Brooks and Krugman

Bobo has seen fit to instruct us about “The Limits of Empathy.”  He gurgles that the ability to identify with other people is an important prerequisite for moral behavior, but it’s not the only one.  Prof. Krugman addresses the “Phony Fear Factor.”  He says despite what Republican presidential candidates are saying, regulation and taxes are not responsible for America’s weak job growth.  Here’s Bobo:

We are surrounded by people trying to make the world a better place. Peace activists bring enemies together so they can get to know one another and feel each other’s pain. School leaders try to attract a diverse set of students so each can understand what it’s like to walk in the others’ shoes. Religious and community groups try to cultivate empathy.

As Steven Pinker writes in his mind-altering new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” we are living in the middle of an “empathy craze.” There are shelfloads of books about it: “The Age of Empathy,” “The Empathy Gap,” “The Empathic Civilization,” “Teaching Empathy.” There’s even a brain theory that we have mirror neurons in our heads that enable us to feel what’s in other people’s heads and that these neurons lead to sympathetic care and moral action.

There’s a lot of truth to all this. We do have mirror neurons in our heads. People who are empathetic are more sensitive to the perspectives and sufferings of others. They are more likely to make compassionate moral judgments.

The problem comes when we try to turn feeling into action. Empathy makes you more aware of other people’s suffering, but it’s not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action.

In the early days of the Holocaust, Nazi prison guards sometimes wept as they mowed down Jewish women and children, but they still did it. Subjects in the famous Milgram experiments felt anguish as they appeared to administer electric shocks to other research subjects, but they pressed on because some guy in a lab coat told them to.

Empathy orients you toward moral action, but it doesn’t seem to help much when that action comes at a personal cost. You may feel a pang for the homeless guy on the other side of the street, but the odds are that you are not going to cross the street to give him a dollar.

There have been piles of studies investigating the link between empathy and moral action. Different scholars come to different conclusions, but, in a recent paper, Jesse Prinz, a philosopher at City University of New York, summarized the research this way: “These studies suggest that empathy is not a major player when it comes to moral motivation. Its contribution is negligible in children, modest in adults, and nonexistent when costs are significant.” Other scholars have called empathy a “fragile flower,” easily crushed by self-concern.

Some influences, which we think of as trivial, are much stronger — such as a temporary burst of positive emotion. In one experiment in the 1970s, researchers planted a dime in a phone booth. Eighty-seven percent of the people who found the dime offered to help a person who dropped some papers nearby, compared with only 4 percent who didn’t find a dime. Empathy doesn’t produce anything like this kind of effect.

Moreover, Prinz argues, empathy often leads people astray. It influences people to care more about cute victims than ugly victims. It leads to nepotism. It subverts justice; juries give lighter sentences to defendants that show sadness. It leads us to react to shocking incidents, like a hurricane, but not longstanding conditions, like global hunger or preventable diseases.

Nobody is against empathy. Nonetheless, it’s insufficient. These days empathy has become a shortcut. It has become a way to experience delicious moral emotions without confronting the weaknesses in our nature that prevent us from actually acting upon them. It has become a way to experience the illusion of moral progress without having to do the nasty work of making moral judgments. In a culture that is inarticulate about moral categories and touchy about giving offense, teaching empathy is a safe way for schools and other institutions to seem virtuous without risking controversy or hurting anybody’s feelings.

People who actually perform pro-social action don’t only feel for those who are suffering, they feel compelled to act by a sense of duty. Their lives are structured by sacred codes.

Think of anybody you admire. They probably have some talent for fellow-feeling, but it is overshadowed by their sense of obligation to some religious, military, social or philosophic code. They would feel a sense of shame or guilt if they didn’t live up to the code. The code tells them when they deserve public admiration or dishonor. The code helps them evaluate other people’s feelings, not just share them. The code tells them that an adulterer or a drug dealer may feel ecstatic, but the proper response is still contempt.

The code isn’t just a set of rules. It’s a source of identity. It’s pursued with joy. It arouses the strongest emotions and attachments. Empathy is a sideshow. If you want to make the world a better place, help people debate, understand, reform, revere and enact their codes. Accept that codes conflict.

Here’s Prof. Krugman:

The good news: After spending a year and a half talking about deficits, deficits, deficits when we should have been talking about jobs, job, jobs we’re finally back to discussing the right issue.

The bad news: Republicans, aided and abetted by many conservative policy intellectuals, are fixated on a view about what’s blocking job creation that fits their prejudices and serves the interests of their wealthy backers, but bears no relationship to reality.

Listen to just about any speech by a Republican presidential hopeful, and you’ll hear assertions that the Obama administration is responsible for weak job growth. How so? The answer, repeated again and again, is that businesses are afraid to expand and create jobs because they fear costly regulations and higher taxes. Nor are politicians the only people saying this. Conservative economists repeat the claim in op-ed articles, and Federal Reserve officials repeat it to justify their opposition to even modest efforts to aid the economy.

The first thing you need to know, then, is that there’s no evidence supporting this claim and a lot of evidence showing that it’s false.

The starting point for many claims that antibusiness policies are hurting the economy is the assertion that the sluggishness of the economy’s recovery from recession is unprecedented. But, as a new paper by Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute documents at length, this is just not true. Extended periods of “jobless recovery” after recessions have been the rule for the past two decades. Indeed, private-sector job growth since the 2007-2009 recession has been better than it was after the 2001 recession.

We might add that major financial crises are almost always followed by a period of slow growth, and U.S. experience is more or less what you should have expected given the severity of the 2008 shock.

Still, isn’t there something odd about the fact that businesses are making large profits and sitting on a lot of cash but aren’t spending that cash to expand capacity and employment? No.

After all, why should businesses expand when they’re not using the capacity they already have? The bursting of the housing bubble and the overhang of household debt have left consumer spending depressed and many businesses with more capacity than they need and no reason to add more. Business investment always responds strongly to the state of the economy, and given how weak our economy remains you shouldn’t be surprised if investment remains low. If anything, business spending has been stronger than one might have predicted given slow growth and high unemployment.

But aren’t business people complaining about the burden of taxes and regulations? Yes, but no more than usual. Mr. Mishel points out that the National Federation of Independent Business has been surveying small businesses for almost 40 years, asking them to name their most important problem. Taxes and regulations always rank high on the list, but what stands out now is a surge in the number of businesses citing poor sales — which strongly suggests that lack of demand, not fear of government, is holding business back.

So Republican assertions about what ails the economy are pure fantasy, at odds with all the evidence. Should we be surprised?

At one level, of course not. Politicians who always cater to wealthy business interests say that economic recovery requires catering to wealthy business interests. Who could have imagined it?

Yet it seems to me that there is something different about the current state of economic discussion. Political parties have often coalesced around dubious economic ideas — remember the Laffer curve? — but I can’t think of a time when a party’s economic doctrine has been so completely divorced from reality. And I’m also struck by the extent to which Republican-leaning economists — who have to know better — have been willing to lend their credibility to the party’s official delusions.

Partly, no doubt, this reflects the party’s broader slide into its own insular intellectual universe. Large segments of the G.O.P. reject climate science and even the theory of evolution, so why expect evidence to matter for the party’s economic views?

And it also, of course, reflects the political need of the right to make everything bad in America President Obama’s fault. Never mind the fact that the housing bubble, the debt explosion and the financial crisis took place on the watch of a conservative, free-market-praising president; it’s that Democrat in the White House now who gets the blame.

But good politics can be very bad policy. The truth is that we’re in this mess because we had too little regulation, not too much. And now one of our two major parties is determined to double down on the mistakes that caused the disaster.

 

Kristof and Collins

In “Just Look What You Did!” Mr. Kristof says donations from Times readers have supported a girls’ school run by a young Kenyan man and a young American woman. And, yes, this is also a love story.  Ms. Collins has “Happy Tidings From the Hill.”  Good news, people! The government will be functioning in October. Congress paid the bills for seven more weeks. And did you hear? Willow the cat is back!   Here’s Mr. Kristof:

In a Mother’s Day column in the spring, I suggested that readers commemorate the day not only with flowers but also with a donation to lift up women around the world. Readers showered one group that I mentioned, www.MothersDayMovement.org, with more than $135,000 that was forwarded to a slum empowerment group in Kenya.

So while in Kenya recently, I dropped by to see what was being done with your money. In the grim alleys of the Kibera slum in the capital of Nairobi, I found a dazzling girls’ school being built with some of those donations — and, yes, I found a love story.

The saga begins with a young man named Kennedy Odede who grew up in the slum. He never received a formal education and lived homeless on the streets after the age of 10, but he was exceptionally bright and taught himself to read.

When he was about 15, a visiting American gave him a book about Nelson Mandela — a biography that captivated Kennedy. Another American visitor, charmed by hearing of the impact of the first book, gave him a biography of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “That book changed my life,” Kennedy recalls.

Dazzled by Mandela and King, Kennedy resolved to fight for social justice. Already active in Kibera, he bought a soccer ball and announced the formation of a youth soccer club that would wrestle with social issues.

Kennedy had become outraged at the abuse of women, partly because his 16-year-old sister had been raped and become pregnant. So his soccer club began to hold street theater performances to denounce sexual violence.

Jessica Posner, a Wesleyan University student interested in theater, heard about the performances and decided to spend a junior year abroad helping the group. She arrived in Nairobi — and then insisted on living inside the Kibera slum itself.

“I thought she was crazy,” Kennedy remembers. He told her that there was no indoor toilet or running water, and plenty of rats. She is white, and Kennedy told her that no white people lived anywhere nearby. But Jessica got her way, sharing a room with four other people — and a romance blossomed.

Kennedy told Jessica of his dream to get an education, and Jessica nudged the Wesleyan admissions office into offering him a full scholarship — even though he had never gone to formal school before.

So Kennedy flew to Connecticut to begin college as a freshman at the age of 23, and, after her graduation, Jessica flew out to Nairobi to help expand his program, called Shining Hope for Communities (ShiningHopeforCommunities.org). They won grants from Newman’s Own Foundation, Echoing Green and DoSomething.org, and they used the money and Jessica’s savings to start the Kibera School for Girls.

Jessica, now 25, showed me around — chattering with local people in the Swahili and Luo languages. It’s staggering what she and Kennedy have created. The Kibera School for Girls now has 64 students in pre-kindergarten through second grade, adding one grade a year. Almost 500 children competed for the 19 slots in the current pre-kindergarten.

The school looks like a good American school, and classes are taught in English. Even though English is a second or third language for these children, 82 percent perform at American grade level — and these kids are ravenous to learn.

“Some of the first and second graders are reading at seventh-grade level,” Jessica said proudly.

Still, obstacles are enormous. This broke my heart: At least 20 percent of the girls have been raped, the teachers say. Rapes have left two of the kindergarten girls with fistulas, internal injuries causing them to leak wastes.

The school has helped prosecute an alleged rapist of a 4-year-old kindergartner who required surgical repairs and is working to end the impunity on sexual violence in the community. It also provides a dormitory for half-a-dozen girls who are at risk of sexual violence in their own homes.

With the money from Times readers, Shining Hope is now building a much larger school that is expected to accommodate 500 pupils. It has also bolstered services, including free family planning, for women at a clinic it runs. It trains women entrepreneurs and has just installed a new water tower that is expected to become the slum’s largest source of clean water. It operates a public library and computer center where slum-dwellers can earn money by performing Internet piece work.

Shining Hope also oversees a network of public toilets, one of which produces biogas used to cook meals for children at the school.

