology tempered by institutionalism can accomplish. But his political approach leaves him in constant danger of losing center and left alike — of being dismissed by independents as another tax-and-spender, and disdained by liberals as a sellout.

Bobo and Krugman

Roger Cohen is off today.  Bobo, in “The Sidney Awards,” tells us to turn off a “Wonderful Life” and read the best essays of the year.  Well, Bobo, I never turn on “A Wonderful Life,” but I may read one or two of the essays.  (For the definitive take on “It’s A Wonderful Life” here’s Scott at World-O-Crap.)  Prof. Krugman, in “Tidings of Comfort,” says imperfect as it is, the health care reform bill, which will likely become a law, will make America a better country.  Here’s Bobo:

Every year, I give out Sidney Awards to the best magazine essays of the year. In an age of zipless, electronic media, the idea is to celebrate (and provide online links to) long-form articles that have narrative drive and social impact.

The first rule of the Sidneys is that they cannot go to any article that appeared in The Times. So David Rohde does not get a Sidney for his unforgettable series on being held captive by the Taliban. But those pieces possess exactly the virtues that the Sidneys are meant to honor, and they make one proud to be a journalist.

This year, magazines had a powerful effect on the health care debate. Atul Gawande’s piece, “The Cost Conundrum,” in The New Yorker, was the most influential essay of 2009, and David Goldhill’s “How American Health Care Killed My Father,” in The Atlantic, explained why the U.S. needs fundamental health reform. But special recognition should also go to Jonathan Rauch’s delightful essay, “Fasten Your Seat Belts — It’s Going to Be a Bumpy Flight,” in The National Journal.

Rauch described what the airline industry would look like if it worked the way the health care industry works. The piece takes the form of a customer trying to book a flight with a customer service representative. The customer wants to fly from Washington, D.C., to Oregon on Oct. 3, but the airline lady can squeeze him in only in January or February. He can call each of two dozen other airlines if he wants to check other availability.

When he finally gets on a flight, he finds that his airline will only take him to Chicago, since it’s an eastern-region specialist. He’ll have to find a western-region specialist to get to Eugene. In addition, he’ll have to fax in a 30-page travel history questionnaire, make arrangements with a separate luggage transport provider and see if he can find a fuelist who might be free to make fuel arrangements on that date. That is, if the airline is in his insurance company’s provider network, which it isn’t.

The most powerful essay I read this year was David Grann’s “Trial by Fire” in The New Yorker. Grann investigated the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for murdering his three children by setting their house on fire.

In the first part of the essay, Grann lays out the evidence that led to Willingham’s conviction: the marks on the floor and walls that suggested that a fire accelerant had been splashed around; the distinct smoke patterns suggesting arson; the fact that Willingham was able to flee the house barefoot without burning his feet.

Then, in the rest of the essay, Grann raises grave doubts about that evidence. He tells the story of a few people who looked into the matter, found a miscarriage of justice and then had their arguments ignored as Willingham was put to death. Grann painstakingly describes how bogus science may have swayed the system to kill an innocent man, but at the core of the piece there are the complex relationships that grew up around a man convicted of burning his children. If you can still support the death penalty after reading this piece, you have stronger convictions than I do.

I try not to give Sidneys to the same people year after year, but the fact is, talent is not randomly distributed. Some people, like Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard, just know how to write. His piece, “A Rake’s Progress” was a sympathetic and gripping profile of Marion Barry, the former Washington, D.C., mayor, crack-smoker and recent girlfriend-stalker.

At the start of his first interview, Labash, making small talk, asked Barry if he still has a scar from an old bullet wound: “ ‘Let’s see,’ he says, lifting his shirt, so that within ten minutes of arriving, I’m eyeball to areola with Barry’s left nipple. It’s a move that’s very Barry. Most times, he reveals nothing at all. Then he reveals too much.”

Labash delights in Barry’s rascally nature, but also captures why the voters of Barry’s ward don’t merely vote for him, they possess him and cherish him.

