I side with

isidewith was an interesting attempt started back in 2012 to get some members of the public to think more about matching their policy interests and goals with political candidates who might better support those. I'm rather skeptical that this project is likely to have much fruitful action in and of itself, for reasons that have to do with how most people vote and why not having very much at all to do with policy goals, particularly in a polarized voting environment. But it was a laudable project at the time to try to get people to think about third parties and more rigorously evaluate their policy visions and compare them to something like the actual positions of candidates.

I'm less sure of its current development still fulfilling that mission, but I have other uses for it all the same.

*I don't really have a positive opinion of some of the methods of matching being used, and the site seems to have taken a somewhat more distinguishably liberal tone to some of its questions and answers rather than being more obviously neutral (I say this as someone who on many issues regards Democratic candidates as illiberal squishes rather than anyone invoking a liberal political and policy tradition). A further problem may be the online sampling is likely to skew younger than the overall population. This has implications on a variety of issues more likely to be popular among younger voters than older voters (note these are not necessarily predictable. Support for entitlement reform for instance tends to be greater among older voters than young people). What that may be suggesting is that some of these issues that are closer in appearance here may be possible for reform, but not for several more years as demographics shift to have fewer of the existing older voters still alive.

But there's still some interesting results in looking at the poll results on specific questions that I wanted to pull apart more.

Issues with general agreement of some kind across parties that might actually get something done in the next few years (and not totally annoy me). 

Welfare-work requirements: Pretty popular with both parties. About 3/4 of Democrats and 80% of Republicans are in favor. I think this would make a possible case for an expansion and better tax incidence smoothing of the EITC and other social welfare programs. But not something like a negative income tax (my favored solution instead of min wages and smoothing out transfer payments by eliminating many programs and consolidating them as a cash transfer.)

Paid family/sick leave: Popular with both parties (60-40 Republicans, 90-10 Democrats). I would prefer this be implemented by having the government pay for it, in a way that it operates like disability insurance of a sort, rather than risk providing distorted incentives for employers to fire or not hire people who are more likely to get sick or avoid hiring or promoting fertile aged women capable of reproducing. It is however an issue on which there appears to be some possibility for reforms, which is rare.

Universal background checks for guns: This gets almost 90% support from either party. One caveat to this is that the support for "more gun regulations" is highly split (80-20).

Euthanasia: There's a gap here, but both Republicans (55-45) and Democrats (90-10) supported this as an option.

Issues with odd divides or near uniformity that annoy me:
ISIS - declaration of war ends up being mostly pro. Democrats were split about 35-65. I could see some number of people suggesting a legal procedural problem of allowing the military and President to conduct a conflict without the input of a Congressional vote but this wasn't offered as a legitimizing feature in the "more options" categories. A very similar partisan split occurred in using "ground troops" however, suggesting that if there is some sort of legal procedural voting bloc, it isn't very big.

"Decrease the military budget" - Republicans were almost united in opposing any decrease, but even Democrats were about evenly split. This was utterly horrifying to me given how much money we expend on defense budgets annually and what little return we receive for it (even in reference to what the defense department receives, this is less than clear it is getting what it asked for in exchange for the money allocated).

Foreign aid - reliably, everyone hates this (across both parties). Also reliably, I expect pretty much no one knows how much we are spending and on what.

GMO labels. The only political group that opposed these in substantial numbers is libertarians (and then it was still about 50-50). Both Democrats and Republicans were at 80-20 margins.

Drug testing welfare recipients. Despite considerable evidence this is either unconstitutional or totally ineffective, both parties supported this. Republicans do so to an absurd degree (93-7). But Democrats do themselves no favors (58-42).

Farm subsidies: There's not much of a divide here. Democrats are marginally more supportive of them. Republicans are about 50/50. Again, libertarians were the only political group that opposed these in substantial numbers. There hasn't been a good economic case for these since the Progressive Era under Hoover. Which is to say there is not one.

Prosecuting bankers for the 2008 financial crisis attracted bipartisan support (more from Democrats, but it's about 60-40 from Republicans). I am unclear what good this would do and tends to be pretty hard to do.

Marijuana legalisation: Still pretty opposed by Republicans (60-40). Democrats are up to about 90-10 in favor. I'm constantly annoyed this has not translated at the elite level very much at all. Few Democratic candidates are openly in favor. Drug decriminalisation more broadly (potentially including say, cocaine) has a similar split of around 70-30.

Patriot Act/NSA reforms, not supported very highly by either party. Republicans are more apt to back the existing architecture of the national security state. Libertarians of course hate these powers. The Apple-FBI fight has a similar split in support of demanding Apple hack phones for the government.

Social security. Both parties tended to have about 70-30 opposition to raising the retirement age for Social Security. I had other ideas on how best to fix the problems here (means test the benefits). Others would prefer raising the tax limit for it. But I can't really see a basis for leaving the age where it is either.

Term limits. Both parties support this at nearly 90%. I've never seen a good argument in favor of this idea. It's entirely populist nonsense. Fortunately nobody in office will do anything about it.

Campaign finance laws: both parties oppose the current Citizens United framework. I think the case against this is pretty weak and that greater funding transparency would be of sufficient fix for now. It misdiagnoses the problem as election laws rather than lobbying.

Voter ID laws: Both parties support these. Republicans are at extremely high rates but Democrats are still at around 2/3s. I find there's little or no basis for this form of voter fraud protection and that methods of suppressing or preventing individuals from voting are really poor ideas (even though I think many voters are poorly informed at best, and misinformed at worst).

Death penalty: Supported by both parties. Democrats around 2/3s. Republicans at 90-10. I can conceive of a moral case for killing certain people based on the severity of crimes and the possibility of rehabilitation, but the amount of burden of proof and expense, and the civil libertarian moral case for not killing people who might be innocent or may be otherwise "redeemable", and that there does not appear to be an effect of deterrence for the sort of crimes that we use it for, and the case that we are often using it for racist reasons, all weigh heavily against this being still a good and necessary idea in a modern state.

Issues with odd divides or near uniformity that may annoy partisan elites:

Cuba - There's a partisan split here but it's an odd one for the way Republican elites have been talking about it. Democrats almost universally support this change (95-5), while Republicans come out as almost a 50-50 split. I'm not sure there's much of a cohort available to them to pander toward (neoconservatives?) that it would actually be beneficial to reverse course on this policy trend toward normalizing relations with Cuba. It probably seems pretty clear to almost everyone what we were doing wasn't working.

Global Warming - big partisan split here too, but there's a cohort of Republicans that still favor doing things (about a third). Democrats are almost universally in support of doing something, but almost none of them favor taxing carbon emissions. Which is really disheartening. I think it's probably one of the simplest methods of attacking the problem.

TPP - Both parties voters were about 60-40 against. I have mixed impressions of this because of intellectual property rights law intersecting with the treaty in a way I find undesirable (strengthening and expanding the protections rather than reducing them to be more sensible).

NSA metadata collection - both parties seem to have about a 60-40 opposition to these programs. Further reform to squash them may be possible.

Issues with large partisan divides (things that we should expect to come up in the elections)

Syrian Refugees (accept or not) - For the record I answered this with "we should accept many more than 10k". I'm about as pro-refugee and asylum as someone gets, particularly given all the restrictions and system of checks involved in accepting such people as we already have making it difficult to accept and integrate as many people as we should.

This comes out as a near 50-50 split. But on partisan grounds both parties ended up closer to 80-20 or 20-80 splits. It's likely to be a sore point over which partisans will argue, but no middle ground can occur.

There isn't a cohort that broadly supports overthrowing Assad or preventing Russian support of Assad through their airstrikes. This seems to be a big disconnect between the public, particularly the conservative public, and most of their candidates (Voldemort seems to have tapped into this best, though it isn't a focal point of his blustery word salad presented as a campaign).

Iran - There's a big partisan split over attacking Iran though. Republicans favor airstrikes on nuclear facilities by an 80-20 margin. The polling there is older, but I doubt it has shifted very much since. (For the record, I wouldn't favor airstrikes even if I thought they were building a bomb. Which I do not think is or has been the case for some years now anyway).