All this may be just a beginning. Kennedy says his dream is to expand Shining Hope across East Africa.

So that’s what your money has wrought. You should be proud. And one more thing to make the story perfect: In June, after Kennedy graduates, he and Jessica plan to marry.

And now here’s Ms. Collins:

In our never-ending battle to bring you good news from the world of politics, let’s focus today on the fact that Congress appears to have reached a deal to keep the government operating for seven more weeks.

Think of all the things you’ll be able to do in October if there’s a government. Camp out in a national park! Mail a letter! Fly to Omaha without fear that your plane will crash into a plane flying to Sioux Falls because of a lack of air traffic controllers! Wage war in Afghanistan!

Life doesn’t get any better than that.

The latest stalemate in Washington has been over the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which had been running out of cash what with all the recent fires, floods, earthquakes, plagues of frogs and what have you. Republicans wanted to balance any new FEMA money with cuts elsewhere. Democrats said that when disaster strikes, the tradition is to pony up and deal with the financing issues later.

Republicans said yeah, and that’s how we wound up $14.7 trillion in the hole. And then the Democrats said no way, we got the hole from the Bush tax cuts, and then the Republicans kicked them in the groin and everybody had to go to the emergency room.

O.K., I can hear you all asking: Whatever happened to Willow the cat?

Willow, you may remember, disappeared from her home in Colorado five years ago and turned up recently in a shelter in New York City. Now that was a feel-good story. Her whole family was flown to New York to appear on the “Today” show for a reunion. Why can’t Congress ever do things like that?

Back to Congress: The government’s fiscal year ends this weekend, and FEMA decided it could make it to Saturday on spare cash that it had found in the sofa. Whew.

The Senate then voted 79 to 12 to keep the government running for the following seven weeks. “It shows us the way out. It means we no longer have to fight,” said Harry Reid, in a deeply uncharacteristic show of euphoria.

You may be wondering about the 12 people who voted against this idea. They were all Republicans, and their most common argument was that they just wanted to make things work better. “Americans are tired of gridlock and games in Washington, and so am I,” said Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri in a press release.

Way to battle gridlock, Senator Roy Blunt!

Marco Rubio of Florida, who is constantly being mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate in the event the Republicans ever find someone to nominate for president, said that he had voted against the bill because he wanted to protest “this dysfunctional Washington way” of running the government. This is a little like protesting the slowness of rush-hour traffic by abandoning your car in the center lane.

But back to Willow the cat. During one of her TV reunions, Willow bit her owners’ 3-year-old daughter. In the flesh, Willow looked pretty standoffish. We might as well have been celebrating the return of a long-lost goldfish. Maybe she liked living in New York.

Meanwhile, the bill to keep the government operating for seven weeks now goes to the House, where it’s expected to pass. Probably. They think.

But wait! There’s more! Remember when I told you the current fiscal year ends this weekend? (It was a few paragraphs back, before Willow bit the 3-year-old.) Congress is on vacation. So in order to get us through the gap, the Senate passed yet another spending bill, this one to keep things running for four days.

That was on a voice vote, depriving anybody of the opportunity to take a strong, principled, public stance against having government on Saturday.

It now goes to the House, where in one of those parliamentary thingies that drive us all to discussions of missing cats or the possible breakup of Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, the bill is supposed to be passed on Thursday in an empty chamber.

If a single representative shows up and objects, the four-day funding bill is dead and the government shuts down this weekend. But, of course, what would make anyone think that there could be a member of the House of Representatives crazy enough to make the trip back to Washington just to bring the entire federal government to a crashing halt?

“Actually, we’re holding our breath,” said one House staffer, who claimed that the Republican leadership had made a list of the most free-spirited members of the Tea Party cadre and got commitments from everyone to get through the weekend with the Grand Canyon open for business.

Which, if it works, would be pretty good news, don’t you think? No one in the House of Representatives actually wants to single-handedly shut government down in its tracks.

Ever lower, goes the bar.

 

Dowd and Friedman

In “Decoding the God Complex” MoDo says Dr. Jerome Groopman may look like God, as Stephen Colbert noted, but he and his wife, Dr. Pamela Hartzband, avoid the God complex.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “2 for 2, or 2 for 1?”, says the breakdown in the Middle East peace process really does have us back at Square 1.  Here’s MoDo:

Medical schools are starting to train doctors to be less intimidating to patients. And patients are starting to train themselves to be less intimidated by doctors.

We haven’t completely gotten away from the syndrome so perfectly described by Alec Baldwin’s arrogant surgeon in the movie “Malice”: “When someone goes into that chapel and they fall on their knees and they pray to God that their wife doesn’t miscarry or that their daughter doesn’t bleed to death or that their mother doesn’t suffer acute neural trauma from postoperative shock, who do you think they’re praying to? … You ask me if I have a God complex. Let me tell you something: I am God.”

But there have been baby steps away from the Omniscient Doctor. The federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has begun a new campaign to encourage patients to ask more pertinent questions and to prod doctors to elicit more relevant answers.

“I used to think, ‘He’s a doctor. Who am I to ask a question?’ ” Bill Lee, a Baltimore man who has suffered 10 heart attacks, says in a video on the agency’s Web site urging people to speak up.

Patients have more options, a flood of Internet information and a bombardment of drug ads listing side effects — and that can be terrifying. It adds to the general anxiety level that health insurance costs are rising sharply and that President Obama’s health care law seems headed toward the Supreme Court.

The “experts” are always issuing guidelines, which are soon contradicted by another set of “experts.” It happened with the recommended age for regular mammograms, and it’s happening with guidelines on hormone replacement for postmenopausal women.

First, estrogen was going to be the fountain of youth. Then hormone replacement therapy was going to spell doom, causing heart disease, stroke and breast cancer. And now, as The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, “some experts are reaching a more nuanced view of the risks and benefits and concluding that hormone therapy may still be a good option for healthy women in their 50s, depending on their symptoms, family history and worst fears.”

Each patient, a Michigan gynecologist told The Journal, is like a Rubik’s Cube, and must get an individual solution.

That is also the message of a new book, “Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What Is Right for You,” by Jerome Groopman, an oncologist, and his wife, Pamela Hartzband, an endocrinologist, both members of the Harvard faculty and staff physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

Few people have done as much to demystify medicine as Dr. Groopman, who has written four other books and lots of New Yorker essays aiming to help doctors understand that patients are often neglected allies with good intuition, and to help patients get confidence and control by understanding how doctors think.

Like a Middle East peace broker, he aims to lower the stress level and bring together two sides who perpetually misunderstand each other.

With his white beard, 6-foot-5 stature and friendly manner, the Queens native certainly looks trustworthy. Stephen Colbert once accused Groopman of “trying to look like God.”

And I can say from personal experience — since I’ve known him, he’s provided guidance that helped save the lives of three members of my family — that he is a fierce, sensitive and generous patient advocate. (And an aficionado of Irish literature.)

Dr. Hartzband and Dr. Groopman warn against excessive reliance on overreaching so-called experts and nebulous metrics and statistics.

“The answer often lies not with the experts but within you,” they write, adding that the Albert Einstein line is apt: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

The authors stress that “the best” and “informed” can be subjective terms, and that your prognosis can often look very different if you “flip the frame” of reference.

They try to decode the Orwellian language that prevents physicians and patients from cooperating, and show how doctors can project their own preferences on patients.

They interview patients who are Doubters and Minimalists, who may agree with Voltaire’s view that “the art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.” And they interview Believers and Maximalists, who go for radical treatments too quickly. They confess that they have a mixed marriage: Dr. Hartzband tends to be a Doubter (her mom’s mantra was “Doctors don’t know everything”) while Dr. Groopman tends to be a Believer (a status that got shaken when he jumped into a spinal fusion operation that had “disastrous consequences.”)

“The unsettling reality,” they write, “is that much of medicine still exists in a gray zone, where there is no black or white answer about when to treat or how to treat.”

But they are both optimists who warn against the “focusing illusion” — focusing on what will be lost after a colostomy, mastectomy, prostate surgery or other major procedures.

“The focusing illusion,” they write, “neglects our extraordinary capacity to adapt, to enjoy life with less than ‘perfect’ health.”

Having worked for doctors for 35 years the one thing I’ve learned is you’ve got to make it clear to them that you understand that “M.D.” does NOT stand for Magnificent Divinity.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and President Obama all spoke at the U.N. last week and, honestly, it is hard to decide whose speech was worse. Netanyahu’s read like a pep rally to the Likud Central Committee. Abbas’s read like an address to an Arab League meeting. Obama’s read like an appeal to Jewish voters in Florida. The president meant well, but domestic politics required that he whisper where he once spoke bold truths to both sides.

The whole soap opera was just another reminder of how broken the peacemaking effort is today and how much both sides still suspect the other of really wanting two states for one people rather than two states for two people.

I’ll explain that in a moment, but, first, let me note that the Israeli newspaper Haaretz summed up the Netanyahu and Abbas performances perfectly, saying: “From these two narratives of demand and complaint, it appeared as if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict traveled in a time machine back to the end of the last century, and decades of dialogue were wiped out — to the great joy of the extremists on both sides. Not peace, but rather the very fact of direct contact between the parties is once more perceived as a goal, and even that is increasingly fading into the distance.”

That is, indeed, where we are — questioning whether the two sides will even talk to each other anymore, let alone negotiate an implementable deal. Yet both sides act as if time is on their side. I beg to differ.

This is a “New Middle East” — but not in the way that we had hoped. When you leave the field empty of diplomacy now, with so many unstable characters roaming around — like extremist Israeli settlers given to occasionally daubing “Muhammad is a Pig” on Muslim buildings in the West Bank and extremist Palestinians from groups like Islamic Jihad given to shooting Israeli civilians or lobbing mortars from Gaza onto Israeli towns — you are really asking for trouble because many of the old firewalls are gone.

If clashes erupt between Israelis and Palestinians today, there is no President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to absorb the flames. Now there is a Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, ready to fan them — toward Israel. It is not an exaggeration to say that if serious clashes erupted between Israelis and Palestinians, both the peace treaties between Egypt and Israel and Egypt and Jordan could be undermined. And if Palestinian violence spreads in the West Bank, Abbas may just tell the Israelis that he is shutting down the Palestinian Authority and will no longer serve as Israel’s policeman on the West Bank. That would be the last nail in the coffin of the Oslo accords. So all three pillars of peace — imperfect as they may have been, but so vital to Israel’s security since the 1970s — are in danger.

Given these stakes, here is what a farsighted Israeli government would say to itself: “We have so much more to lose than the Palestinians if all this collapses. So let’s go the extra mile. Abbas says he will not come to peace talks without a freeze on settlement-building. We think that is bogus. We gave him a 10-month partial freeze and he did nothing with it. But you know what? There is so much at stake here, let’s test him again. Let’s offer him a six-month total freeze on settlement-building. What is six months in the history of 5,000-year-old people? We already have 300,000 settlers in place. It is a win-win strategy that in no way imperils our security. If the Palestinians still balk, they will be the ones isolated, not us. And, if they come, who knows? Maybe we cut a deal.”