The region around Afghanistan is now regarded as a global backwater, but S. Frederick Starr’s “Rediscovering Central Asia,” in The Wilson Quarterly, is an eye-opening look at what once was. A thousand years ago, those mountains were the intellectual center of the world. Central Asians invented trigonometry, used crystallization as a means of purification, estimated the Earth’s diameter with astonishing precision and anticipated Darwin’s theory of evolution. Starr describes glittering cities and a flowering of genius. He also describes the long decline — the Sunni-Shia split played a role — and modern glimmers of revival.

On Tuesday, we will publish another batch of Sidney winners, so turn off “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Read these today.

Here’s Prof. Krugman:

Indulge me while I tell you a story — a near-future version of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” It begins with sad news: young Timothy Cratchit, a k a Tiny Tim, is sick. And his treatment will cost far more than his parents can pay out of pocket.

Fortunately, our story is set in 2014, and the Cratchits have health insurance. Not from their employer: Ebenezer Scrooge doesn’t do employee benefits. And just a few years earlier they wouldn’t have been able to buy insurance on their own because Tiny Tim has a pre-existing condition, and, anyway, the premiums would have been out of their reach.

But reform legislation enacted in 2010 banned insurance discrimination on the basis of medical history and also created a system of subsidies to help families pay for coverage. Even so, insurance doesn’t come cheap — but the Cratchits do have it, and they’re grateful. God bless us, everyone.

O.K., that was fiction, but there will be millions of real stories like that in the years to come. Imperfect as it is, the legislation that passed the Senate on Thursday and will probably, in a slightly modified version, soon become law will make America a much better country.

So why are so many people complaining? There are three main groups of critics.

First, there’s the crazy right, the tea party and death panel people — a lunatic fringe that is no longer a fringe but has moved into the heart of the Republican Party. In the past, there was a general understanding, a sort of implicit clause in the rules of American politics, that major parties would at least pretend to distance themselves from irrational extremists. But those rules are no longer operative. No, Virginia, at this point there is no sanity clause.

A second strand of opposition comes from what I think of as the Bah Humbug caucus: fiscal scolds who routinely issue sententious warnings about rising debt. By rights, this caucus should find much to like in the Senate health bill, which the Congressional Budget Office says would reduce the deficit, and which — in the judgment of leading health economists — does far more to control costs than anyone has attempted in the past.

But, with few exceptions, the fiscal scolds have had nothing good to say about the bill. And in the process they have revealed that their alleged concern about deficits is, well, humbug. As Slate’s Daniel Gross says, what really motivates them is “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is receiving social insurance.”

Finally, there has been opposition from some progressives who are unhappy with the bill’s limitations. Some would settle for nothing less than a full, Medicare-type, single-payer system. Others had their hearts set on the creation of a public option to compete with private insurers. And there are complaints that the subsidies are inadequate, that many families will still have trouble paying for medical care.

Unlike the tea partiers and the humbuggers, disappointed progressives have valid complaints. But those complaints don’t add up to a reason to reject the bill. Yes, it’s a hackneyed phrase, but politics is the art of the possible.

The truth is that there isn’t a Congressional majority in favor of anything like single-payer. There is a narrow majority in favor of a plan with a moderately strong public option. The House has passed such a plan. But given the way the Senate rules work, it takes 60 votes to do almost anything. And that fact, combined with total Republican opposition, has placed sharp limits on what can be enacted.

If progressives want more, they’ll have to make changing those Senate rules a priority. They’ll also have to work long term on electing a more progressive Congress. But, meanwhile, the bill the Senate has just passed, with a few tweaks — I’d especially like to move the start date up from 2014, if that’s at all possible — is more or less what the Democratic leadership can get.

And for all its flaws and limitations, it’s a great achievement. It will provide real, concrete help to tens of millions of Americans and greater security to everyone. And it establishes the principle — even if it falls somewhat short in practice — that all Americans are entitled to essential health care.

Many people deserve credit for this moment. What really made it possible was the remarkable emergence of universal health care as a core principle during the Democratic primaries of 2007-2008 — an emergence that, in turn, owed a lot to progressive activism. (For what it’s worth, the reform that’s being passed is closer to Hillary Clinton’s plan than to President Obama’s). This made health reform a must-win for the next president. And it’s actually happening.

So progressives shouldn’t stop complaining, but they should congratulate themselves on what is, in the end, a big win for them — and for America.