College loans/college debt. There's a big partisan split over how to fund these. Sanders plan of a Wall St tax or raising taxes on rich people to fund colleges is very popular among Democrats and liberals. But nobody else likes it.

Immigration: Democrats on virtually any immigration question favored much broader admittance and acceptance. Republicans did not. There was a huge split over whether local law enforcement should detain people based on minor crimes (like traffic violations or other misdemeanors). This is likely because this is believed to be used (and has been shown to be used) for racial profiling purposes rather than immigration enforcement. There was another 80-20 split over birthright citizenship and over the restriction of Muslim immigrants. There was also a gap between Democrats (50-50) and Republicans (96-4) over "border security".

There was no real divide over "immigrants should be required to learn English". Which in practice makes sense, but in terms of the legal system does not.

Unions were regarded negatively by Republicans (70-30) and positively by Democrats (80-20). Which probably explains min wage discussions. Speaking of which, minimum wage increases were along a similar split (80-20 each).

Obamacare: huge partisan divide here. Democrats favored 85-15, Republicans 95-5 against. This essentially forecloses the ability to do either a) reforms to the existing system that make it work better or b) any substantive discussion of further liberal policy choices. It also limits the prospect of conservative policies being put forward instead as the existing system is essentially one put in place by moderate conservatives (Mitt Romney for instance).

Abortion: Remains a pretty strong partisan split. Republicans are "only" coming in at 70-30 "pro-life". Democrats at 90-10 pro-choice. Planned Parenthood funding achieves similar results as a proxy fight in this issue.

Gay marriage: Republicans come in 70-30 against still (Democrats are nearly universally in support).

Vox populi

Mostly didn't hear very good answers. I see a couple points of agreement (carbon tax is simpler and better than cap and trade, but difficult to implement, GBI was good but he seems to be talking in multiple directions on that point that don't have much to do with basic income provisions that it's not focused enough to make sense to someone what that would involve).

He worries me on two points if I'm to define these, from what came up in the interview (there's a third point that I've been hammering on that didn't even come up, which I'm not sure if that's Sanders problem or Klein's or both).

1) IR. When he says "we are all realists", this to me says he doesn't know enough or care enough about the topic to discuss it seriously or rigorously. Realism is a specific IR school of thought*.  That's why Klein asked about it. If I'm voting for Presidential candidates, my number one concern is foreign policy and what sort of crazy and potentially damaging things this person might want to do or at least what kinds of basis they might have for doing something crazy. If they have little or no grounding for their positions on this, then they're likelier to give over control of the IR state to the existing interventionist bipartisan consensus (this is sort of what happened to Obama as his IR diagnosis seemed limited to "Iraq was bad", which was true, but wasn't a total critique of our current models of interventions by military force or a plan to use diplomatic efforts to get what you want done instead, etc). His answer does not give me some idea what his basis for interventions or warfare actually is, or what sorts of diplomatic engagement he would prefer, and his lack of seriousness with the question suggests he doesn't have one. Sanders doesn't strike me as crazy as most of the GOP candidates, but the fact that he doesn't seem to care much about IR bothers me.

This is by far the most power a President possesses under our current legal frame. Most of a President's domestic agenda relies on Congress, or even state and city governments, to get something done, while Congress has effectively abdicated its war powers in most respects. Sanders will have fairly limited, if any, power to enact most of what he suggests he wants to do as an overall agenda. Except on this question. And I don't have some idea what he thinks we should do here. That's not helpful.

*The initial reason I picked Sun Tzu as a nom de plume is my affinity for that school and its decline in American IR over the last 50 years or so I saw as a substantial problem causing us considerable dismay in reckless militarism and interventions without a clear and convincing strategic goal, with predictable results in disastrous and ineffectual wars and national security policies that resemble theater rather than structured responses to real (or imagined) problems. That Sanders dismissed it so casually I see as further evidence of this trend and a knock against him. He can dismiss it in the normative terms it has come to be used in public (for people who are generally neoconservatives) but the academic tree at its roots is still around and easily accessible and someone like Klein isn't asking about it in this way for his health. Klein's a smart cookie and could have pushed back against that kind of flippant response more than "I don't think they are".

2) It seems more important to demagogue the rich in his rhetoric than to describe policies that would deal with inequality or help the poor. That he brings up the boogeyman of the Kochs rather quickly was amusing but not enlightening. He doesn't seem to have any idea what policies the Koch's even support on immigration, and would rather describe more open borders policies as though they are a Koch brothers position as if this is a bad thing in and of itself. Paying people from Sub-Saharan Africa even this meager 2-3 dollars per hour he describes would be a massive boon to their economic welfare and probably more effective than sending millions of dollars of foreign aid. I'm not sure I see the same downside he does there and there are ways around this as a policy problem if it is one, such as guaranteed basic incomes. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I've seen the Kochs endorse an open borders policy in the first place or that it is a "right wing" position even if they had. Libertarians are pretty scattered on immigration but right-wingers are not in favor of it, even legal immigration. Bernie's position of having a pretty restrictive immigration system is probably more in line with "right-wingers" than he thinks it is based on this. "Getting jobs for people" isn't really a government policy for the most part. So I'm more than a little confused by this line of rhetoric.

Sometimes the rich deserve some scorn, but I'm rather less happy about someone who doesn't seem to have another note to play than someone who points out something more difficult to describe than "rich people are evil". Describing the Nordic/Western European welfare states as an ideal is all well and good as they have some interesting policies. But it leaves out that most of those countries possess a strong market ethos (people can start businesses pretty easily for example, easier than here, and school choice has been reasonably popular in Sweden or the UK). Denmark is routinely rated as "more free" economically than the United States despite having a large welfare state even by the pro-market groups that do such ratings. Most of the others are not far behind. More to the point, most of these countries have scaled back or reformed some elements of their welfare state over the last couple of decades. Suggesting that the sustainability of these as policies is dependent on the public's willingness to pay for them in some respect. Most European states actually have less progressive systems of taxation than the US wherein the middle class actually pays quite a lot. This is tolerated because they receive quite a bit back in the form of services offered or benefits (such as generous paid family leave policies). It's possible that is a bargain Americans are willing to make, but it is not clear that anyone offers it. Few people mention that Medicare currently pays out about 3 dollars to every one it takes in so the public believes it is getting what it paid for rather than getting what someone else has paid for. In Europe, the model is probably closer to cost-benefit where many people are getting what they themselves have paid for.

There are also demographic reasons why such states have supported these policies. Other than Germany they're all pretty small. In most cases they have fewer people living there than live in the Chicago metropolitan area. Netherlands is the only country that might fall out of this category. Iceland has fewer people than the area I live in. This means that normative behavior is generally easier to enforce and scale into policy than it can be for a country of 300 million (plus). Most of the European countries have a fairly homogeneous population ethnically as well. It does not seem to be a big deal for people to give assistance and aid to other people who they assume are very much like them for physical and cultural reasons. When it comes to giving aid and assistance to other people who are, in appearance or customs, not like them, most people say "not so much", even these supposedly enlightened Europeans. This is a difficult impediment for getting Americans to go along with a more robust welfare state. Indeed, I'm fairly sure it's a basis point for the ill-fated "drug test people on welfare" idea I discussed the other day. Americans would rather make welfare harder to access based on this logic rather than increase its stability or simplify the processes of providing assistance to the poor because it is perceived, by a substantial majority of people, as giving money to undeserving "others". This is not a casual problem that can be dismissed and the policies implemented anyway over these objections. The racism implied in it is quite real.