That is what a wise Israeli leader would do now. And when this Israeli government won’t do that, it fans the Palestinian fears that Israel really wants two states — both for itself. That is pre-1967 Israel and post-1967 Israel, i.e., Israel, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The Palestinian leadership, though, could do much more to encourage such an overture because the only thing that can force Netanyahu to move is the Israeli center. It has done so before. Why not now? Because when the Israeli silent majority sees its army unilaterally withdraw from Gaza and uproot settlements there and get rockets in return, and when they see previous, dovish, Israeli prime ministers make far-reaching withdrawal proposals and get nothing back, and when they hear that Palestinians insist on the “right of return” for some of their people — not only to the West Bank, but to Israel proper — it raises Israeli fears that the Palestinians still dream of having two states, both for themselves: the West Bank and pre-1967 Israel. If Abbas spoke more directly to those fears, Netanyahu would be under much more domestic pressure to move.

We really are back at the beginning of this conflict. Until each side reassures the other that both of them really do want two states for two people — not just for one — nothing good is going to happen out there, but something really bad might.

 

Brooks, Nocera and Bruni

Bobo is getting all concern-troll.  In “The Lost Decade?” he gurgles that insular thinking and rigid ideas are holding the United States back from productive engagement with its most important problems.  Mr. Nocera, in “Factory Field Trip,” says a visit to brand-new manufacturing facilities in North Carolina offers reasons for optimism, but it also suggests a long road ahead.  Mr. Bruni, in “Doors Swinging Open,” says to meet Energy Maburutse is to get a crucial reference point for what we in America call hardship.  Here’s Bobo:

If you want a big swig of despair, listen to the people who know something about the global economy. Roger Altman, a former deputy Treasury secretary, is arguing that America and Europe are on the verge of a disastrous double-dip recession. Various economists say it will be at least another three years before we see serious job growth. Others say European banks are teetering — if not now, then early next year.

Walter Russell Mead, who teaches foreign policy at Bard College, recently laid out some worst-case scenarios on his blog: “It is about whether the international financial system will survive the next six months in the form we now know it. It is about whether the foundations of the postwar order are cracking in Europe. It is about whether a global financial crash will further destabilize the Middle East. … It is about whether the incipient signs of a bubble burst in China signal the start of an extended economic and perhaps even political crisis there. It is about whether the American middle class is about to be knocked off its feet once again.”

The prognosis for the next few years is bad with a chance of worse. And the economic conditions are not even the scary part. The scary part is the political class’s inability to think about the economy in a realistic way.

This crisis has many currents, which merge and feed off each other. There is the lack of consumer demand, the credit crunch, the continuing slide in housing prices, the freeze in business investment, the still hefty consumer debt levels and the skills mismatch — not to mention regulatory burdens, the business class’s utter lack of confidence in the White House, the looming explosion of entitlement costs, the public’s lack of confidence in institutions across the board.

No single one of these currents prolongs the crisis. It is the product of the complex interplay between them. To put it in fancy terms, the crisis is an emergent condition — even more terrible than the sum of its parts.

Yet the ideologues who dominate the political conversation are unable to think in holistic, emergent ways. They pick out the one factor that best conforms to their preformed prejudices and, like blind men grabbing a piece of the elephant, they persuade themselves they understand the whole thing.

Many Democrats are predisposed to want more government spending. So they pick up on the one current they think can be cured with more government spending: low consumer demand. Increase government spending and that will pump up consumer spending.

When President Obama’s stimulus package produced insufficient results, they didn’t concede that maybe there are other factors at play, which mitigated the effects. They just called for more government spending. To a man in love with his hammer, every problem requires a nail.

Many Republicans, meanwhile, are predisposed to want lower taxes and less regulation. So they pick up on the one current they think can be solved with tax and regulatory cuts: low business investment. Cut taxes. Reduce regulation. All will be well.

Both orthodoxies take a constricted, mechanistic view of the situation. If we’re stuck with these two mentalities, we will be forever presented with proposals that are incommensurate with the problem at hand. Look at the recent Obama stimulus proposal. You may like it or not, but it’s trivial. It’s simply not significant enough to make a difference, given the size of the global mess.

We need an approach that is both grander and more modest. When you are confronted by a complex, emergent problem, don’t try to pick out the one lever that is the key to the whole thing. There is no one lever. You wouldn’t be smart enough to find it even if there was.

Instead, try to reform whole institutions and hope that by getting the long-term fundamentals right you’ll set off a positive cascade to reverse the negative ones.

Simplify the tax code. End corporate taxes and create a consumption tax. Reshape the European Union to make it either more unified or less, but not halfway as it is now. Reduce the barriers to business formation. Reform Medicare so it is fiscally sustainable. Break up the banks and increase capital requirements. Lighten debt burdens even if it means hitting the institutional creditors.

There are six or seven big institutions that are fundamentally diseased, from government to banking to housing to entitlements and the tax code.

The Simpson-Bowles report on the deficit was an opportunity to begin a wave of institutional reform. But that proposal died because our political leaders are too ideologically rigid to take on big subjects like tax reform, which involve combining Republican and Democratic ideas. The failure to seize that moment was one of the Obama administration’s gravest errors.

The world economy has many rigidities. The worst ones are in people’s heads.

Here’s Mr. Nocera:

If you want to feel optimistic about the state of manufacturing in America, you ought to spend a day with Stephen Gray. Then again, if you want to feel depressed about the state of manufacturing in America, you ought to spend a day with — yep — Stephen Gray.

Gray, 46, is chief executive of Gray Construction, a family-owned company, based in Lexington, Ky., that builds factories for big firms. As a result, far more than most people, he has his finger on the pulse of manufacturing in this country.

Not so long ago, Gray told me, the future looked grim. Manufacturing companies were canceling construction projects. The 10 or so factories Gray was building were nearing completion, yet there was nothing new in the pipeline. Gray was forced to lay off employees. The recession was taking a terrible toll.

But, in the summer of 2010, Gray Construction began to turn around because manufacturing itself began to turn around. There were six big jobs up for bid, including a Siemens factory in Charlotte, N.C., and a Caterpillar plant in Winston-Salem. Gray won them all. It now has 22 projects in various stages of development. With the two North Carolina plants nearly done, Gray asked me if I wanted to tour them. I said yes.

It is impossible not to be impressed with modern manufacturing plants like the Siemens and Caterpillar facilities. They are, first of all, immense; the Caterpillar plant in Winston-Salem, for instance, which will make gigantic axles for its mining trucks, is 850,000 square feet. Both plants use complex robotics, yet still convey the brawn we associate with manufacturing, with giant cranes that lift — in the case of the Siemens plant — the 280-ton gas turbines the plant will soon be making.

Secondly, these plants offer something that has become increasingly rare: middle-class jobs that don’t require a college degree. The jobs pay between $20 and $30 an hour, plus benefits, allowing a skilled machinist to make a decent middle-class living.

The key word, of course, is “skilled.” One reason Siemens and Caterpillar chose North Carolina is that Charlotte and Winston-Salem have community colleges that stress manufacturing skills. In Winston-Salem, Forsyth Tech, a local community college, was involved in wooing Caterpillar and created a program, in cooperation with the company, to make sure its graduates have the machining skills the company needs. Job training was part of the incentives packages that were dangled in front of the companies to lure them to North Carolina.

When I asked Richard Voorberg of Siemens why the German company chose to put its new plant in Charlotte instead of, say, China, he said that for highly skilled work, the labor cost differential wasn’t very big and that, in any case, factors like shipping costs and efficiency mattered more. “For this kind of manufacturing,” he said, “the U.S. can compete with China.” Gray Construction’s backlog of projects suggests that other manufacturers — many of them foreign companies — have come to the same conclusion.

That’s the optimistic part.

Now for the depressing part. Despite the size of the factories, the tens of millions in investments the companies are making, not to mention the millions in incentives and tax abatements that Charlotte and Winston-Salem used to land them, neither Siemens nor Caterpillar is going to employ that many people. Caterpillar is getting an estimated $14 million in incentives, yet it will employ only 500 or so workers in Winston-Salem. Siemens doesn’t expect to employ more than 800 people in the Charlotte facility. The same robotics technology that makes these plants so efficient also means they don’t need many people on the factory floor.

At the airport, on my way back to New York, I saw a headline from that day’s Winston-Salem Journal: “Lost,” it read, “108,000 Jobs.” The article was about a study, conducted by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, that claimed that North Carolina had lost that many jobs, most of them in manufacturing, “due in part to the trade deficit with China.”

In particular, North Carolina’s once thriving furniture industry has been decimated in the last decade. But I saw another example just down the street from Caterpillar: a Dell factory that had employed more than 900 people — and had only been open four years — shut down in late 2010. The Caterpillar factory won’t even replace the lost Dell jobs next door, much less put a dent in all the jobs lost in the last decade.

Manufacturing is terribly important. “More than any other sector, manufacturing creates additional jobs in the supply chain,” says Andrew Liveris, the chief executive of Dow Chemical, who has been pushing for a national manufacturing strategy.

It’s encouraging, for sure, that manufacturers again see America as a place where they can build things profitably. But my day in North Carolina suggests that the road back to true manufacturing prosperity is going to be a long one indeed.

And now here’s Mr. Bruni:

Like many college freshmen, Energy Maburutse is adjusting to a new world. For him it’s not merely strange. More like wondrous.

That ceaselessly humming appliance in his dorm-room window? In Zimbabwe he had never seen an air-conditioner. That sweet treat in the student cafeteria? Frozen yogurt is another first — and one reason he has almost gained his freshman 15 already. He now weighs about 80 pounds.

Most amazing to him is the electric wheelchair in which he spends his waking hours. It’s nicer by far than any from his past. Because of it and the ramps and automatic doors at Lynn University here, he can move his hunched, twisted body from place to place without constantly asking for help. That, too, is a revelation.

“I can’t stop smiling,” he told me. “I’m free.”

To meet him is to get a crucial reference point for what we in America call hardship and an example of how profoundly a life can be changed by the right intervention and the right determination. His is a miserable story that became a miraculous one.

He was born 21 years ago in a rural village in Zimbabwe that still doesn’t have electricity or plumbing. Crippled, he never walked, so his mother would carry him four hours to the nearest medical clinic. It was a trip they made often, because his bones kept breaking.

The clinic’s workers berated and even slapped her, certain she was being negligent. In reality Energy had osteogenesis imperfecta, known as brittle bone disease, but it wasn’t diagnosed until he was 5.

He didn’t know there was such a thing as a wheelchair until he got one two years later at a school for disabled children where his mother, intent on his education, managed to place him. The school was far from home. Saying goodbye, his mother told him: “Make me proud.”

He was at another such school, King George VI, in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, when my friend Elinor Burkett, an American journalist, happened to meet him in 2006. The school’s band, Liyana, caught her attention and deeply touched her, and she got to know its members, including three disabled boys who played marimba — Energy, Goodwell and Honest.

They confessed a fantasy: college in America. It was like “an ant dreaming of becoming King of the jungle,” Energy wrote in a recent class assignment.

Burkett connected them with the United States Achievers Program, administered by embassies. It helps disadvantaged foreigners apply to, and get scholarships from, American universities.

Each boy was admitted to a school, and Burkett lobbied each school for as much aid as possible. She hit up friends, strangers and foundations for the additional thousands necessary for the boys’ living expenses, a process she’ll repeat until all three have diplomas.

People are generous when faced with concrete situations rather than abstract causes. At Lynn University faculty members and students made sure Energy got a television and a mini-fridge. One of Burkett’s friends pays for his iPhone. His wheelchair was donated by UCP Wheels for Humanity; United Parcel Service delivered it free. His Kindle he won in a card game.

Around campus almost everyone greets him by name. He stands out, given the big chair and tiny body in it. His legs are stuck in a lotuslike position; he can’t straighten them all the way. He has no idea how tall he is.