Kristof’s Christmas List

Gail Collins is off today.  Mr. Kristof, in “A Most Meaningful Gift Idea,” says some of the best kinds of gifts don’t need to be wrapped, just donated. He gives us a list of worthy, unknown charities.  Here he is:

Are the kids demanding the latest murder-and-mayhem video game? Do your loved ones have all the neckties/bottles of perfume/sweaters that can be used in a lifetime? Tired of celebrating spiritual holidays with crass commercialism?

If so, then perhaps it’s time to try a different kind of gift. After all, nothing says “happy holidays” like donating in Aunt Tilda’s name to build a composting toilet in Haiti or to deworm kids in Kenya. And a deworming pill will never be regifted!

This time of year I’m always barraged with inquiries about well-run charitable groups doing effective work. So let me tell you about some of the organizations that I’ve encountered that tackle global poverty in innovative ways.

In this column, I’m putting aside the larger, well-known aid organizations like CARE, Save the Children, Mercy Corps and Heifer International. They all do fabulous work, but today I want to bring to show-and-tell some organizations laboring in obscurity. These groups are also a reminder that the gap in savvy, creativity and effectiveness between the business world and the nonprofit sector is narrowing — in some cases vanishing.

So here’s my quirky holiday list of nifty, unknown charities:

•

Acumen Fund, www.acumenfund.org, brings a venture capital sensibility to aid work. It invests money in for-profit businesses — like WaterHealth International, whose business model is to provide clean drinking water where none is available. Acumen also invests in LifeSpring Hospitals, which runs low-cost maternity centers where impoverished women can safely deliver babies.

Acumen argues that these businesses, because they earn profits and treat the poor as customers, are more sustainable than giveaways. This reflects a growing trend of using business mechanisms to fight poverty.

•

Afghan Institute of Learning, www.creatinghope.org, is an aid group run by Afghan women. It is led by Sakena Yacoobi, a force of nature who was educated in the United States, and it now serves 350,000 Afghan women and children annually.

Yacoobi runs education programs, training centers and clinics, emphasizing local buy-in and self-reliance. Western aid programs in Afghanistan have not always been successful, and my hunch is that if more aid had been routed through Afghan-managed programs like this, more would have been accomplished.

•

BRAC, www.brac.net, is a Bangladeshi antipoverty organization that has had huge success serving tens of millions of people there and is now branching out to Afghanistan and Africa. It emphasizes organizing village women and promoting education, health and microfinance.

One of BRAC’s strengths is its ability to turn impoverished women into agents of change for the entire community.

•

Developments in Literacy, www.dil.org, builds terrific modern schools in Pakistan, particularly for girls. It frustrates me that rural Pakistan abounds with hard-line madrassas financed by fundamentalist Muslims who channel the students toward extremism. Extremists recognize the transformative power of education, and so should we. This is a security issue, for D.I.L. schools can help protect us from terrorism.

•

Deworm the World, www.dewormtheworld.org, tackles a problem most Americans don’t even think about: intestinal worms. Most kids in poor countries have worms, and the result is anemia, malnutrition and sicknesses that cause absences from school. One of the most cost-effective ways of getting more children into school appears to be deworming them with one pill a year, for about 50 cents per person reached.

•

SOIL, www.oursoil.org, is bringing dry, composting toilets to Haiti. Run by two remarkable American women, SOIL operates on a shoestring budget in impoverished communities.

One aim is to improve sanitation and public health. Another is to compost waste so that it can be safely used as fertilizer to boost agricultural production.

•

Sustainable Health Ventures, www.sheinnovates.com, is a new effort to help women and girls in poor countries to manage menstruation, so that they miss less school and work. S.H.E. is trying to help African women start their own businesses based on making and distributing low-cost sanitary pads.

Although one Nepal study found contrary evidence, education experts increasingly believe that a cost-effective way to keep high school girls from dropping out in poor countries is to help provide them with sanitary products and perhaps ibuprofen for cramps.

•

The Worldwide Fistula Fund, www.wfmic.org, and the Fistula Foundation, www.fistulafoundation.org, are dedicated to correcting a childbirth injury that is one of the worst things that can happen to a person: an obstetric fistula. This is an internal injury that leaves a girl or young woman incontinent, leaking wastes, scorned and ostracized.