European democratic socialists also often possess different political systems (again, Germany might be an exception), where the central governments are often not as limited by jurisprudence and Constitutional law. So ultimately what this doesn't tell me is pretty vast. It doesn't tell me how such policies would be implemented here, rather than how they are used over there, who would carry them out (at what level of governance), and which ideas are or are not good from markets. His response to this question "What is the underlying principle there? What are the situations where you look at a given area of the economy and say, "That's something we should turn over to the market," or, 'That's something we should possibly federalize'?" wasn't helpful as he didn't offer some softball things that could be turned over to markets (because the model countries he likes did so). All he did was point to things on the other end of the lever which I'm not all that fond of. This doesn't offer a model for what he thinks markets are good for, just what he thinks they are ill-disposed for. I'm not necessarily opposed to these ideas, for example I think a universal health care system would have been better than what we have or what the ACA provided. I'm not just not sure I follow why these are big deals or why they would have to be implemented in the way he seems to be describing and how they would help us fight inequality as a social ill. Health care alone as a universal system has a number of options ranging from the UK to Switzerland to Singapore. It doesn't have to be just the one way he seems to prefer.

I'm really not clear on how or why "free college" is a good and necessary reform. College educations still generally pay for themselves, and are generally pursued by people who are coming from relatively well-off socioeconomic status already. While the cost and debt load has risen (the cost in particular), the benefit in post-graduated income and access to the job market readily pays it off such that it's basically like having a really expensive car loan that you can pay off in the time it takes to pay off a house, with income that generally does so. The skill sets are pretty specific and specialised in most cases, which feeds further into a career path that benefits the person paying for it. This means that most of the benefit accrues privately, whereas a K-12 education is intended to provide both a basis for people to jump off to go to college and a set of basic skill sets that everyone benefits from by having a moderately educated population (or workforce). The debt involved is more like individual capital investment (that usually pays off). There are ways we could alleviate this debt load or provide alternative methods of paying it off well before "everyone can go for free" that would resolve this as an economic problem and free up college educated persons to make alternative career decisions to improve economic mobility further. In any case making it "free" doesn't do anything about the basic reasons American colleges have risen in the tuition costs on its own, just as Medicare did not do much about the cost of health care, meaning it potentially adds a substantial cost to the taxpayer without a clear social benefit that accrues to the taxpayers. It looks more like rent seeking behavior to pander to the recent college graduate class (younger and mostly white voters) than a sensible economic proposal as a result. I'm not seeing this as a major social reform that is needed.

Despite college being "free", Germans still graduate fewer people from college than the US does. Suggesting they're doing something else instead to provide for the economic welfare of people than sending more people to college, as "free college" should have to imply to be a good policy (otherwise it is just a handout to relatively well off and well educated people). What seems a better question of higher priority is why our K-12 education doesn't pay for itself anymore as that's where the college pay gap has emerged. "College" pay hasn't risen so much as graduating high school has collapsed as being economically viable on its own. Or perhaps look at what the Germans do that provides for people who don't get into college (eg, better use of apprenticeships, fewer occupational license laws, somewhat more unionization, etc). Another better question might be what we could do to raise the college graduation rates, or look at why or how students wash out, or what we could do to provide for people who must work while attending school to help pay for it with more generous loans or other social welfare changes that have less to do with college, or do things like expand access to accredited online resources or local community colleges that offer (only) basic courses such that students moving on to a four year program or degree can take these basic courses cheaply and then proceed on to these more rigorous demands that only a more specialized program supposedly could offer.

One of the basic questions of economics to me is "why are there people who are prosperous" as the natural state of human beings is scarcity and poverty. Sanders seems to have implicitly answered this question in a way that doesn't interest me very much. To me the answer to that question is not something like a zero sum game where the rich are taking something from everyone else. The model Sanders proposes is the system of economics for capitalist or market society, and which I admit does exist on some level in the US in the form of crony capitalism or rent seeking behavior, is not a model for sustained prosperity (the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia and the ongoing struggles in Russia or Greece should demonstrate a reason why, and if you think the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia were about something other than poverty and economic structures of cronyism enriching the few, I'm here to tell you are completely wrong). I think it is possible there are kernels of what Sanders says on these questions that move toward an idea that is not zero sum and is a way that the perceived imbalances of worker and corporation can be redressed in the political sphere if not the economic one, but most of the policies he seems to prefer are either not likely to be enacted or not likely to do much about it (indeed, I see the "free college" idea as suggestive of something moving away from this ideal he envisions rather than toward it). The basic problem of the "use government to solve the problem of markets behaving badly" is that it requires governments behave correctly too, and that it may be easy for governments to become co-opted by these nefarious forces they are intended to be policing. That doesn't mean it cannot be done, but it does suggest there is a rather substantial obstacle to dismantling and reforming the structures of power that Sanders believes are impediments to growth and prosperity, much less in the directions he proposes doing so. If something as a agenda is impractical and doesn't seem to be addressing the problems, I'm likely to be not interested and dismiss it as populist nonsense. As I generally have done with Sanders.

3) He barely touches on race or racism as a problem. Klein sort of asks about it, but mostly softballs it. This has been a major problem with his campaign is that the types of policies he talks the most about, for the most part, do not generally help poor minorities in the same way they might help lower middle class or working class whites. The needs of minorities in policy terms are more concrete and immediate, such as better relations with police, or because of this commonly poor relationship, access to job markets that are either which can more easily ignore (often unjust) criminal records. For instance occupational licensing often prevents people from obtaining a license and starting a business or just getting a job. This intersects poorly with the forms of unionization that Sanders tends to want to promote as it is often police unions and police union reps standing up loudly to thwart reforms in the criminal justice system or opposing and reversing penalties for bad apple cops who have done egregious things to people in the communities they work in (it is also often the largely white governing bodies of cities that oppose criminal justice reforms, but not every city or jurisdiction is controlled by majority white governments, and there are emerging trends for reform supported on certain issues regardless, like mandatory minimums or winding down portions of the drug war). Or it is unions that have helped enacted occupational licensing laws in the first place, to obstruct competition or to collude with businesses that provide themselves (but not others) employment. The idea that unions are inherently good market actors that do not rent seek at the expense of the public or even that they are good social actors is not a necessary truth and includes a rather ugly racial history that I suspect some minority voters are not all that happy about still. His positions on immigration and trade likewise have struck too often at poor people in Malaysia or Mexico in a way that is not likely to appeal to minorities either, even if his intention was to complain about rich business owners supposedly exploiting cheap labor.

I suspect he has downplayed this as a problem too much because it interferes with the economic populism message he wants to run with instead. It would have been interesting if Klein had pointed at this harder to see how he would have responded.

A frustration

One of the central dynamics involved in studying economics as it relates to human behavior is that human beings will respond to incentives. And one of the frustrating aspects of political decisions as they relate to economics is that these decisions to implement policy rarely take these into account when they are formed and enacted. Almost nowhere does this appear more evident than the politics surrounding environmentalism.

A variety of problems occur which should be evident and obvious. A law or regulation is passed which mandates higher energy efficiency standards or fuel economy. The result is that people use more energy or drive more. People will often have in mind a relative fixed budget for energy expenses and when they are below it, it is possible that they will seek to consume the rest of that budget than to seek to save it. Or they may also think that their more efficient vehicle or appliances entitles them to use these devices more often because they will be doing so more effectively than their neighbours. While this may be perfectly reasonable from an individual experience, it has rather unpleasant ramifications if it applied at a social level. Wherein it allows us to claim victories on environmental policies without having actually achieved them. This is not unusual where a policy is passed with the explicit claims of victory over some vast social ill, and then very little is done to assure that indeed that policy did achieve those aims. But since environmental policies and responses relating to climate change could have rather more significant consequences than say, abortion policy, we may want to be sure we are getting something useful for our buck and make sure we are getting something at all.

Suppose we mandate that fuel efficiency standards are high. Many people buy more efficient cars as they need a new vehicle. In theory this should reduce energy consumption. In practice, people then drive them more often (on average). This increases traffic and congestion costs for everyone, including the people who have less efficient vehicles. Traffic and congestion are clear costs to productivity and time, but these costs are not paid by the people imposing them. If you are in a traffic jam, you are part of the problem, but it does not seem obvious that this is true because there are hundreds of others also involved in being part of the problem. None of these people will have good incentives to seek to reduce these costs because they can point to all of those people instead. An economic solution would be to impose congestion-adjusted tolls on controlled access roads (highways), which would assure that when there is high volumes of traffic, the costs will be paid by those accessing the road and it may deter people from driving when they otherwise would. This idea is of course unpopular. Or it could instead be the idea to reduce the incentives for housing to be located away from denser urban areas such that fewer people must commute by car and can commute instead by buses or trains (or even walk to work). Again, this is unpopular.