Over the years his spine has curved badly. Some of his vital organs are compressed. With painful corrective surgery he could live a long life, and he hopes to get an operation this summer, from a doctor at Johns Hopkins Medical Center whom Burkett took him to see. Now that he has medical insurance through school, it just might happen.

He studies hard and frets all the time. He can’t fail, not if he wants to realize his goal of a job as a human rights advocate — maybe with the United Nations, maybe with Unicef — and of some sort of arrangement by which he can live in America or anywhere but Zimbabwe, where there are no ramps, astronomical unemployment and unfathomable poverty.

He told me that he’s surprised by the casual work habits of many of his fellow students.

“Americans are so relaxed,” he told me. “So rich.”

He pointed to a mop leaning against his room wall. Like most mops in this country, it can be wrung by a sliding mechanism on the handle. He thinks that’s hysterical — absurd. In Zimbabwe everyone wrings mops with their hands.

He had just returned from a class in which he’d given a presentation on global warming, a phenomenon he hasn’t thought much about. In Zimbabwe other issues, like hunger, crowd it out.

I asked him if anything about his new life disappointed him. He stared blankly at me. To him, the question made no sense whatsoever.

 

Krugman, solo

In “Euro Zone Death Trip” Prof. Krugman says there is a frightening gap between what the euro needs to survive and what the policy elites are willing to do.  Here he is:

Is it possible to be both terrified and bored? That’s how I feel about the negotiations now under way over how to respond to Europe’s economic crisis, and I suspect other observers share the sentiment.

On one side, Europe’s situation is really, really scary: with countries that account for a third of the euro area’s economy now under speculative attack, the single currency’s very existence is being threatened — and a euro collapse could inflict vast damage on the world.

On the other side, European policy makers seem set to deliver more of the same. They’ll probably find a way to provide more credit to countries in trouble, which may or may not stave off imminent disaster. But they don’t seem at all ready to acknowledge a crucial fact — namely, that without more expansionary fiscal and monetary policies in Europe’s stronger economies, all of their rescue attempts will fail.

The story so far: The introduction of the euro in 1999 led to a vast boom in lending to Europe’s peripheral economies, because investors believed (wrongly) that the shared currency made Greek or Spanish debt just as safe as German debt. Contrary to what you often hear, this lending boom wasn’t mostly financing profligate government spending — Spain and Ireland actually ran budget surpluses on the eve of the crisis, and had low levels of debt. Instead, the inflows of money mainly fueled huge booms in private spending, especially on housing.

But when the lending boom abruptly ended, the result was both an economic and a fiscal crisis. Savage recessions drove down tax receipts, pushing budgets deep into the red; meanwhile, the cost of bank bailouts led to a sudden increase in public debt. And one result was a collapse of investor confidence in the peripheral nations’ bonds.

So now what? Europe’s answer has been to demand harsh fiscal austerity, especially sharp cuts in public spending, from troubled debtors, meanwhile providing stopgap financing until private-investor confidence returns. Can this strategy work?

Not for Greece, which actually was fiscally profligate during the good years, and owes more than it can plausibly repay. Probably not for Ireland and Portugal, which for different reasons also have heavy debt burdens. But given a favorable external environment — specifically, a strong overall European economy with moderate inflation — Spain, which even now has relatively low debt, and Italy, which has a high level of debt but surprisingly small deficits, could possibly pull it off.

Unfortunately, European policy makers seem determined to deny those debtors the environment they need.

Think of it this way: private demand in the debtor countries has plunged with the end of the debt-financed boom. Meanwhile, public-sector spending is also being sharply reduced by austerity programs. So where are jobs and growth supposed to come from? The answer has to be exports, mainly to other European countries.

But exports can’t boom if creditor countries are also implementing austerity policies, quite possibly pushing Europe as a whole back into recession.

Also, the debtor nations need to cut prices and costs relative to creditor countries like Germany, which wouldn’t be too hard if Germany had 3 or 4 percent inflation, allowing the debtors to gain ground simply by having low or zero inflation. But the European Central Bank has a deflationary bias — it made a terrible mistake by raising interest rates in 2008 just as the financial crisis was gathering strength, and showed that it has learned nothing by repeating that mistake this year.

As a result, the market now expects very low inflation in Germany — around 1 percent over the next five years — which implies significant deflation in the debtor nations. This will both deepen their slumps and increase the real burden of their debts, more or less ensuring that all rescue efforts will fail.

And I see no sign at all that European policy elites are ready to rethink their hard-money-and-austerity dogma.

Part of the problem may be that those policy elites have a selective historical memory. They love to talk about the German inflation of the early 1920s — a story that, as it happens, has no bearing on our current situation. Yet they almost never talk about a much more relevant example: the policies of Heinrich Brüning, Germany’s chancellor from 1930 to 1932, whose insistence on balancing budgets and preserving the gold standard made the Great Depression even worse in Germany than in the rest of Europe — setting the stage for you-know-what.

Now, I don’t expect anything that bad to happen in 21st-century Europe. But there is a very wide gap between what the euro needs to survive and what European leaders are willing to do, or even talk about doing. And given that gap, it’s hard to find reasons for optimism.

 

The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd, Friedman and Kristof

The Pasty Little Putz thinks he has ideas about “Justice After Troy Davis.”  He says abolishing the death penalty won’t fix the criminal justice system, and he doesn’t seem to give much of a crap if innocent people die.  It’s an interesting moral code he’s got there.  MoDo asks if you’re “Fed Up With the Author of ‘Fed Up!’?”  She says Mitt Romney shows the real value of inauthenticity.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Help Wanted: Leadership,” says there are lots of empty seats at the Grand Bargaining table.  Mr. Kristof, in “On Top of Famine, Unspeakable Violence,” says the world’s worst humanitarian crisis is probably the famine in Somalia. Victims face not only starvation but also an epidemic of violence and rape.  Here’s The Pasty Little Putz:

It’s easy to see why the case of Troy Davis, the Georgia man executed last week for the 1989 killing of an off-duty police officer, became a cause célèbre for death penalty opponents. Davis was identified as the shooter by witnesses who later claimed to have been coerced by investigators. He was prosecuted and convicted based on the same dubious eyewitness testimony, rather than forensic evidence. And his appeals process managed to be ponderously slow without delivering anything like certainty: it took the courts 20 years to say a final no to the second trial that Davis may well have deserved.

For many observers, the lesson of this case is simple: We need to abolish the death penalty outright. The argument that capital punishment is inherently immoral has long been a losing one in American politics. But in the age of DNA evidence and endless media excavations, the argument that courts and juries are just too fallible to be trusted with matters of life and death may prove more effective.

If capital punishment disappears in the United States, it won’t be because voters and politicians no longer want to execute the guilty. It will be because they’re afraid of executing the innocent.

This is a healthy fear for a society to have. But there’s a danger here for advocates of criminal justice reform. After all, in a world without the death penalty, Davis probably wouldn’t have been retried or exonerated. His appeals would still have been denied, he would have spent the rest of his life in prison, and far fewer people would have known or cared about his fate.

Instead, he received a level of legal assistance, media attention and activist support that few convicts can ever hope for. And his case became an example of how the very finality of the death penalty can focus the public’s attention on issues that many Americans prefer to ignore: the overzealousness of cops and prosecutors, the limits of the appeals process and the ugly conditions faced by many of the more than two million Americans currently behind bars.

Simply throwing up our hands and eliminating executions entirely, by contrast, could prove to be a form of moral evasion — a way to console ourselves with the knowledge that no innocents are ever executed, even as more pervasive abuses go unchecked. We should want a judicial system that we can trust with matters of life and death, and that can stand up to the kind of public scrutiny that Davis’s case received. And gradually reforming the death penalty — imposing it in fewer situations and with more safeguards, which other defendants could benefit from as well — might do more than outright abolition to address the larger problems with crime and punishment in America.

This point was made well last week by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, writing for The American Scene. In any penal system, he pointed out, but especially in our own — which can be brutal, overcrowded, rife with rape and other forms of violence — a lifelong prison sentence can prove more cruel and unusual than a speedy execution. And a society that supposedly values liberty as much or more than life itself hasn’t necessarily become more civilized if it preserves its convicts’ lives while consistently violating their rights and dignity. It’s just become better at self-deception about what’s really going on.

Fundamentally, most Americans who support the death penalty do so because they want to believe that our justice system is just, and not merely a mechanism for quarantining the dangerous in order to keep the law-abiding safe. The case for executing murderers is a case for proportionality in punishment: for sentences that fit the crime, and penalties that close the circle.

Instead of dismissing this point of view as backward and barbaric, criminal justice reformers should try to harness it, by pointing out that too often our punishments don’t fit the crime — that sentences for many drug crimes are disproportionate to the offenses, for instance, or that rape and sexual assault have become an implicit part of many prison terms. Americans should be urged to support penal reform not in spite of their belief that some murderers deserve execution, in other words, but because of it — because both are attempts to ensure that accused criminals receive their just deserts.

Abolishing capital punishment in a kind of despair over its fallibility would send a very different message. It would tell the public that our laws and courts and juries are fundamentally incapable of delivering what most Americans consider genuine justice. It could encourage a more cynical and utilitarian view of why police forces and prisons exist, and what moral standards we should hold them to. And while it would put an end to wrongful executions, it might well lead to more overall injustice.

God, he’s a poisonous little toad.  Here’s MoDo:

In a flash, Rick Perry has gone from Republican front-runner to cycling domestique, riding in front of the pack and taking all the wind — or in this case, hot air — to allow the team leader to pedal in the slipstream.

In the debate on Thursday night in Florida, as Perry grew more Pinteresque, lapsing into long, paralyzed pauses, Mitt Romney grew less statuesque, breaking his marble mold and showing a new sarcastic streak.

Romney unveiled his own version of Reagan’s “There you go again,” repeatedly blowing off Perry with a smile and a “Nice try.”

Slapping Perry for backtracking from his suggestion in his book “Fed Up!” that Social Security should be left up to states, Romney snidely noted, “There’s a Rick Perry out there that’s saying” that, “so you’d better find that Rick Perry and get him to stop saying that.”

Romney, a champion flip-flopper, has painted Perry as a floppier flipper.

In the high school version of the 2008 Republican primary contest, Romney was regarded by John McCain and other contenders as the loathed hall monitor, prissy and hypocritical. It’s not that he has gotten so much more popular or less plastic, although he has improved his performance. It’s just that his rivals keep getting more implausible.

The only reason Perry got in the race in the first place was that Republicans yearned for an alternative to Romney. (This weekend, they were drunk-texting Chris Christie.) But for now, Perry is proving to be Romney’s best asset.

Asked the 3 a.m. question by a moderator, Bret Baier of Fox News, what would a President Perry do if he got a call saying Pakistan had lost control of its nuclear weapons to the Taliban, the Texas governor offered a Palinesque meditation on “the Pakistani country.”

“Well, obviously, before you ever get to that point, you have to build a relationship in that region,” he said. “And that’s one of the things that this administration has not done. Just yesterday we found out through Admiral Mullen that Haqqani has been involved with — and that’s the terrorist group directly associated with the Pakistani country — so to have a relationship with India, to make sure that India knows that they are an ally of the United States.” But can he see the Taj Mahal from his house?

Romney used his new sarcasm on President Obama, too, claiming the Democrat takes his inspiration from the “socialist democrats” in Europe. “Guess what?” Romney said. “Europe isn’t working in Europe. It’s not going to work here.”