A $450 surgical repair can usually solve the problem and give these young women their lives back. For fistula suffers, it’s truly the gift of a lifetime.

I would also add the much better-known Heifer International.

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo has a question:  “Is There a Real McCain?”  She says once a constructive independent, John McCain now is such a predictable obstructionist that he’s in the just-say-no vanguard with the same conservatives who used to despise him.  I think I’ve figured it out — MoDo notices things about 4 or 5 Friedman Units after everyone else.  Speaking of Friedman Units, the Moustache of Wisdom, in “The Copenhagen That Matters,” says the climate summit may not have solved our problems, but we can’t ignore the issues — or how individual countries, like Denmark, have effectively addressed them.  Here’s MoDo:

The Maverick’s buck stops here.

John McCain is no longer the media’s delight and his party’s burr, bucking convention with infectious relish.

The man used to be such a constructive independent that some of his Republican Senate colleagues called him a traitor. Now he’s such a predictable obstructionist that he’s in the just-say-no vanguard with the same conservatives who used to despise him.

On Tuesday afternoon on the floor, Senator Mitch McConnell, who contemptuously fought McCain’s campaign finance reform bill all the way to the Supreme Court, oozed admiration toward his Arizona colleague, as McCain did yet another grandstanding fandango on the health care bill.

Watching him, one can only wonder: Is McCain betraying his best self? Who is the real McCain?

Even some of McCain’s former aides are disturbed by the 73-year-old’s hostile, vindictive, sarcastic persona — a far cry from The Honorable Man portrait so lovingly pumped up in books by his former aide and co-writer Mark Salter.

After he lost to W. in a nasty primary battle in 2000, McCain delighted in poking at the new Republican president. But he was a trenchant critic of W.’s budget-busting tax cuts and other policies because his objections were consistent and honestly felt. (Or so we thought.)

Now he delights in attacking another man he ran against and lost to: a new Democratic president who had once hoped, based on McCain’s past positions, that his former Republican rival might be of help in such areas as the economy, national security, immigration and climate change.

With President Obama, McCain’s objections seem motivated more by vendetta than principle.

He angrily turned on his former base, the news media, during his campaign when his lame performance on the economy and his irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin got panned.

In 2000, McCain would devilishly point out Tom Brokaw or a Times journalist to town hall audiences as “one of the last Trotskyites, left-wing, Communist, pinkos of the American media.”

In 2008, he snarled to political aides about journalists whom he had once admired, like Brokaw and Charlie Gibson, and he cut off The Times completely. He talks about the media betrayal with the same outsize scorn that he once reserved for his Viet Cong captors.

The famous twinkle is gone, replaced by an infamous bitterness.

After his 2008 race against Obama — a campaign that too often took the low road in toadying to the right and painting Obama as a socialist and terrorist fellow-traveler — the capital eagerly waited to see which McCain would return to the Capitol.

Would McCain be the new lion of the Senate, putting “Country First” for a historic final chapter to his long career? Or would he morph into the sort of knee-jerk Congressional partisan he had once loathed?

Sadly, despite the scary trellis of problems America faces, the unorthodox, brave and cheeky McCain failed to show up.

Part of his sharp turn to the right may be motivated by his primary challenge for a fifth term from J.D. Hayworth, a conservative, anti-immigration talk-show host and former Republican House member (who has also been anti-Times at times).

But he has said himself that it’s more about philosophical differences with President Obama.

Unlike his pal Lindsey Graham, who voted to confirm Sonia Sotomayor, McCain seemed motivated by revenge when he voted against Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee.

“An excellent résumé and an inspiring life story are not enough to qualify one for a lifetime of service on the Supreme Court,” McCain sniffed.

McCain, who once led the fight in the Senate with his pal Joe Lieberman on enacting a global warming bill, shocked many when he flipped on the issue, attacking climate legislation supported by Lieberman, Graham and John Kerry.

McCain has also descended into demagoguery on Medicare. Although he has been in favor of Medicare reductions to cut the deficit over years, he’s now adopted a rigid hands-off Medicare stance.