There are a couple of obvious possible reactions to this. 1) The ideas of economists must not very good solutions; otherwise they would be more popular. 2) The reason they are not popular is they are not pushed forward by other elites (scientists or politicians say), and the rather simple story as to why they are more effective than mandating somebody else pay the cost also provides a clear incentive to individual people (use less energy by driving around less, or at different times, and you will pay less). Economic solutions tend not to get very much airplay and explanation for the general public to discuss and digest them, and this is in part because where environmental policies are concerned, economic solutions require individual people, both as businesses and households, to pay something rather than expecting someone else to do all the heavy lifting. Regardless of who does the lifting however, or even if nobody does any lifting, individual people are paying the costs. Be it in the form of increasingly unpleasant weather conditions or traffic congestion or in not recouping long-term investment costs for energy efficient adjustments to a home or property.

Another example. Suppose we encourage individual people through social coercion or some tax incentive to place solar paneling on their homes as part of a way to avoid using carbon based energy to power their homes (not coal or natural gas). What inevitably happens is that many people respond to that social coercion as the incentive rather than the underlying environmentalist demand that created it. That is: they may ostentatiously display these panels by putting them on the side of the home facing a street to show everyone they did it (and yay for me!). And not placing them on the most beneficial side of the home facing the sun during the core part of the day. This also means that a variety of energy efficient modifications that are not visible, but which may have much higher returns than using current solar technology in most parts of the country, are not used. Such as by well-insulating the property or using a variety of heating and cooling design setups and materials when the home is renovated or constructed. Very rarely is this allowing people to obviously demonstrate their environmentalist concerns in a way that a solar panel does, despite the fact that it may have much better benefits for the environment. If we want a coercive social demand or incentive to work, it should target the actual interest that we want to coerce people into doing and do so fairly directly. A carbon tax does this pretty easily as it directly discourages the consumption of energy produced by burning carbon-based fuels. People might then seek to ameliorate this cost, while still consuming a comfortable energy demand for their homes, by placing solar panels up effectively or by adjusting the design of properties under construction or just by properly insulating a building.

Consider a final point about incentives. One thing that is not often taken into consideration is the demand to do something. If there are not restrictions preventing a project (a business or set of homes) from being built anywhere, they will be built somewhere. It would seem logical for environmental policy that we want these projects and homes built in places where it is efficient for people to live in; that is where the climate is relatively stable and reasonably warm, where there is access to sufficient supplies of clean fresh water, and so on. So, we would prefer that most people probably live in portions of the Midwest or along coastal areas and rivers than in the American Southwest (West Texas, Nevada, Arizona, etc) which is hot and dry, and that we accordingly can place projects to encourage people to live and work in those areas. But if we have rules and regulations that only account for the potential environmental damage of a project going into one place, and not where it will be built instead if it is diverted away from that place, we are failing to account for the potential damage and may end up needlessly restricting construction in one way rather than another. A fairly recent example of this is the Keystone XL pipeline. There are potentially very good economic reasons to object to it, and some philosophical arguments relating to property rights and so on that may be quite good at providing objections. But there aren't actually very great environmental reasons not to simply because it seems clear that human beings (or at least Canadians) are intent on supplying and refining the oil from tar sands projects and a pipeline represents a safer and cleaner alternative to transportation of the materials involved than trains or trucks. The actual source of the damage is not the pipeline itself. It's the continued use of oil as a fuel. If we wish to stop that, then the basis point would be to discourage the use of oil as a fuel (through carbon taxes or higher gasoline taxes at least) or provide better alternatives (cleaner fuels).

The appeal of thinking apocalyptically

There seems to be no limitation to the ability of humans to conceive of ways that their own generation will be the last generation of humans to exist and flourish. I can conceive myself of a myriad of destructive forces that could signal the end of modern civilization. I am not certain that most of them pose us a grave risk in our lifetimes. This does not mean that investment in multi generational solutions is not worthwhile; it simply means that our imagination of time is far too limited. Studies of history would rather quickly show us that many things we take easily for granted are very recent, and that (positive or negative) social changes can happen more rapidly than we anticipate. Studies of other cultures would rather quickly show us some people still don't know of their benefits at all and live at a much more marginal subsistence level. We ourselves often as not have already developed such specialised economies surrounding these benefits that most of us could not replicate them outside of that society of specialisation as we lack any of the required training or aptitude.

Of these world ending scenarios I can think of perhaps four that are worthy of our concern.

1) Asteroids or other large deep space objects colliding with the Earth (or the Moon if they were big enough). - There's a lot of stuff out there and the Earth is a fairly large gravitational influence to pull in objects that pass very close to us. The easiest way to start on this project is to set out to assure we can detect random space particles of asteroids or comets that may pass nearby. And then from there figure out what we would need to do to repel, divert, or even destroy those that pose a greater threat of damaging our environment or potentially impacting near a population center.

2) Nuclear warfare, particularly on a large scale. - There's still enough nuclear firepower in even some of the tertiary nuclear armed countries to annihilate most of human civilisation in minutes. This is to say nothing of the American or Russian arsenals that could (still) do so several times over. The easy way here is to reduce the size of those arsenals overall. That is unlikely for political reasons beyond a certain point. One good incentive of doing so though is the materials used to detonate a large city can also be repurposed to power a large city relatively cleanly, with at least much less of a footprint environmentally than a coal power plant. More countries will occasionally consider this an acceptable possibility.

3) Biological pandemic. - I do not think we're about to have a zombie plague breakout at all, but it is very possible for a virus to wipe out large numbers of people and create a social panic far exceeding the absurd levels of panic we generated over a few religious fanatics and their rejection of modern society via terrorism. We have various methods of response already available to research and cure or treat some diseases. Probably the biggest problem is actually identifying when something is a serious risk of becoming an international pandemic capable of killing or incapacitating tens or even hundreds of millions of people. Even something that could kill a million people a year is a serious problem (and there are diseases that do so right now, but they generally don't have a transmission vector that poses a serious risk to developed societies like the US, so nobody really gives a shit). The tricky bit there is then to do so before it ever reaches that point. And then actually being able to show the counterfactual of mass chaos and biological devastation was true instead of a false alarm.

I think this is somewhat less likely than is historically the case to be a serious concern. Humans live in somewhat more removed circumstances from livestock/poultry (not everywhere), which were the pathogenic sources for killer diseases like smallpox in our past. We also live in a more connected society which means that most of us have been exposed to more varied diseases and developed a broader immune spectrum. Smallpox was still potentially lethal to Europeans but vastly more so to aboriginal peoples in North and South America precisely because these peoples had had no exposure to it and no time to develop it (and in not a few cases, because the Europeans accelerated the plague by spreading it deliberately). Something generally ignored is that the introduction of small pox to the western hemisphere is estimated to have killed off millions of people in less than a century and certainly tens of thousands were dead within a few short years. This is far, far more destructive than AIDS, or Ebola, or even the famous influenza outbreak during the WW1 era as a matter of perspective. Whole villages or towns were wiped out or ceased to function. In order to repeat this, we would most likely require a viral or bacterial agent that acts lethally, spreads easily, and for which humans have no current immunities (meaning it would be unlike other infectious agents). That can happen. Viruses and bacterium can mutate and adapt, and our overuse of antibiotics as a society is not helping by potentially forcing such mutations forward faster than we can adapt our medical knowledge.

4) Global warming. - Of the four of these, this is probably the only one that actually requires amendment of human behavior in any way. It's also probable that unless it generates very catastrophic results (possible), that mostly richer countries could adapt to climate changes and circumstances without a major impact on well-being and lifestyle for most of their citizens even as climate is shifting. The problem isn't the billion or 3 people living in the rich or near rich world. It's the other 3-4 billion who are living in societies that are closer to subsistence levels or abject poverty. Their lives can be ended, their countries destroyed or chaotic, and so on. I regard that as a very serious matter that people of Bangladesh would be impacted and it does not seem sensible that we should do nothing as a society or individually in response. But that leads to the actual and more sensible debate, "so, what do we do about it now?"