He also poked the president on jobs: “I happen to believe that to create jobs it helps to have had a job, and I have.”

Those are strong words from a candidate whose liability is that he made a living eliminating jobs.

In any other economy, working at Bain would be a bane to Romney’s presidential craving because it’s hard to trust a flip-flopper who’s a company flipper. Romney himself has used the phrase “creative destruction” to describe what his former private equity firm, Bain Capital, excelled at: buying companies, restructuring and downsizing, and selling them for a profit.

As Howard Anderson of M.I.T. told The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty: “Private equity is a little like sex. When it’s good, it’s very, very good. When it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.”

But in this economy, a predatory business plan from a man worth $200 million may not sound so bad. Especially now that the former community organizer is being limned as a president who was too naïve and hesitant in handling the cascading crises of his first two years.

In “Pretty Woman,” Richard Gere played a financial shark who downsized companies; he wore expensive suits, went to polo matches and drove an expensive sports car. (No dog or hooker tied to the roof.) Romney, by contrast, is trying to downplay his downsizing fortune and his upgrading of his snazzy La Jolla beach house.

He makes sure everyone knows about his Carl’s Jr. jalapeño chicken sandwiches and his Jet Blue middle seats. And he pushes the regular-guy image in tweets: “Great deep-dish at @ginoseast”; “Just got a Trim at Tommy’s in Atlanta”; “Thanks @subwayfreshbuzz for breakfast. Better than the usual campaign diet of morning donuts”; “Thanks to the great @SouthwestAir crew for an easy flight.” On Friday, his adviser Ron Kaufman tweeted a picture of the candidate in an airport terminal with his laptop on his lap, presumably tweeting more encomia to fast-food emporia.

Just as George Bush the elder, a Yalie, used to mock Michael Dukakis as part of the “Harvard boutique,” Willard Mitt Romney, a Harvard alum, in a speech in Florida on Thursday, mocked Obama as an elitist who hung out in the “Harvard faculty lounge.”

For now, Romney is effectively using Perry as a whipping boy on issues that matter to conservatives, like illegal immigration. And when Perry attacks Romney as “Obama lite,” he could be doing Mitt a favor by reminding independents and Democrats that the Stormin’ Mormon is a pseudo-conservative whom they can abide.

Authenticity can be overrated, especially in a rabid conservative.

Now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

To Barack Obama, John Boehner, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi and Eric Cantor, I just have two words of advice: Herbert Hoover.

I know you’re all familiar with that name. Hoover lives in infamy in U.S. history for having been on duty when the Great Depression happened. You’re all courting a similar fate. Your collective behavior is setting all of you up to be known as our generation’s Herbert Hoovers — the leaders who were on duty when we entered our second great economic meltdown.

But unlike Hoover, who was just practicing the conventional economic wisdom of his day when we fell into the Depression, you have no excuses. We know what to do — a Grand Bargain: short-term stimulus to ease us through this deleveraging process, debt restructuring in the housing market and long-term budget-cutting to put our fiscal house in order. None of this is easy and the economy will not be fixed overnight; it will take years. But there is every chance it will get healed if our two parties construct the Grand Bargain we need.

But the more I read the papers the more I’m convinced that “we the people” are having an economic crisis and “you the politicians” are having an election — and there is frighteningly little overlap between the two.

What’s worse — both parties seem to have concluded lately that no compromise is possible and therefore their differences will just have to be settled by the 2012 election. No problem! I’m sure our markets will be patient until the next president is in place in early 2013! And I am sure the European debt crisis will be happy to take the next year off. In fact, that must be why Republicans held another presidential debate on Thursday night and the European economic crisis and how it might affect us — and what we must do to insulate ourselves — merited no discussion.

Has our leadership lost its mind? Do these people go home on weekends to some offshore island, where everyone’s retirement fund is doing fine, everyone’s kids have jobs and no one’s mortgage is under water? Where is the urgency? This is code red. We are facing a possible global financial contagion triggered by European banks choking with sovereign debt spreading their woes to an already weakened U.S. financial system.

President Obama says that he tried to strike a Grand Bargain with Mr. Boehner on taxes and spending but that the speaker of the House backed off, when it became clear that he could not deliver his own caucus. Boehner says it was the president who undercut the deal, when he asked for more tax revenues than the two of them had already agreed upon.

All I know is this: If either of you had been a real leader truly committed to a Grand Bargain — which you both know is what we need — you wouldn’t have just walked away from your negotiations. You would have taken the issue to the country and not let up until the other guy came back to the table.

Instead you both mumbled publicly about a Grand Bargain and how you were prepared for it but the other guy folded — and then retreated to your bases. Boehner went back to his base, arguing that more tax cuts can get us out of this, and Obama moved back to his base, with his focus on taxing millionaires. (In my next life, I want to be a member of the “base” — any base. They seem to have so much more fun and influence.)

If the president really wants to lead from the front, he should summon the Democratic and Republican leadership, along with all 12 members of the House-Senate deficit “supercommittee,” to join him at Camp David and tell the world that they are not coming back without a Grand Bargain — one that offers some short-term jobs stimulus, a credible long-term debt reduction plan with entitlement cuts and tax reform that increases revenues.

We desperately need that for two reasons: We need to do our part in leading the world out of this crisis by stabilizing our own economy. And we need to show that we can still act collectively. The toxic paralysis in Washington is, in and of itself, slowing growth. It is keeping a black cloud over the center of the country and creating a sour mood wherein people just want to hold on to what they have. As one banker in Dallas put it to me: “Today, you only hire someone when you absolutely have to.”

Do I feel that Republicans have tried to make President Obama fail from Day 1? Yes, I do. And their dabbling with another government shutdown now is pure madness. But the president is not blameless. He walked away from his own Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction commission, which still could be the foundation for a sane Grand Bargain.

Most important, Mr. Obama is in charge. He is going to be held most responsible by history for what happens and therefore he needs to take the lead in getting the leaders of both parties back to the Grand Bargaining table.

If between now and November 2012 all we are going to have from our two parties is a death duel, not a Grand Bargain — Republicans blaming Mr. Obama for the bad economy and Mr. Obama running on how crazy the G.O.P. has become — we will pay a very, very dear price.

And now here’s Mr. Kristof:

Imagine that you’re a Somali suffering from the drought and famine in that country. One of your children has just starved to death, but there’s no time to mourn. Depleted and traumatized, you set off on foot across the desert with your family, and after 15 exhausting days finally reach what you believe is the safe haven of Kenya.

But at the very moment when you think you’re secure, you encounter a nightmare broached only in whispers: an epidemic of violence and rape. As Somalis stream across the border into Kenya, at a rate of about 1,000 a day, they are frequently prey to armed bandits who rob men and rape women in the 50-mile stretch before they reach Dadaab, now the world’s largest refugee camp.

It is difficult to know how many women are raped because the subject is taboo. But more than half of the newly arrived Somalis I interviewed, mostly with the help of CARE, said they had been attacked by bandits, sometimes in Somalia but very often on Kenyan soil. Some had been attacked two or three times.

In short, this seems like an instance of mass rape — adding one more layer of misery to the world’s most desperate humanitarian crisis. The United Nations warns that 750,000 Somalis are at risk of starving to death in the coming months, and it’s increasingly clear that those who try to save themselves and their children must endure a gantlet of robbers and rapists.

“There were three places where bandits attacked us,” a 35-year-old mother told me. “The first two times they took money and food. The last time, I had nothing left to give them. So they raped me.” The rape, by three men, occurred inside Kenya.

Another woman, a 20-year-old, said she was raped twice during her journey, first in Somalia and then after she had crossed into Kenya. One time, she said, the rapists left her naked in the desert.

Although Somalian culture sometimes blames a woman for being raped, there seems less of that now, perhaps because so many have been brutalized. The 20-year-old said her husband would not divorce her: “My husband still loves me,” she said simply.

For unmarried women, rapes often involve tearing and physical injuries. That’s because Somali girls often undergo an extreme kind of genital cutting, infibulation, that involves slicing off the genitals and sewing up the vagina with a wild thorn.

The bandits, who are virtually all ethnically Somali, seem to fear the Shabab militia on the Somalian side of the border. On the Kenyan side, which is sparsely populated with little police presence, they feel impunity.

Aid groups have begun sending out vehicles to search for refugees near the border, sparing them the final few days of hiking. That has helped, but the vehicles can’t rescue everyone.

One obvious solution is to establish reception centers along the border, and then bus refugees to Dadaab. Kenya isn’t embracing that idea, however, for fear of an even larger Somali influx.

It would be unfair to beat up on Kenya, for by international standards it has borne its responsibilities and been quite hospitable to Somali refugees. It doesn’t turn people away from Dadaab, and so Kenya’s third-largest city is now a Somali refugee camp. Yet the fact remains: To avert mass rape and violence, Kenya must permit aid agencies to establish reception centers at the Kenya-Somalia border.

Americans also suffer from compassion fatigue, and that brings me to a final point. In a previous column from Dadaab, I told of a father of eight who had lost two of his children to starvation and feared that he would lose three more. Many readers responded bluntly that when men have eight children, it is pointless to help. Saving Somalis, they say, reflects a soggy sentimentality and runs against a Malthusian constraint of mouths multiplying more rapidly than food.

This view is both repulsive and wrong. I often write about the need for more family planning, but Somalis have eight children partly because they know that several may die. If we help save lives now so that parents can be confident their kids will survive, family size will drop. Likewise, educate girls and they will have fewer children.

That is what has happened around the world: In India, women now average 2.6 births, down from about six in 1950. This pattern is a reason to support family planning and girls’ education — not a reason to let children die.

We mustn’t turn away from starving children because their mothers had no access to education or contraception. It would be monstrous to allow Somalis to starve to death because they lost the same lottery of birth that all of us won.

 

Blow, Nocera and Collins

Mr. Blow says “It Takes a Village,” and that a nurturing environment for the poor in West Harlem is helping to build more productive citizens.  Mr. Nocera addresses “The Phony Solyndra Scandal,” and says that Federal loan programs virtually require the government to take risks the private sector won’t take.  Ms. Collins considers “Perry’s Bad Night” and comes to the conclusion that it was impossible to watch this week’s Republican debate without realizing that Rick Perry is not presidential timber, or even presidential polyurethane.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Around the corner came a little golden ball of sunshine named Madison, dressed head to toe in pink, hair arranged in Afro puffs, one wrist covered in turquoise beaded bracelets, arms opened wide. She wrapped those arms around a teacher’s legs, hugged them close and looked up with the kind of smile that sets the world right.

Madison is 4 years old. She is happy and thriving. This is her second year of Head Start in the basement of a building that houses the poor and homeless in one of Manhattan’s poorest neighborhoods.

I met Madison and 50 other little rays of hope at the Dorothy Day Apartments on Riverside Drive in West Harlem. The building is the sixth in the neighborhood run by Broadway Housing Communities, and the first to include a day care center serving both the building and the community. This former drug den is not only beautiful, but it also pulses with pride and hope and happiness.

It’s just what I needed to see. Writing about children and the poor and the vulnerable these days, there aren’t very many bright spots — but this is one.

The children are bathed by natural light that floods into the basement through skylights. The floors are covered by beautiful green ceramic tile made to look like slate. The walls are painted a sunrise yellow, lined with thick wooden moldings and covered with well-framed pieces of art — some by the children, some donated. The courtyard, which had been filled with six feet of garbage, is covered with mats and used as an area where wee little legs that barely have kneecaps can be folded into funky shapes for daily yoga.