He rejected the idea of being a point man on immigration in the Senate, apparently preferring to stew.

A couple of times, during floor speeches on health care this month, the Arizona senator noted “that a fight not joined is a fight not enjoyed.”

It seemed to be an inadvertent recognition that he was fighting for the sake of it, not to help the country get past some of the hideous problems left by the man McCain failed to stop in 2000.

Maybe an excellent résumé and an inspiring life story are not enough to qualify one as a real statesman.

No shit, MoDo…  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom, who’s still in Copenhagen:

As I listened to Denmark’s minister of economic and business affairs describe how her country used higher energy taxes to stimulate innovation in green power and then recycled the tax revenues back to Danish industry and consumers to make it easier for them to make and buy the new clean technologies, it all sounded so, well, intelligent. It sounded as if the Danes looked at themselves after the 1973 Arab oil embargo, found that they were totally dependent on Middle East oil and put in place a long-term strategy to make Denmark energy-secure and start a new industry at the same time.

The more I listened to the Danish minister, Lene Espersen, the more I thought of my own country, where I’ve been told time and again by U.S. politicians that proposing even a 10-cent-a-gallon increase in gasoline taxes to make America more energy independent and to stimulate fuel efficiency is “off the table,” an act of sure political suicide.

Not in Denmark. So I asked the Danish minister: “Tell me, what planet are you people from?”

Espersen laughed. But I didn’t. How long are we Americans going to go on thinking that we can thrive in the 21st century when doing the optimal things — whether for energy, health care, education or the deficit — are “off the table.” They’ve been banished by an ad hoc coalition of lobbyists loaded with money, loud-mouth talk-show hosts who will flame anyone who crosses them, political consultants who warn that asking Americans to do anything important but hard makes one unelectable and a citizenry that doesn’t even ask for optimal anymore because it believes that optimal is impossible.

Sorry, but there are no good ideas proven to work in other democratic/capitalist societies that we can afford to shove off our table — not when we need to build a knowledge economy with good jobs and everyone else is trying to do the same.

“Already the green taxes here are quite high,” said Espersen. “And even though we know this is not popular with business and industry, it has made all the difference for us. It forced our businesses to become more energy efficient and innovative, and this meant that, suddenly, we were inventing things nobody else was inventing because our businesses needed to be competitive.”

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute, a nonpartisan research center, and the Embassy of Denmark recently held a briefing on how Denmark is working to become a low-carbon economy. Here are some highlights:

Although it still generates the majority of its electricity from coal, “since 1990, Denmark has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 14 percent. Over the same time frame, Danish energy consumption has stayed constant and Denmark’s gross domestic product has grown by more than 40 percent. Denmark is the most energy efficient country in the E.U.; due to carbon pricing, through energy taxes, carbon taxes, the ‘cap and trade’ system, strict building codes and energy labeling programs. Renewable resources currently supply almost 30 percent of Denmark’s electricity. Wind power is the largest source of renewable electricity, followed by biomass. … Today, Copenhagen puts only 3 percent of its waste into landfills and incinerates 39 percent to generate electricity for thousands of households.”

The Danish government funnels energy tax revenue “back to industry, earmarking much of it to subsidize environmental innovation,” wrote Monica Prasad, a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research, in a March 25, 2008, essay in this newspaper. Therefore, “Danish firms are pushed away from carbon and pulled into environmental innovation, and the country’s economy isn’t put at a competitive disadvantage.”

It’s why Denmark, with only five million people, boasts some of the leading wind, biofuel and heating, cooling and efficiency companies in the world. Energy technologies are now 11 percent of Denmark’s exports. Oil exports and energy taxes also subsidize mass transit and energy efficiency, keeping bills low for Danish consumers.

Where do Danish politicians get the courage to do the right things — even if painful?

“We don’t have a lot of resources,” said Ida Auken, a spokeswoman for the Danish green/socialist party, S.F. “We have a welfare state that we have to keep up, so we have to think forward all the time and not get stuck in the past. That is where we get the courage. And we have seen it work for 30 years. It is good business. Danish contractors are begging for strict standards on buildings because they know that if they can become efficient and meet them here, they can compete anywhere in the whole world.”