I've seen or encountered a lot of arguments and they come from both the local, individual level, and the societal, governmental level.

• Stop burning coal. Easier said than done, but I agree. Coal is the most bad option here to power a modern society used in large amounts. To do so you'd have to change the price of burning coal to be less profitable ALL over the globe, not just here, where coal use is actually going down already, or change the price of alternative fuel sources (natural gas for example) to be cheaper options. 
• Use and fund alternative energy projects. I suspect a far stronger argument could be to stop funding "dirty" energy projects or fuel use with substantial subsidies first rather than trying to redress this balance by funding yet more energy projects. 
• Apply some kind of externality (as "net zero" income tax) onto existing fossil fuel consumption and sale. For the most part if we could pass a pretty clean bill to do this, and the tax wasn't used to build new infrastructure (unless it is upgrading existing infrastructure or a distribution system for new or cleaner fuels), this would be my favored approach at the policy level. I have little confidence such a bill would be clean and that there would be all manner of carve outs. The basis for this working would be that most people could avoid the tax by reducing their individual energy footprint, which in turn should make it easier to pay for any consequences of climate shifts as they may be reduced (and thus less tax would need to be raised). 
• Localvore food consumption. For the most part I think this is a silly idea and that it may even be counterproductive environmentally. Maybe not on climate change but on water pollution from agricultural run-off of nitrates or disease vectors from using manure. Which in turn requires feeding and care of large animals, who themselves are a considerable source of pollution. I think this argument rests on several concerns; that trade from elsewhere is somehow inefficient, which is usually false, I see no problem if I have to buy my grapes from California or Chile and I am greatly improved as an individual to have a large array of possible produce and meat to sample and enjoy in my daily meals. We are all also greatly improved to buy things from other people by selling them things that we are ourselves effectively producing rather than trying to consume them all ourselves. Trade works and is almost always a good in improving our lives to let things be grown or produced in places that can do so far more effectively than we can ourselves. The major flaw of that argument is it dramatically underestimates that the environmental impact of modern agriculture is almost entirely at the production stage (especially for meat), and not at the shipment, storage, and distribution stage. Which is pretty small for most things. Even if it is not zero, it is the act of large scale farming (even local farming) that does most of the work. It is generally more efficient and much less damaging to have a large farm, even a local one, going out and fertilizing and producing food and flora and fauna for sale than to have lots of people gardening. The reason people should garden should not be that they believe they can save the planet. The reason should be that it is something they enjoy doing or enjoy the (literal) fruits of. As related concerns, many people have gone into buying things that are "organic" or "natural", with similar environmental justifications that are usually equally flawed. The reason human beings should consume these things in their diet has little to do with the environment and more to do with the fulfillment they receive from production of the food stuffs and the overall reliability of the food chain if they feel they know where something came from rather than an impersonal package of meat or vegetables. If the environmental impact is, as I think it is, actually somewhat negative, it's fairly negligible at the individual level to have a garden versus trying to buy local produce from farms that can be grown half way around the world for a quarter of the environmental cost. 
• At an individual level many people may seek to reduce their energy use, or to use alternative sources of energy themselves. Unfortunately there appears to be a large signaling effect at play rather than an effective result. People and companies sometimes install wind turbines that have to be powered to spin because there is inadequate wind to turn them most of the time, and then wastefully power them anyway. Solar panels are more frequently deployed on the side of the house or business facing the street, regardless of whether that is the side which would generate the most electrical power. Recycling rates are far more likely in the US to be reasonably high if the collection of recyclable goods and materials is public. People who own more fuel efficient cars on average drive them more often which leads to larger traffic snarls and jams, which in turn leads to more pollution and higher energy consumption rates, for not only themselves but for other drivers. Governments respond to this last by building more roads, which paradoxically can increase traffic and energy use further by providing more routes, if not also more destinations. 
• By far the most significant thing at an individual level (here at any rate) that could be done is to do away with the home mortgage interest deductions in the US (actually this is government having to do something, but it would change individual behavior significantly). This would help to encourage urban density instead of suburban life; which nobody seems to actually want so much as they may find the cities unpleasant right now. We would need some governmental actions to reduce rent controls or property constraints such that more people could live vertically, thereby reducing commuting and concentrating our energy demands, densifying populations and destinations to make public transit much more viable, and so on. 
• Tax congestion on roads by instituting variable tolls on controlled access roads (highways). 
• We may want to combine that with an effort to allow for more telecommuting work and flexible scheduling. 
• Another strong individual level constraint would be to have more energy efficient objects, put in insulation, design homes and offices to be heat/cooling efficient, unplug things more often, compost food waste, and so on. Most of this is invisible and inconspicuous consumption. That makes it difficult to signal. Which implies that maybe we need conspicuous signs that we've done it that come along with these projects and maybe more people would investigate these options. 
• Geo-engineering experiments to alter weather or sunlight absorption patterns. These are uncertain, but in my view are at this rate the most likely options to proceed forward and be carried out, somewhere, by someone. 

The individual arguments arise primarily out of frustration that the societal level few things are being done. I find that there are two basic attitudes to really any large scale societal issue.

1) Most people expect someone else to do all the work of fixing it. This may be a consequence of specialisation. Climate modeling or weather and climate analysis and geological histories are complicated subjects and can involve a great deal of the dreaded "math". It is assumed that because this is a "science" problem, that scientists will solve it for us. In repeated polls I think the average American expects that whether we are faced with a plague or widespread drought and heat waves/cold snaps from climate shifts, we would have smart people somewhere stashed working on solving the problem and they would invent something that wouldn't require us, as individuals, to really fundamentally alter how we live in a "negative" way. Innovation must be a part of our problems and their solutions, but innovation sometimes requires that we will eat some vegetables for a while before it gets into the wild as a tamed beast with applications ready to go. It is not as clean and tidy as is believed, and it often involves an iterative process of fits, starts, failures, and restarts. And then even if it is ready to get something off the ground and working, someone could try to squash it politically anyway. 

2) Everyone else then basically expects that somehow nobody will ever do anything about a major problem at a large enough scale and that preparation for imminent disaster and societal collapse is an immediate priority. Or if not taken on that scale, that we should adopt fairly radical and often ineffectual behaviors to moderate our worst and most destructive impulses, without properly and empirically seeking out a way of identifying what those are. In other words, "we should all do what I say, because I don't like X." Whether or not X is actually a problem or not or whether solution Y is itself any more desirable is not important to discuss. The important thing is to be seen as "doing something" about the problem, and often as a corollary to loudly proclaim that whatever that something is, it's probably what you are doing about it.

The advantages of both of these systems is that it allows the measure of blame to be mostly shifted away. And for complex scenarios for which the individual's merit and demerit is very small, elections, pollution, water or antibiotic overuse, etc, it is in fact the case there isn't much incentive to making significant changes in your own behavior.

The question mark is what happens when the cumulative incentives are bad such that little or no change is made, in an area something must be changed or calamities are at risk of occurring. The best bet is to look for a way to change the game and rig the incentives. But if we think we're about to destroy the world and no longer have the incentive of "future generations" toward which we are abstractly connected through children or grandchildren, nobody has any incentive to change the game. They actually have a strong incentive to hold out for a better deal to do what they want. Apocalyptic thinking is the self-important way to examine the situation, the flexibility of the status quo, and determine (or pre-ordain really) that the world probably won't spin on without me and my kind in it anyway, so why should I care what happens to it now.

This is a reality based outgrowth of my disdain for the common belief in supernatural afterlives. The world is here, now. We have some responsibility to do things with the people in it, and to interact and attempt, if often poorly, to share their concerns and affections. The thinking that the world won't be here tomorrow, or that there's some better world out there instead, destroys these moral obligations to one another in the face of potential catastrophes. It may accelerate their comings and goings rather than give us breaks and stops on that path. 