Above the day care center are six floors of housing for 190 people, more than half of whom are children and all of whom were either homeless or in extreme poverty. Many of the adults are the hardest cases: those recovering from drug addiction, those with chronic diseases like H.I.V. and those with mental disabilities. In fact, most of the adults suffer from some form of disability.

And on the top floor is an art gallery that opens onto a sweeping veranda, lined with flowering plants and with some of the most magnificent Hudson River views in the city.

It is easy to forget that you’re in a low-income housing building. The administrators joked often when I was there about the chic woman who had jumped out of a cab and inquired about rents because she wanted a river view, only to be told to her befuddlement that the building was for the poor. “She was shocked,” they chuckled.

There are no security guards. There is no commotion. There are no signs of institutional living like names above doors. There isn’t even so much as a crayon mark on any of the walls. This is an oasis of civility and tranquility and culture inhabited — and to some degree, self-policed — by people whom the world would rob of those dignities.

So why so much emphasis on beauty and art, I asked?

One administrator responded resolutely: “You don’t just give a person four walls to live in. You give them something to be inspired by.”

Ellen Baxter, the founder and executive director of Broadway Housing Communities, an unassuming woman whose braided ponytail swept the middle of her back, chimed in that “art and nature show the other side of poverty.” She continued, “Poverty denigrates people and dehumanizes people.”

Another administrator said that the environment helped to “stabilize the parents to provide a platform for the children.” And those children, she said, can create “pathways out of poverty” for the whole family.

As Lady Bird Johnson once famously said, “Where flowers bloom, so does hope.”

The administrators talk a lot about community and citizenship and the building being a village of people supporting and protecting each other, and it strikes me how apropos the village metaphor is.

They have taken the most extreme cases, given them a warm, safe, stable and, yes, beautiful place to live, while treating them with dignity and respect. And the transformations of the adults, and, more important, the outcomes for the children have been incredible.

The Dorothy Day Apartments have been open since 2003, and they have had no arrests and no teenage pregnancies, unless you count the girl who was pregnant when she moved in.

Most of the children went through the Head Start program in the basement, which now mostly serves the surrounding community. None of the children have dropped out of school. A handful have even earned scholarships to the city’s better private schools. Of the 10 children who have graduated from high school, eight have gone on to college and one has just graduated from college. (None of the adults in the building have ever been to college.)

The building runs mentoring programs and literacy programs and English as a second language programs. It maintains a computer lab and this week launched a partnership with what is essentially an international, Internet-based book club for boys in the building. (The girls’ group will begin next week.) It’s fantastic.

I know what you’re asking now, because it’s the same thing I asked: how much does something like this cost, because it sounds too good to be true?

Well, the cost of the building plus renovations was $17 million. So if it houses 190 people, that works out to about $89,500 a person, not including most of the children served by the day care center.

But let’s put that into the context of prison construction, for instance. According to the New York State Commission of Correction, 1,000 new jail beds will have been built between the end of 2007 and the end of 2011 in the counties of Albany, Essex, Rensselaer and Suffolk at a cost of $100,000 per bed.

Furthermore, as Broadway Housing Communities points out on its Web site, “permanent supportive housing for an individual costs taxpayers $12,500 annually, compared to annual costs of $25,000 for an emergency shelter cot; $60,000 for a prison cell; and $125,000 for a psychiatric hospital bed.”

In the long run it’s a bargain and builds more productive citizens — starting with little girls like Madison who bring the sunshine into the basement.

Now here’s Mr. Nocera:

If Brian Harrison and W. G. Stover, the two Solyndra executives who took the Fifth Amendment at a Congressional hearing on Friday, ever spend a day in jail, I’ll stand on my head in Times Square.

It’s not going to happen, for one simple reason: neither they, nor anyone else connected with Solyndra, have done anything remotely criminal. The company’s recent bankruptcy — which the Republicans are now rabidly “investigating” because Solyndra had the misfortune to receive a $535 million federally guaranteed loan from the Obama administration — was largely brought on by a stunning collapse in the price of solar panels over the past year or so.

The company’s innovative solar panels, high-priced to begin with, became increasingly uncompetitive in the marketplace. Solyndra didn’t have enough big commercial customers to create the necessary economies of scale. And although Harrison and Stover remained optimistic up to the bitter end — insisting six weeks before the late-August bankruptcy filing that the company was going to be fine — they ultimately failed to raise additional capital that would have allowed Solyndra to stay in business.

The Republicans are trying to make that optimism appear sinister, but if we’ve learned anything from the financial crisis, it is that wishful thinking in the face of a collapsing market is not a crime. Otherwise, Richard Fuld, the former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, would be wearing prison garb.

Harrison and Stover are on the hot seat. Anything they say in their defense — even an off-hand remark — can and will be used against them. Their lawyers would be fools if they didn’t insist that their clients take the Fifth Amendment.

Do the Republicans know this? Of course. Do they care? Of course not. For an hour and a half on Friday morning, they peppered the two men with questions about this “taxpayer ripoff,” as Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, described it, knowing full well that Harrison and Stover would invoke their constitutional right to remain silent. Joe McCarthy would have been proud.

The purpose of the hearing — indeed, the point of manufacturing a Solyndra investigation in the first place — is to embarrass the president. That’s how Washington works in the modern age: the party out of power gins up phony scandals aimed at hurting the party in power.

Undoubtedly, the Solyndra “scandal” will draw a little blood: there are some embarrassing e-mails showing the White House pushing to get the deal done quickly so it could tout Solyndra’s green jobs as part of the stimulus package.

But if we could just stop playing gotcha for a second, we might realize that federal loan programs — especially loans for innovative energy technologies — virtually require the government to take risks the private sector won’t take. Indeed, risk-taking is what these programs are all about. Sometimes, the risks pay off. Other times, they don’t. It’s not a taxpayer ripoff if you don’t bat 1.000; on the contrary, a zero failure rate likely means that the program is too risk-averse. Thus, the real question the Solyndra case poses is this: Are the potential successes significant enough to negate the inevitable failures?

I have a hard time answering “no.” Most electricity today is generated by coal-fired power plants, operated by monopoly, state-regulated utilities. Because they’ve been around so long, and because coal is cheap, these plants have built-in cost advantages that no new technology can overcome without help. The federal guarantees help lower the cost of capital for technologies like solar; they help spur innovation; and they help encourage private investment. These are all worthy goals.

To say “no” is also to cede the solar panel industry to China, which last year alone provided some $30 billon in subsidies for its solar industry. Over all, the American solar industry is a big success story; it now employs more people than either steel or coal, and it’s a net exporter.

But solar panel manufacturing — a potential source of middle-class jobs, and an important reason the White House was so high on Solyndra, which made its panels in Fremont, Calif. — is another story. Not so long ago, China made 6 percent of the world’s solar panels. Now it makes 54 percent, and leads the world in solar panel manufacturing. Needless to say, the U.S. share of the market has shrunk. The only way America can manufacture competitive solar panels is to come up with innovative technologies that the Chinese can’t replicate. Like, for instance, Solyndra’s.

At the hearing on Friday, several of the Republican congressmen boasted that, in passing the continuing resolution to keep the government running the day before, they had succeeded in slashing the program that had made the loan to Solyndra. It’s true: of the $4 billion that remained in the program, $1.5 billion was cut.

But the real winner isn’t the American taxpayer or even the House Republicans. It’s the Chinese solar industry.

And now here’s Ms. Collins:

Gloom pervades the land. Some people believe it’s the economy. Others blame the weather. I think it’s because the country is gradually coming to grips with the fact that Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee for president.

It is a scientific fact. Every minute, somewhere in America, another citizen realizes that Mitt is going to be in our face for the next 14 months. Conceivably for the next nine years. Children now in third grade might graduate from high school without ever experiencing a totally Romney-free day.

This is not something I’m happy pointing out. For one thing, I don’t want to believe I live in a country that would seriously consider bestowing the nation’s highest office on a man who once drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car. Plus, we have barely gotten started on Rick Perry, the last great Mitt alternative. Have you noticed how huge his chest and shoulders are? Looming over his lectern at Thursday’s debate, he looked like a float.

But it was impossible to watch that debate without realizing that Perry is not presidential timber, or even presidential polyurethane.

Here was Perry’s answer to the inevitable question about what he’d do if the White House phone rang at 3 a.m. In this case, the hypothetical call informed the hypothetical President Perry that the Taliban had gotten control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

“Well, obviously, before you ever get to that point, you have to build a relationship in that region. And that’s one of the things that this administration has not done. Just yesterday we found out through Admiral Mullen that Haqqani has been involved with — and that’s the terrorist group directly associated with the Pakistani country — so to have a relationship with India, to make sure that India knows that they are an ally of the United States.”

He went on to tell a story about how the Obama administration wouldn’t sell upgraded F-16 fighters to India. Which never happened.

Romney, meanwhile, was very much on his game, glib and grinning madly. He lashed into Perry for the Texas version of the Dream Act. (“If you’re an illegal alien, you get an in-state tuition discount!”) One of the very few silver linings in this story is that over the next year we’ll all have a number of opportunities to revisit the saga of the undocumented immigrants who used to mow the Romney lawn.

The debate stage was crowded with other would-be candidates, most of them pretty well worn. The only newbie, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, made a big splash with a joke about how his neighbor’s two dogs produced more shovel-ready projects than Barack Obama did. Johnson cracked the place up! Line of the night! Then on Friday everyone discovered that Rush Limbaugh had told the joke the day before.

The dog-owning neighbor joins the ever-growing throng of Republican Imaginary People, along with the woman who told Michele Bachmann the vaccine to prevent cervical cancer made her daughter mentally retarded.

Perry appeared very cheerful during most of the debate — he has a way of cocking his head and grinning as if he saw a waiter entering the room with a large dessert. Perhaps he was anticipating the triumphant moment when he would be able to nail Romney for being a flip-flopper. This appeared to be something he had prepared for. When the opportunity presented itself, this is what Perry said:

“I think Americans just don’t know sometimes which Mitt Romney they’re dealing with. Is it the Mitt Romney that was on the side of — against the Second Amendment before he was for the Second Amendment? Was it — was before — he was before the social programs from the standpoint of — he was for standing up for Roe versus Wade before he was against first — Roe versus Wade? Him — he was for Race to the Top. He’s for Obamacare and now he’s against it. I mean, we’ll wait until tomorrow and — and — and see which Mitt Romney we’re really talking to tonight.”

So there you are.

It is true that the nation has elected incoherent Texans to the White House before. But the first one had been vice president. And when George W. Bush was marching through the primaries, saying things that made no sense whatsoever, Republican voters told one another that if he got into trouble, he could always ask his parents for advice. I swear to you, that came up a lot. But I always thought it was an excuse, to cover the fact that they were really just trying to avoid John McCain.

And then in 2008, they nominated McCain just to avoid Mitt Romney. No wonder they’re miserable.

Next week, give a Republican a cookie, just to show you understand.

But if you give a mouse a Republican a cookie…

Brooks and Krugman

Bobo has decided to natter on about “The Amateur Ideal.”  He gurgles that people seem to do best when they have to wrestle between commercialism and values. So, no, let’s not pay college athletes.  Prof. Krugman, in “The Social Contract,” says with shrieks of “class warfare” going back and forth in Washington, a closer look at the data shows just what class warfare looks like.  Here’s Bobo, clutching at his pearls and tottering toward the fainting couch:

The 1910s and 1920s were the golden age of the amateur ideal. On the golf courses, Bobby Jones, the greatest amateur golfer of all time, won a string of major championships.