My fellow Americans, the fact that the recent Copenhagen climate summit was a bust in terms of solving our energy/climate problems doesn’t mean that we can ignore those problems — or that we can ignore how individual countries, like Denmark, have effectively addressed them. With unemployment in Denmark at about 4 percent, compared with our 10 percent, maybe we should at least consider putting a few of its ideas on our table.

Brooks and Cohen

Bob Herbert is off today.  Bobo ponders what he’s calling “The Protocol Society” and says the success of an economy depends on its ability to invent and embrace a new set of instructions.  Mr. Cohen writes “In Defense of America,” and says no other nation is as capable of self-correcting renewal, even after a bruising decade.  Here’s Bobo:

In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions. A software program is a protocol for organizing information. A new drug is a protocol for organizing chemicals. Wal-Mart produces protocols for moving and marketing consumer goods. Even when you are buying a car, you are mostly paying for the knowledge embedded in its design, not the metal and glass.

A protocol economy has very different properties than a physical stuff economy. For example, you and I can’t use the same piece of metal at the same time. But you and I can use the same software program at the same time. Physical stuff is subject to the laws of scarcity: you can use up your timber. But it’s hard to use up a good idea. Prices for material goods tend toward equilibrium, depending on supply and demand. Equilibrium doesn’t really apply to the market for new ideas.

Over the past decades, many economists have sought to define the differences between the physical goods economy and the modern protocol economy. In 2000, Larry Summers, then the Treasury secretary, gave a speech called “The New Wealth of Nations,” laying out some principles. Leading work has been done by Douglass North of Washington University, Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago, Joel Mokyr of Northwestern and Paul Romer of Stanford.

Their research is the subject of an important new book called “From Poverty to Prosperity,” by Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz.

Kling and Schulz start off entertainingly by describing a food court. There are protocols everywhere, not only for how to make the food, but how to greet the customers, how to share common equipment like trays and tables, how to settle disputes between the stalls and enforce contracts with the management.

The success of an economy depends on its ability to invent and embrace new protocols. Kling and Schulz use North’s phrase “adaptive efficiency,” but they are really talking about how quickly a society can be infected by new ideas.

Protocols are intangible, so the traits needed to invent and absorb them are intangible, too. First, a nation has to have a good operating system: laws, regulations and property rights.

For example, if you are making steel, it costs a medium amount to make your first piece of steel and then a significant amount for each additional piece. If, on the other hand, you are making a new drug, it costs an incredible amount to invent your first pill. But then it’s nearly free to copy it millions of times. You’re only going to invest the money to make that first pill if you can have a temporary monopoly to sell the copies. So a nation has to find a way to protect intellectual property while still encouraging the flow of ideas.

Second, a nation has to have a good economic culture. “From Poverty to Prosperity” includes interviews with major economists, and it is striking how they are moving away from mathematical modeling and toward fields like sociology and anthropology.

What really matters, Edmund S. Phelps of Columbia argues, is economic culture — attitudes toward uncertainty, the willingness to exert leadership, the willingness to follow orders. A strong economy needs daring consumers (Phelps says China lacks this) and young researchers with money to play with (Romer notes that N.I.H. grants used to go to 35-year-olds but now they go to 50-year-olds).

A protocol economy tends toward inequality because some societies and subcultures have norms, attitudes and customs that increase the velocity of new recipes while other subcultures retard it. Some nations are blessed with self-reliant families, social trust and fairly enforced regulations, while others are cursed by distrust, corruption and fatalistic attitudes about the future. It is very hard to transfer the protocols of one culture onto those of another.

It’s exciting to see so many Nobel laureates taking this consilient approach. North, the leader of the field, doesn’t even think his work is economics, just unified social science.

But they are still economists, with worldviews that are still excessively individualistic and rationalistic. Kling and Schulz do not do a good job of explaining how innovation emerges. They list some banal character traits — charisma, passion — that entrepreneurs supposedly possess. To get a complete view of where the debate is headed, I’d read “From Poverty to Prosperity,” and then I’d read Richard Ogle’s 2007 book, “Smart World,” one of the most underappreciated books of the decade. Ogle applies the theory of networks and the philosophy of the extended mind (you have to read it) to show how real world innovation emerges from social clusters.