Quiz it

There's a political quiz here: http://www.isidewith.com
Which appears designed to deal with the problems routinely found in an uninformed electorate voting wildly upon issues that they may or may not care much about for candidates that may or may not actually share those views or act to carry them into law.

I went through and took this. For the most part, I find that the questions lack enough sophistication for more nuanced positions, more radical positions, or more... unique positions.  I have some quibbles with the scoring system as well, but not many. They seemed for instance to properly identify Obama as a drug warrior rather than as a drug-reformer or drug-decriminalisation advocate as is sometimes claimed, nor as an anti-war candidate as was commonly believed during the 2008 election (see Afghanistan), and there doesn't appear to be much "socialist!" idiocy. I also quibble with the fact that there isn't much dealing with the Iraq war or the Libya incursion, at least directly, for foreign policy.

Going through, these would be my more specific responses. (And short version, they didn't get into monetary policy enough for me to greatly distinguish Ron Paul from Gary Johnson and that abortion and immigration had to be relied upon. But both of them crushed everyone else. This should not be surprising)

Foreign policy

Should the US intervene in the affairs of other countries? I picked the "only if it serves national security", which to me read as the proximate statement for "realist concerns benefiting a strong or vital national interest only". That does not include "humanitarian" missions employing military force use for the most part and definitely doesn't include regime changing occupation missions.

How should the US deal with Iran? I went with "Maintain diplomacy while discouraging the use of nuclear weapons" My actual position would be something akin to "continue to attempt to slow development if possible or practicable of actual weapons, and use international law/treaty and diplomacy to enforce non-proliferation rather than military force". I'm not sure what "discouraging the use of nuclear weapons" means in practical terms but it could mean providing a nuclear deterrent against their use (M.A.D style?), or it could mean arms reduction treaties to limit the scope and size of any possible nuclear wars along with disarmament or IAEA/NPT compliance for other countries. Given that there's a lot of preposterous fear mongering relating to Iran's technical capacities for missile launches and conventional payloads (both of which might at best represent threats to Israeli security, for which they are amply supplied to defend or counter by themselves, and neither of which represents any severe danger to American security), I'm guessing that only our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan have prevented outright warfare by diminishing the public appetite for additional conflict.   

Should the US maintain a presence at the UN? "Yes". Generally speaking diplomacy is cheap, even if it doesn't always provide gains to us, and as a "great power", we have veto powers to prevent things that we perceive as against our interests from happening through diplomatic means (much as China and Russia do). As a realist, while I recognize the international community won't always function according to legal dictums, it serves our interests to a) appear to go through the motions such that when rare actual forceful actions are necessary, as they might appear to be motivated by more noble concerns and thus shared in by others (obviously this has not been the case in our choice of recent actions), b) to use the existing structure to preserve or achieve power by avoiding tedious and expensive wastes of conflict for our blood and treasure by securing interests in other ways, and c) to provide diplomatic channels to secure and demonstrate alliances of convenience to hegemonic power or to cushion the decrease in relative power to a multi-polar world.

Should the US end the war in Afghanistan? "Yes". I also went with a stronger constraint on the War Powers Act, such that wars should be declared more affirmatively by Congress and only carried out by the CINC powers of the Presidency. Drone warfare should be included in this, even if it has more vague powers of declaration associated with it. The idea that "military leaders" should be allowed to determine whether any political or national interests are served by continuing a conflict is totally ludicrous to me. They can tell us whether those missions of vital interest could be carried out, what resources are required, and engage in military discipline and strategic planning with some latitude, but deciding whether or not to stay in a country for us? Stupid.

Should the US continue to support Israel? "No". In so far as we should provide aid if they were attacked and invaded (foolishly) by a rival country, fine. I can see that argument, much as we might if Western Europe or Australia were attacked by some (largely fictional) enemy. Those scenarios are extremely unlikely given the relative power of any allied military to their enemies for possible invasion (even South Korea could win against North Korea rather handily, just the terribly high cost of civilian infrastructure and population in the South prevents such a conflict). I can see arguments for sharing intelligence on terrorist networks for global purposes also. In so far as we should unilaterally or even tacitly support whatever Israeli policies are internally, or projected into Palestinian occupied territories, no.

How should the US handle the genocide in Sudan? "Don't get involved". I'm not sure how our involvement would or could resolve the situation. See Kosovo or Somalia for how interventions don't work out. Or Libya for a more recent example. Sudan also sounds like less of a regime matter and more a local tribal conflict that the regime has exploited and expanded, and which would require a very considerable investment on our part to dial down successfully (essentially a large occupation/peacekeeping force positioned for an indefinite period and effectively supporting one or more of the rival factions). To boot, the US does not have substantial diplomatic ties with the current Sudanese government on which to carry any influential weight as it is in the Chinese or Russian sphere of influence. Official US policy should be non-intervention. Private citizens may lobby the Chinese if they want as was done with a modest success in the South Sudan situation.

Should the United States end its trade embargo and travel ban on Cuba? Generally I am opposed to embargoes on any country. The type of country which a trade ban or boycott or other restriction is likely to have useful effect is likely to be the sort of country we are unlikely to use such things against (that is: a country with a democratically accountable government and a large developed economy). There are types of embargoes that may more penalise the intended targets (such as by trying to track and freeze the assets of corrupt regime leaders when moved to foreign and aligned countries, which limits opportunities for investment and growth of those private assets), but wide scale embargoes accomplish little but to impoverish, even starve or otherwise endanger, the general public of a rival country at the expense of providing a cheap propaganda point on which a dictatorial leader may rally support against our initiatives. For no probable gain on our behalf. Eg, they are counter-productive. It is sensible that US interests may be served by limiting military technology or friendly espionage with rival countries, but this is not what the trade and travel bans intend. Trade and travel restrictions should really only be used during a time of active war and conflict.

Immigration

Should children of illegal immigrants be granted citizenship? I went with "yes if they were born here." In general I see citizenship as distinct from open borders policies for residency or trade and labour. People should want to definitively associate themselves as "Americans" to participate fully and for civic purposes in our society as citizens. But in so far as it would then be necessary to make distinctions from current American citizens being born here instead of just getting citizenship, I don't see any reason to make such a distinction to shut off immigrants receiving citizenship at birth in the same way that other residents do.


Should illegal immigrants be given access to paid health care? "Yes". Medical ethics demands this to some extent. I am not convinced that this is a substantial driver of costs (The "ER use" mythology is very powerful). Essentially I think the same arguments against immigrants being denied care would have to apply to any poor person or anyone who lacked insurance, etc.

Should illegal immigrants working in the US be granted temporary amnesty? Again, yes. I would prefer some combination of the following: auctioning off work visas to businesses rather than requiring businesses to prove need, increased allowances for entrance through this means, and especially a simplified means of accessing citizenship rather than extension hoop jumps we use now. We are generally enriched by immigration for cultural and economic reasons and I don't see a reason to reduce this enrichment by worrying about boot millions of people out of country.

Science

Do you support the Theory of Evolution? I suppose this is a proxy for other social conservative value assessments. (Eg, a way to provide additional emphasis to anti-gay or anti-abortion stances). Otherwise, I'm not sure what filtering value this question serves. Being anti-rational or anti-humanist isn't exactly an unpopular political view in the US, and is actually something that takes the format of being influenced by other political ideological views. Liberals end up being more likely to take views opposing GM foods or vaccinations or nuclear power with more seriousness because they hold anti-corporate views just as social conservatives take creationism and abortion and homosexuality with more seriousness than the science would indicate is deserved because of faith-based views. 

Should the federal government fund stem cell research? If the grant proposals involved in such research are very promising, I suppose a case can be made here. I'm skeptical that this is actually the case for much stem cell research that the government needs to be encouraging it in some special way that the private market doesn't have incentives to do already. The question here also simplifies the disparity between adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells; which is where most social conservatives seem concerned, though for my purposes, it doesn't matter. I'm opposed to subsidizing this sort of thing not on moral grounds but on economic grounds. There are more promising or more directly practical lines of medical and genetic research available to lavish with public monies.