He served as a moral exemplar as well. In the 1925 U.S. Open, he accidentally nudged his ball while setting up for a shot. He asked the marshals and members of the gallery if they had noticed. None had. Nevertheless, he assigned himself a two-stroke penalty, which cost him the tournament as he lost by one stroke. When complimented for his sense of fairness, Jones replied, “You may as well praise a man for not robbing a bank.”

At Princeton, Hobey Baker was the glittering star of college sports, dominating in both football and hockey. He was also famous for his sportsmanship. He had only one penalty called on him his entire college hockey career. After each game, he went to the opposing locker room to thank his opponents for a good match. He was acutely modest when people spoke of his triumphs.

There were two sides to the amateur ideal. On the one hand, it was meant to serve as a restraint on some of the more brutal forces of the day. Social Darwinism was in full flower, with its emphasis on ruthless competition and survival of the fittest. Capitalism was rough and raw. The amateur ideal was a restraining code that emphasized fair play and honor. It held that those blessed with special gifts have a special responsibility to hue to a chivalric code. The idea was to make sport a part of the nation’s moral education.

On the other hand, the amateur code was elitist. It was designed to separate the affluent sports from the working-class sports, to create a refined arena that only the well-bred and well-born could enter.

Today’s left-leaning historians generally excoriate the amateur ideal for its snobbery and the hypocrisy it engendered. The movie “Chariots of Fire” popularized their critique. In the film, the upholders of the amateur ideal are snobbish, anti-Semitic reactionaries. The heroes are unabashedly commercial and practical. Modern and free-thinking, they pay people so they can win.

Thus did the left-wing critique welcome the corporate domination of sport.

Over the decades, the word amateur changed its meaning. It used to convey a moral sensibility, but now it conveys an economic one: not getting paid. As many universities have lost confidence in their ability to instill character, the moral mission of the university has withered.

Commercialism and professionalism have filled the void. Taylor Branch’s superb cover article in the current issue of The Atlantic, “The Shame of College Sports,” shows how financial concerns have come to dominate college athletics. Everybody makes money except the players. College football coaches at public universities make more than $2 million on average, according to the article, and even assistant coaches sometimes make nearly $1 million.

Quarterback Cam Newton was investigated for violating the amateur rules. Meanwhile, there were at least 15 corporate logos on the uniform he wore every week. A.J. Green, a wide receiver, was punished for selling his jersey. While he was serving his suspension, the school continued selling replicas of his No. 8 jersey for $39.95 and up.

Branch shows the brutal ways the N.C.A.A. and its member schools protect and advance their financial interests. For example, one of the reasons schools fight to keep the student-athlete tag on their players is to keep from having to pay workman’s compensation if they get hurt. Kent Waldrep, a running back, was paralyzed while playing for Texas Christian. He sued to get some compensation for his sacrifice for the university. T.C.U. fought him in court and won.

Branch concludes that it is time to give up on the amateur code entirely. Pay the players and get over it. At this late date, he may be right, but there are two concerns.

The first is practical. How exactly would you pay them? Would the stars get millions while the rest get hardly nothing? Would you pay the wrestling team, or any of the female athletes? Only 7 percent of Division I athletic programs make money, according to the N.C.A.A.; where would the salary dollars come from?

The other is moral and cultural. A competitive society requires a set of social institutions that restrain naked self-interest and shortsighted greed. The amateur ideal, though faded and worn, still imposes some restraints. It forces athletes, seduced by Michael Jordan fantasies, to at least think of themselves partially as students. It forces coaches, an obsessively competitive group, to pay homage to academic pursuits. College basketball is more thrilling than pro basketball because the game is still animated by amateur passions, not coldly calculating professional interests.

The commercial spirit is strong these days. But people seem to do best when they have to wrestle between commercial interests and value systems that counteract them. The lingering vestiges of the amateur ideal are worth preserving.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

This week President Obama said the obvious: that wealthy Americans, many of whom pay remarkably little in taxes, should bear part of the cost of reducing the long-run budget deficit. And Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan responded with shrieks of “class warfare.”

It was, of course, nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it’s people like Mr. Ryan, who want to exempt the very rich from bearing any of the burden of making our finances sustainable, who are waging class war.

As background, it helps to know what has been happening to incomes over the past three decades. Detailed estimates from the Congressional Budget Office — which only go up to 2005, but the basic picture surely hasn’t changed — show that between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. That’s growth, but it’s slow, especially compared with the 100 percent rise in median income over a generation after World War II.

Meanwhile, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn’t a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million.

So do the wealthy look to you like the victims of class warfare?

To be fair, there is argument about the extent to which government policy was responsible for the spectacular disparity in income growth. What we know for sure, however, is that policy has consistently tilted to the advantage of the wealthy as opposed to the middle class.

Some of the most important aspects of that tilt involved such things as the sustained attack on organized labor and financial deregulation, which created huge fortunes even as it paved the way for economic disaster. For today, however, let’s focus just on taxes.

The budget office’s numbers show that the federal tax burden has fallen for all income classes, which itself runs counter to the rhetoric you hear from the usual suspects. But that burden has fallen much more, as a percentage of income, for the wealthy. Partly this reflects big cuts in top income tax rates, but, beyond that, there has been a major shift of taxation away from wealth and toward work: tax rates on corporate profits, capital gains and dividends have all fallen, while the payroll tax — the main tax paid by most workers — has gone up.

And one consequence of the shift of taxation away from wealth and toward work is the creation of many situations in which — just as Warren Buffett and Mr. Obama say — people with multimillion-dollar incomes, who typically derive much of that income from capital gains and other sources that face low taxes, end up paying a lower overall tax rate than middle-class workers. And we’re not talking about a few exceptional cases.

According to new estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, one-fourth of those with incomes of more than $1 million a year pay income and payroll tax of 12.6 percent of their income or less, putting their tax burden below that of many in the middle class.

Now, I know how the right will respond to these facts: with misleading statistics and dubious moral claims.

On one side, we have the claim that the rising share of taxes paid by the rich shows that their burden is rising, not falling. To point out the obvious, the rich are paying more taxes because they’re much richer than they used to be. When middle-class incomes barely grow while the incomes of the wealthiest rise by a factor of six, how could the tax share of the rich not go up, even if their tax rate is falling?

On the other side, we have the claim that the rich have the right to keep their money — which misses the point that all of us live in and benefit from being part of a larger society.

Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer who is now running for the United States Senate in Massachusetts, recently made some eloquent remarks to this effect that are, rightly, getting a lot of attention. “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody,” she declared, pointing out that the rich can only get rich thanks to the “social contract” that provides a decent, functioning society in which they can prosper.

Which brings us back to those cries of “class warfare.”

Republicans claim to be deeply worried by budget deficits. Indeed, Mr. Ryan has called the deficit an “existential threat” to America. Yet they are insisting that the wealthy — who presumably have as much of a stake as everyone else in the nation’s future — should not be called upon to play any role in warding off that existential threat.

Well, that amounts to a demand that a small number of very lucky people be exempted from the social contract that applies to everyone else. And that, in case you’re wondering, is what real class warfare looks like.

 

Kristof and Collins

In “A Few Words With Iran’s President” Mr. Kristof says an interview with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran includes some testy moments and an unusual olive branch.  Ms. Collins asks “What Would Willow the Cat Do?”  She says Congress sure has been busy since it raised the debt ceiling. Lots to talk about there. But, first, how about that cat from Colorado being found in New York?  Here’s Mr. Kristof:

Before sparks began flying between me and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, he began my interview with an unusual olive branch: “I would like to, with your permission, greet all of your readers as well as Web viewers and wish all of them the success and blessings of the Almighty.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad is a complex, even bizarre, figure. A firebrand with a penchant for making explosive public statements, he is small in person, subdued and very soft-spoken. Even when I pushed him hard on human rights abuses and nuclear deceptions, he responded in even tones while claiming that Iran is manifestly more democratic than the United States.

Another olive branch came hours after our conversation with the release of the two American hikers who had been imprisoned unjustly for two years in Iran. Mr. Ahmadinejad didn’t even attempt to suggest that they were spies, but he bristled at my questions about them. He claimed that they had entered Iran illegally and would have merited punishment in any country.

This was Mr. Ahmadinejad’s only print interview on his visit to the United Nations General Assembly, and he made a significant effort to be friendly and conciliatory. Most important, he repeated an offer made in a Washington Post interview this month to stop all nuclear enrichment if the West would supply nuclear fuel enriched to a 20 percent level. He insisted that Iran will happily give up its enrichment processing if it can get this enriched uranium for “cancer treatment medication.”

“If they were willing to sell us the 20 percent enriched uranium, we would have preferred to buy it,” he said. “It would have been far less expensive. It’s as though you wish to purchase a vehicle for yourself. No one is willing to sell it to you, then you must set up your own production line to produce your own vehicle.”

This sounds very much like an incipient deal that Mr. Ahmadinejad initially welcomed two years ago but was later scotched by the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The chief of Iran’s nuclear program, Fereydoon Abbasi, seemed to reiterate recently that any such deal was dead.

But when I raised those points, Mr. Ahmadinejad insisted that there had never been any daylight between himself and the supreme leader on the nuclear issue and that Mr. Abbasi was not opposed today. When I asked skeptically if Mr. Ahmadinejad spoke for the full Iranian leadership, there was a flash of resentment at the question. He insisted that he did, indeed, have full authority.

Is this a real offer to stop all enrichment? I don’t know, but it’s worth it for the West to pursue it — without easing sanctions in the meantime. One question is how the West could verify an end to enrichment. I asked Mr. Ahmadinejad about that and noted Iran’s history of deceptions.

“We have done nothing wrong,” he said, denying sharply that his country had hidden anything.

Mr. Ahmadinejad called for Syria, his ally, to stop its violent crackdown on protesters, cautioning that “with clashes and confrontations problems will not be solved. They will be multiplied.”

Oh? What’s the difference with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s own harsh crackdown on dissidents?

“In Iran, things were quite different,” he insisted, a bit testy. Many of the dead in Iran were members of security forces, he claimed, suggesting that protesters were not deliberately targeted.

I asked Mr. Ahmadinejad what he thought when he saw the famous photos of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, lying on the ground and bleeding to death after she had been shot in the chest.

A hint of sadness crossed Mr. Ahmadinejad’s face. I thought, for a moment, that he was going to apologize. Instead, he constructed his own reality: He suggested that she had been murdered by his opponents, working with the BBC, as part of a bizarre snuff film.

“We do search for those who are truly guilty of murdering this young lady,” he said.

Our interview became more confrontational, and we tussled over Iran’s repression of the Bahai faith and other human rights issues. Mr. Ahmadinejad’s minders were signaling that the interview was ending, but he seemed to enjoy the give-and-take and ignored them.

Mr. Ahmadinejad also indulged in a bit of triumphalism. He acknowledged that the West’s “crippling” sanctions against Iran had “worked well.” But he added: “Does Iran face more problems or the United States of America?” He referred to the “collapse” of the American financial system and suggested that Iran’s economy is in better shape.

He added that the West will be driven by its weakness to “seek a rapprochement with Iran.”

Then the interview was over, and Mr. Ahmadinejad zoomed back from bombast to conciliation. He beamed and told me: “We truly like and love the people of the United States.”

Now here’s Ms. Collins:

Right now you’re probably asking yourself: What has Congress been up to since it raised the debt ceiling?

A lot! The House, for instance, recently passed an important resolution repudiating the raising of the debt ceiling.