Economic change is fomenting intellectual change. When the economy was about stuff, economics resembled physics. When it’s about ideas, economics comes to resemble psychology.

Here’s Mr. Cohen:

A sentence I wrote earlier this month has provoked much criticism: “I still believe the greatest strength of America, its core advantage over the old world, is its lack of interest in where you’re from and consuming interest in what you can do.”

Wrong, I was told by hundreds of readers who referred to decades of segregation, glass ceilings for African-Americans, quotas for Jews at Ivy League schools that persisted at least into the 1960s, past exclusionary practices at New York law firms, U.S. villages once unperturbed by signs saying “A Gentile Subdivision” and other forms of prejudice.

Richard Cummings wrote that, “My experience at Princeton in the Fifties was horrendous.” He continued, “My name was Cohen, so I was banned from most the exclusive eating clubs and had my room trashed. I did finally get into a decent club but only because a friend intervened on my behalf. Once I was out of there, I changed my named to Cummings and I’m not sorry I did.”

Joan Weinberger told me that, “When I applied to Vassar (first U.S. college granting degrees to women), my father warned me I might not get accepted for being Jewish, but I did get in. At Yale my interviewer asked how much money my father gave to Israel! I did not get in there.”

Paula Robbins commented that, “In the early ’60s, I worked in the Appointments Office at Radcliffe College. I remember looking up the folder of an alumna in her forties who had come for career counseling. There was a notation from her senior year that read something like this, ‘Very Jewish looking. Don’t refer to … (a certain employer).’”

Clearly, in a column about my experience of prejudice as a Jew at school in England in the late 1960s, I was too glib in celebrating American openness. I was trying, as a naturalized American, to give expression to the unshackling feeling experienced by many Europeans in the United States, the sense of getting freed up from quiet constraint, the release from the tethered comforts of the old Continent into a bracing directness, the liberating understanding of how a nation of laws differs from the blood-laden (and bloodied) European experience of nationhood, the sliding away of the debilitating unsaid.

America, I wanted to say, expects people to name their price. Europe tends to price people’s names.

But, yes, I was too glib and should have known better. When I was researching a book on the agonizing fate of a group of Jewish American soldiers captured by the Nazis, I spent time with a survivor called Morton Brooks. He’d been called Morton Brimberg when the Nazis tried to work him to death and returned to a United States to find the only way to get into college was to change his name. That was how his nation thanked him.

And yet, glib as I was, I still believe the American genius, for all its original sins (and slavery was a great sin), lies in a combination of an essential optimism and an essential pessimism about human nature so articulated by the nation’s founders as to make self-correcting renewal the nation’s core identity.

It might be a truth self-evident that all men are created equal and have a right to pursue happiness, but not so evident as to dispense with a system of checks and balances designed to spur the correction over time of the kinds of prejudice that flout professed equality of opportunity.

That’s America’s founding bargain. It still works.

It still keeps doors open, if less so since 9/11, as Switzerland bans minarets, and the French get in a funk about their national identity and its lack of appeal to North African immigrants, and Japan wonders if returning Japanese immigrants from Brazil are Japanese enough to fit, and Asian nations in general begin an uneasy confrontation with the issue of immigration as their societies age and get richer.

There is still a fundamental distinction between a nation that views the newcomer as a potential source of talent and one that finds cause for discomfort in “the other.” After a hard decade, in which its relative power has declined, that distinction (Mexican border walls notwithstanding) is probably the best single reason to believe that the erosion of U.S. influence in the 21st century will not be inexorable. As Richard Hofstadter observed, it is the fate of the United States “not to have an ideology but to be one;” and so America in its lacerating imperfection must ever aim high.

I choose therefore to close this decade in defense of a flawed America and to echo the recent words of Barack Obama: “There has been no Third World War. The Cold War ended with jubilant crowds dismantling a wall. Commerce has stitched much of the world together. Billions have been lifted from poverty. The ideals of liberty, self-determination, equality and the rule of law have haltingly advanced. We are the heirs of the fortitude and foresight of generations past, and it is a legacy for which my own country is rightfully proud.”