Should the US increase our space exploration efforts and budget? Other than satellite surveillance or communications, or things like GPS, I'm not convinced the US requires a public space programme. If private enterprise wants to do space tourism, exploration, or maintain orbital platforms for their own use, I'm fine with that. I don't think this should be a NASA centric effort and there are other ways to exhort Americans to take up the cause of science and mathematics in ways that they presently do not.


Health Care


Should marijuana be legalised in the US? Yes. With the additional requirements of a) a regulated open market, including possible medical uses for anyone and recreational use for adults and b) the reduction or elimination of criminal penalties for nonviolent offences associated with marijuana (or other narcotic substances).

Do you support the PPACA (Obamacare)? There really wasn't a good response here. My preference is a universal catastrophic coverage system provided by the government in exchange for taxes or mandated medical savings, basic subsidies for people who are poor or lower income or medically disabled, and then open it up from there to anyone who wants first dollar coverage or augmented elements to the private insurance market (which should be cheaper to provide if catastrophic care is augmented with government payments). This idea is some version of Singapore, Wyden-Bennett, and to some extent the Ryan plan. This also feeds into the next question...

Should we expand or dismantle our medicare programme? To which I would reply dismantle. It is an unsustainable economic model in the American polity to ask poorer working young people to pay for the health care of richer retired old people. Asking working people to pay for health care for poor people might be a justifiable system. Asking them to pay for the elderly on the basis of an arbitrary retirement age being reached is stupid. This idea should be phased out, starting with means testing benefits, then a general overhaul of medical insurance structure such that people when they retire ought to have some amount of funding available for their own needs privately held (eg, mandated HSA style accounts). This is but one example of vast transfers of wealth from poor to rich within our system (Home mortgage interest deductions are another), an idea which is both socially unjust and economically unsustainable.

Domestic policies 

Do you support increased gun control? I am opposed on some general liberties and Constitutional rights, and am agnostic about the efficacy of gun control setups that have been used. Some were genuinely bad and counterproductive, others seem to have at least "noble" goals and had minimal harm on the public they were enforced against (assault weapon bans for instance or constraints on ex-felons or mentally ill). I am however not all that fond of a social mindset that sees guns in the home and on one's person as essential. I just don't see that there are many sensible legal ways to restrict this attitude. Other than to make it less feel less essential (eg, make people aware that crime is rare, for instance, for most of us). So "no".

Do you support the Patriot Act? There are probably some provisions in there that were or are still of actual utility (some position of unified intelligence and intelligence sharing between various bureaus for example, if they were ever to use such a system might be beneficial. They do not appear to have done so very efficiently). But most of it read like a laundry list of law enforcement wants that exceeded Constitutional mandates, and offered little actual anti-terrorism effects. The general effect of security theater policies, especially in the formation of the Homeland Security cabinet position and the arbitrary methods of the TSA, does little to inspire confidence that other government provisions were of any necessity either. So "no".

Should the government regulate the internet to deter online piracy? Generally no. I am opposed to stronger intellectual property rights defenses, and support weakening of public domain laws and patent trolling powers. I do think that piracy of movies and music, along with video games, is a legitimate concern for those industries, but it does not appear to cause sufficient harm to their abilities to make creative works, distribute them, and to profit by them. Indeed, piracy itself seems heavily related to either a) distorted price controlled markets or b) items of considerable popularity. That is: something being pirated a lot ought to tell us that something is really, really popular already and is probably already making a lot of money. It would better if people weren't pirating it.. but the music industry finally seems to have twigged to resolving a partial solution by using digital distribution methods like itunes, and movies or TV shows will eventually concede to things like Netflix streaming or ala carte cable subscriptions as a method of generating revenues for consumption of their works. These methods do not eliminate piracy, but seem to alleviate it by offering ways to buy into the market and participate as a consumer without the old methods of having to consume entire albums, or to purchase on reserve copies of DVD/Blue-Rays for movies and shows that we may enjoy but probably don't want to own.

Are you in favor of decriminalising all drugs? Yes. As with marijuana, the problem is generally medical, not legal. It should be treated as such rather than as locking up addicts and providers with no other basis. I am skeptical that mere possession ought to be a basis for sending people off to drug treatment centres either (seems like a wasteful lack of filtering), but this is quite a bit better than locking such people up in prisons and jails and implementing invasive and aggressive police tactics to deal with non-violent criminals. If drug dealers are killing each other or their violence and aggression challenges a neighbourhood for other reasons, we should naturally be concerned. But just selling and possessing and using things ought not to automatically concern us.

Should we limit federal funds to public schools that do not meet performance standards? If we had some means of school choice, I should think this would be handled by parents and markets without need for federal decisions for implementing standards based testing that is probably counterproductive to providing a broad based general k-12 education and lacks effective enforcement methods at this time. I see several problems with this: one the current methods are ineffective, two, it's difficult to present what federal standards ought to be, or a basis for why they should override local or state standards, and three, who monitors these standards and how is a punitive method by reducing funds to a trapped school district a means of effectively improving the quality of education available to students and parents in that neighbourhood or city?

Do you support affirmative action programmes? "No, but we should offer social programmes to address poverty regardless of race or ethnicity". I see this as far more useful than automatic assistance to ethnic minorities. Given that there are disproportionately poor minorities, poverty based assistance would still provide substantial racial disparity in public benefits, without assisting people who have limited need of our public aid. The "sin of slavery" is an important historical reference point, but it should be possible to redress it by alleviating poverty and opportunity inequalities in occupation and education for all people.

Environmental issues


Is Global warming a threat to the environment? Yes. But I'm not sure what government plans would do much to help with it. The US already is among the largest reducers of CO2 reduction in the developed world for example by way of reducing CO2 intensity in our economy. Without much in the way of direct intervention and in spite of still substantial government largess for fossil fuel production (coal and oil) and use (highway subsidies rather than congestion pricing). There are existing government policies that should be abolished that may be exacerbating the problem as a result rather than a pressing need for additional government policy. A carbon tax or congestion pricing or gasoline tax would be probably sufficient if more action is necessary after those actions are taken (in exchange for reductions in other taxes at the federal or local level). A greater emphasis on densification rather than current policy favoring suburban settlement would also help (ideally we would do little to encourage either. Better schools and lawns provide incentives to live in the burbs, while access to culture, "public" transit, and other creative class benefits should provide incentives to live in cities).

Should we expand our offshore drilling? Generally speaking we should stop promoting it with additional support in the form of subsidies but other than basic regulation of environmental damage, I'm not sure we should be preventing it either. Without government support, it's possible these would still be economically useful to energy companies, but I'm not concerned if that were to be the case or not. The government should neither support nor oppose much offshore drilling.

Economic issues


Should the government raise the federal minimum wage? No, the federal government should abolish federal min wage standards altogether. These have the effect of depressing low skilled employment. Competition among such jobs would ensure that wages would not be "too low". What would be of greater importance is a general welfare reform that takes on the format of a universal basic income or negative income tax, such that people would receive transfer payments in cash rather than most in-kind forms of assistance for housing, food, and to some extent health care, etc. This would remove some of the inefficiencies in the design of these programmes such that they would not "phase out" when people cross income thresholds and allow people to earn additional income without fear of losing essential public benefits. 

Should Congress raise the debt ceiling? Yes. My preference is for Congress to reign in spending of all kinds and conduct an extensive tax reform. Since it won't do those things, I would prefer we not default on debts. Any ideas that we can cut spending without touching defence, and entitlements are absurd as is most "balanced budget amendment" talk. This is pandering rather than solutions. That money is already effectively spent and accounts for the overwhelming percentage of our expenses.

Should the US have bailed out the major banks during the financial crisis of 2008? Not as such. What should have been done was a NGDP target, or at least an inflation target that the Fed actually tried to hit, combined with a negative interest rate on reserves. This might have meant that some big banks would fail, or be broken up, but it would have discouraged hording of money by large institutions of all kinds (regular corporations for instance) at a time when the economy required liquidity and a higher velocity of money. Simply giving money to businesses that made very poor decisions does acknowledge some amount of government complicity in those decisions (eg, that they were encouraged to make them), but it doesn't do much to resolve the underlying problem that they were in fact poorly run institutions that made stupid decisions.