These are the moments when it becomes clear why nobody wants to talk about politics anymore. In fact, as a public service, I would like to change the subject and point out that Willow, a cat who disappeared from its home in Colorado five years ago, has been found in New York City. How do you think she got here? By car? By foot? Let’s all talk about that for the next hour or two.

O.K., about the debt-ceiling vote. This was a totally meaningless, but deeply symbolic, action involving core Republican principles. In August, Congress actually voted to make the president lift the debt ceiling so the House majority could maintain ideological purity by demanding he take it back.

“We are competent men and women in this chamber who love our great nation,” said Representative Tom Reed of New York, who led off the debate for the Republicans. After that reassurance, Reed urged his fellow members to come together in a bipartisan effort to cut spending, increase employment, “walk and chew gum at the same time,” and reject everything it had agreed on over the summer.

“Working together won’t work if you undo the work that we did together,” retorted Representative Sandy Levin of Michigan for the Democrats.

And then the House voted 232-186 to approve the repudiation resolution, which had already died in the Senate.

Perhaps you are eager to know more about Representative Reed. He was elected to replace Democrat Eric Massa, who resigned after the famous Tickling Sex Scandal. He should not be confused with Bob Turner, the Republican who was elected to replace Democrat Anthony Weiner after the famous Tweeting Sex Scandal. New York Democrats are really going to have to find more mundane ways to have illicit sex or the delegation is going to vanish before our eyes.

Perhaps you are eager to know more about Willow the cat, who has now become a major celebrity, perhaps only inches away from her own reality TV show. She appeared to have gained weight during her absence, so the betting is that she was picked up in Colorado by a New Yorker who transported her East despite the inability of Congress to come up with long-term funding for either highway construction or the Federal Aviation Administration.

But about Congress. Do not imagine that these people are spending all their time expressing regret for stuff they just finished doing. They have other things on their plate, mainly the critical job of passing emergency extensions of everything.

On Wednesday, the House failed to pass a bill to finance the government until November. While most members appeared to approve of the general idea of keeping the government going, there was a partisan division over the Republicans’ principled position that spending on emergency disaster relief should be balanced by cuts in programs that the Republicans never really liked to begin with.

Once again, we are forced to miss the good old days when nobody in Congress had principles and we all got to complain about political hacks. We miss the hacks a lot, even as Willow the cat’s Colorado family must have missed her when she took off for New York.

Last week, in a terrific triumph, the House and Senate did manage to get together long enough to avert another shutdown of the F.A.A. During the summer, you may remember, 4,000 people had to be furloughed and the federal inspectors who go around checking airport safety had to continue working without pay, while covering travel expenses with their personal credit cards.

Also the government could not collect the federal tax on airline tickets, so it lost about $400 million. Which most of the airlines decided to keep for themselves under the principled theory that they could use the cash.

This particular emergency extension will keep the airports in business until January. Ideally, you would want to finance the F.A.A. for five or six years at a time, but Congress hasn’t gotten around to that since 2007. There have been 22 emergency extensions since then, precipitated by critical issues like the number of planes that can land at Reagan National Airport, $4 million for a handful of small rural airports and the rules that apply when workers in the air industry vote on whether to join a union. The Republicans feel as though any worker who fails to vote should be automatically counted as a “no.”

Willow’s original owners, by the way, found her through an identification microchip. Maybe all the members of Congress should consider planting microchips in their pets. They would never live to repudiate it.

 

Dowd and Friedman

In “The Re-Election Tango” MoDo tells us that Bill shows Barry how to dance with adoring women.  The Moustache of Wisdom has a question:  “Are We Going to Roll Up Our Sleeves or Limp On?”  He says our country faces a big choice right now. We can either have a hard decade or a bad century.  Here’s MoDo:

Whether Bill Clinton is being mischievous or helpful is never entirely clear. But the former president often manages to show the current president just how the game should be played.

When Barack Obama was languishing by the phone in July, yearning to hear from John Boehner on the elusive Grand Bargain, the Big Dog advised blowing off the obstructionists in Congress and invoking the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling.

Clinton will often forcefully — and feelingly — frame the argument for Obama policies that would help the working class in a way that Obama himself, once hailed as a master communicator, can’t seem to muster.

On Sunday talk shows, Bill adroitly defended Barry against Dick Cheney’s sly jab that Hillary would make a stronger Democratic nominee in 2012 and against the Cajun ragin’ of James Carville.

And, on Tuesday in New York, as the airwaves thrummed with talk about whether President Obama provoked a “women” problem by letting the West Wing become too much of a frat house, Clinton showed how easy it is to get a roomful of women purring.

While Obama tried to get some credit for Libya at the U.N. and make nice with Turkey, Bill kicked off his Clinton Global Initiative with a visit to Rachael Ray’s cooking show.

Looking sharp in a three-piece suit and cozy on the kitchen set, Bill charmed the women in the audience with tales of his new vegan diet, how he misses omelets, his fantasy to play sax with the Rolling Stones and his painful recollection of being a chubby 13-year-old.

“The world we live in glorifies people who are skinnier and longer-legged than most of us could ever be,” he empathetically told his rapt listeners.

Asked what he would be doing if he were president again for one day, he replied to cheers: “I would pass as many things as I could to put people back to work.” When Ray wondered what superpower Clinton would want, he replied (perhaps inspired by his own missteps): “I would be able to enter the minds of people who were about to do really stupid things” and stop them.

When a woman in the audience asked if he’d do “Dancing With the Stars,” he said they had petitioned him but that he was too busy to train. “I would like to master the tango,” he said, adding: “Last night, Hillary said to me, ‘You know, when I’m not secretary of state anymore, we should go take dancing lessons.’ ”

The audience swooned.

Obama, in contrast, is still mooning over the tango he didn’t have with Boehner.

The suggestion in Ron Suskind’s new book, “Confidence Men,” that the president in the first year of his administration focused so much on the guys in his West Wing that it created problems with some top women, is not a new one.

Everyone thought the first African-American president would crack open the cloistered boys’ club of officials and columnists that always forms with a new White House. But it turned out that Obama felt he was all the change that Americans could handle at one time. Especially with Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers and Robert Gibbs around, the atmosphere often played as the usual “Mad Men” testosterone culture. Even Rahm was not a completely comfy fit, given that he preferred yoga to football and doted on strong women.

It’s passing strange that a man who was raised by a strong single mother, who talks affectionately about the influence of the banker grandmother who helped raise him, who married a strong woman, who lives with his mother-in-law and who has two daughters he adores, could ever create an Oval man-cave where some women felt uncomfortable.

Or maybe after all that petting and pecking by women, he just wanted to macho it up at the office, bonding by talking sports, playing sports and watching SportsCenter. This president in particular, though, has to be careful to make sure he includes the feminine perspective, even if it’s from men who have a full complement of it, like Joe Biden and David Axelrod.

Obama concedes that he has lost the narrative that brought him to the White House against all odds: his vision for making America great. Suskind’s book suggests he went astray in the sway of Wall Street pal Tim Geithner, going too easy on the gluttonous bankers, demanding no important concessions from them and throwing the equitable balance of society out of whack.

Now the president is trapped in two damaging story lines. Is he too weak and immature to do the job? Or is he too cool and distant to do the job?

The Aloof One has to convince voters that he can connect emotionally. In a way, his relationship with Americans now is analogous to a marriage that’s not working. He’s the detached husband; we’re the neglected wife.

Is he paying attention? Does he understand our needs? Or is he just pretending to listen while he watches SportsCenter?

Oh, gawd…  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

It becomes clearer every week that our country faces a big choice: We can either have a hard decade or a bad century.

We can either roll up our sleeves and do what’s needed to overcome our post-cold war excesses and adapt to the demands of the 21st century or we can just keep limping into the future.

Given those stark choices, one would hope that our politicians would rise to the challenge by putting forth fair and credible recovery proposals that match the scale of our debt problem and contain the three elements that any serious plan must have: spending cuts, increases in revenues and investments in the sources of our strength. But that, alas, is not what we’re getting, which is why there remains an opening for an independent Third Party candidate in the 2012 campaign.

The Republicans have come nowhere near rising to our three-part challenge because the G.O.P. is no longer a “conservative” party, offering a conservative formula for American renewal. The G.O.P. has been captured by a radical antitax wing, and the party’s leaders are too afraid to challenge it. What would real conservatives be offering now?

They would understand, as President Eisenhower did, that at this crucial hinge in our history we cannot just be about cutting. We also need to be investing in the sources of our greatness: infrastructure, education, immigration and government-funded research. Real conservatives would understand that you cannot just shred the New Deal social safety nets, which are precisely what enable the public to tolerate freewheeling capitalism, with its brutal ups and downs.

Real conservatives would understand that we cannot maintain our vital defense budget without an appropriate tax base. Real conservatives would understand that we can simplify the tax code, get rid of all the special-interest giveaways and raise revenues at the same time. Real conservatives would never cut taxes and add a new Medicare entitlement in the middle of two wars. And real conservatives would understand that the Tea Party has become the Tea Kettle Party. It is people in real distress about our predicament letting off steam by trying to indiscriminately cut everywhere. But steam without an engine — without a strategic plan for American greatness based on spending cuts, tax reform and investments in tomorrow — will take us nowhere. Countries that don’t invest in the future tend to not do well there. Real conservatives know that.

I’ve argued that the only way for Obama to expose just how radical the G.O.P. has become would be for the president to put out in detail his version of a credible “Grand Bargain” and then go sell it to the country. But that proposal had to include real long-term spending cuts in Medicare and Social Security so they can be preserved, tax reform that raises revenues by asking more of the rich — but also demands something from everyone — and an agenda for investing in our growth engines, like schools and infrastructure, right now to stimulate the economy today in ways that also increase our productivity for tomorrow. That plan should have been a combination of the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction proposal and Mr. Obama’s new jobs agenda announced last week.

Such a credible, fair “Obama Plan” for deficit reduction married to a credible jobs initiative would have captured America’s radical center and made life very difficult for the G.O.P., which can’t accept any tax increases and has no investment agenda other than tax cuts. It was the only chance for maneuvering the G.O.P. into a Grand Bargain.

Mr. Obama gave us the credible $447 billion jobs program, but his deficit reduction plan announced on Monday to pay for it and trim long-term spending does not rise to the scale we need. It may motivate his base, but it will not attract independents and centrists and, therefore, it will not corner the Republicans.

As The Washington Post reported: “The latest Obama plan ‘doesn’t produce any more in realistic savings than the plan they offered in April,’ said Maya MacGuineas, the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. ‘They’ve filled in details, repackaged it and replaced one gimmick with another. They don’t even stabilize the debt. This is just not enough.’ The most disheartening development, MacGuineas and others said, is Obama’s decision to count $1.1 trillion in savings from the drawdown of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan toward his debt-reduction total. Because Obama has no intention of continuing war spending at last year’s elevated levels, that $1.1 trillion would never have been spent.”

A Financial Times editorial summarized my feelings: “American voters are not looking for champions of their preferred redistributive stance, but responsible attitudes to the country’s challenges. If Mr. Obama suggests a millionaire’s tax can save ordinary voters from pain, he will fail, economically and politically.”

My fading hope is that this is Obama’s opening bid and enough Republicans will come to their senses and engage him again in a Grand Bargain. My fear is that both parties have just started their 2012 campaigns. In which case, the rest of us will just sit here, hostages to fortune, orphans of a political system gone mad, hunkering down for a bad century.