Do you agree with President Obama's 2009 stimulus plan? They probably should have provided more specifics here, but in general the answer was no. Things like unemployment compensation to some reasonable extent are uncontroversial in my view. And the sort of ad hoc manner that states would balance budgets by slashing payrolls in police or teaching would not be carried out in the most effective manner (by firing and retiring ineffective or abusive members of those institutions for example; partly because the methods of dismissing public employees are already fraught with legal complexity). But infrastructure spending is by now fraught with all manner of complicating and competing regulation fights that make it inefficient stimulus and to boot wasn't in most cases all that well designed to get projects of necessity off the ground. An ideal infrastructure stimulus programme involving infrastructure could have been to improve and maintain the already existing infrastructure rather than to supply incentives to produce more.  Of an often dubious utility. This would have had the advantages of more immediately providing work to people in a heavily displaced economic sector and providing some benefits in a more functional road network, efficient electrical grid, or updated water or sewer lines, some of which date to the 19th century, and so on without the need for boondoggle projects in high speed rail or subsidized clean energy.

Should the federal government subsidize farmers? Nope. Next question.

Should we keep or dismantle our Social Security programme? I think this can function as a mandatory retirement savings system if reformed. It is less economically insane than medicare for example that old people should draw an income in their retirement than that we should then also provide medical care for all such people. I am however very skeptical that it should be monopolized and run by the government to the exclusion of other options (in the same way that I do not think a monopoly on schools is satisfying to the public externality of providing a quality education). Some variety of asset distribution or private control would be preferred here. Arguments like "look what happened to the stock market" do not concern me much here. In general that bashed the public's retirement assets because people who are retired shouldn't have very much money left in stock anyway and the problem was financial illiteracy and complexity of financial instruments. That is a separate if related issue but one which isn't as easily resolved as the relative freedom to do with money as we see fit money which is designated to be our own at a later date. Note: that could include investment in public bonds or allowing the government to manage the money in exchange for a possibly lower return on investment.

Do you believe the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 should be extended? They should really also be called the Bush tax cuts of 2010 and, probably 2012. But okay. The answer is I don't care about the Bush tax cuts one way or the other. My real concern with the tax code is that it should be simplified and greatly reformed. A general tax structure in my ideal world would include any or all of the following:
A huge reduction or elimination in all federal corporate taxation combined with both
A relative increase in the rate of capital gains and dividend earnings taxation to be closer to that of regular wage income (retaining the same sort of progressivity, and thus ending the private equity trader exclusions of carried interest also and the absurd manner in which middle class stock earnings can be taxed at regular rates while actual investment income is not)
And elimination of most forms of corporate welfare

An overall shift toward consumption taxation, possibly with a graduated effect from earnings potential (again, including capital gains type earnings) and income excluded from taxation for basic needs. This might include a VAT, carbon or gasoline taxes, other excise taxation (alcohol, narcotics, expensive first dollar health care insurance, etc). It could also included a heavily modified (less regressive scale) version of the Fair Tax proposals generally replacing income taxation of any kind.

Abolition of many tax exclusions like home mortgage deductions combined with a roughly flatter and lower overall tax rate on the increased base of money available to be taxed (this is essentially what was done during the Reagan years but not during the Bush years and also during the Kennedy and Coolidge administrations). 

No tax proposal is going to actually abolish the IRS. A bureau will exist to enforce tax laws and collect revenues. It might be smaller, and it might have very different mandates to carry out, perhaps against different sectors of the economy than the manner of taxing income. But the tax men are still going to exist. Sorry to disappoint.

Social issues.

Should abortion be outlawed in the US? No. I am persuaded that varieties of birth control access (making it OTC for example would help in addition to subsidies or cash transfers for the poor), more comprehensive sex ed, streamlined adoption methods, and other social services could actually help achieve the purported goal of reducing the likelihood and frequency of abortions. Bans would also reduce these but at the cost of increasing risks to women's health through illegal markets for provision of abortion and decreased ability to carry out medically necessary abortive procedures for the preservation of a woman's life as well as carrying enforcement costs, probably through invasive and insensitive police tactics made necessary to insure things like miscarriages are not actually abortions, etc. If the goal is actually to reduce abortions, there are better ways than by imposing enormous limitations on the liberty of women to conduct their health and sexuality (with no such restrictions imposed upon men), both for personal liberty and economic reasons I oppose bans even before entering into other moral arguments. There I favour allowing people to make complicated moral decisions themselves without fear of penalty so long as the harms committed to other human beings are limited. I am further persuaded that there is little moral certainty or clarity  that fetal and embryonic development is a "person" endowed with unalienable rights and much scientific evidence to suggest otherwise through the persistence of pregnancy difficulties in other formats, like miscarriages and failures to implant fertilized embryos in the uterine walls, to suggest that nearly any time frame of "person" prior to birth is inherently arbitrary. Positions of viability are possibly instructive as providing points of limitation and restrictive access, but not total bans.

Should gay marriage be allowed in the US?  Yes. Federal policy should be amended to provide federal legal benefits in accordance with state laws and licensing at the very least. It is also possible that federal policy should need to be amended under equal protection clauses in the 14th amendment such that ALL states would need to legalise such arrangements but I am content that demographic change on this issue will suffice to provide it in the near future to enough US residents and citizens as to make it universally approved.

Should the government require health insurance companies to provide free birth control? In general I oppose the government mandating what insurers must provide. I think the government's role here would be to provide sound scientific or transparent evidence that provision of particular methods, medications, etc is medically sound and reasonably cost effective such that insurers ought to do this. But I don't see why, say, a woman in her 50s should be receiving an insurance plan that automatically covers birth control (maybe there's some medical reasons, but it wouldn't be what we traditionally associate with the drugs and devices) simply because the government has decided that insurance companies need to provide it. I also disagree with first dollar insurance for health care more broadly anyway and think of things that are usually only modestly expensive and regular expenses (check-ups, birth control, etc) to be things that we ought to simply budget for yearly rather than to expect anyone else to pay for us. It ought to be reasonable socially or culturally to expect men and women to share the costs of provision while in a regular sexual relationship also. As an additional step, birth control of many varieties could be made OTC, which would render it cheaper and more accessible to millions of women, men, and their families or significant or occasional others by eliminating a largely extraneous step of seeing a doctor to obtain it. Women with specific and significant health risks could be filtered out by pharmacists issuing the drugs, prior consultations with doctors,etc (and the primary risks of note are "do you smoke?") without imposing costs on the vast majority of the population.

Where this became an issue politically was not mentioned in the question. The problem is that many Americans receive their insurance through their employers and employers then get to exercise their own moralising impulses upon their employees types of plans. I do not see a basis for preventing people from opting out of mandates of this kind (as opposed to more general mandates for health care provision of any kind), nor for preventing them from accessing types of care and coverage that they find perfectly acceptable when they work with or for people who do not feel likewise. The problem is more the employer provision in my view here and less the mandates.

Dilemmas of dilemmas

Metaphysical version?

Frequent and recent debates on the ongoing political football that is abortion politics in this country are clearly the most obvious portion of how to tackle a dilemma. If there are others, they have much fewer muddled moral components (global warming to me is the closest national policy issue with the same lack of clarity in its debated terms). Most people generally accept a premise that abortions should be legal, but rare. That is, that they personally feel uncomfortable or wrong about them, probably wouldn't want one, but don't see a reason or way to make that discomfort into a preventive measure against anyone else wanting abortions. They don't articulate why they should be acceptable, or why they shouldn't. Even defenders of abortion rights do not tend to do so with a full-throated power that presents abortion, or even the option thereof, as a moral good in and of itself. What they do instead is present the portrait of people who oppose abortions as Luddites who hate women. This is likely true, given the ancillary features of the pro-life movement and its positions on issues like birth control or health care or economic gender balance, and so on. But it fails to present any moral ground on its own for women, other than to denigrate opposition. Better defenses argue the importance of existing, living, breathing, women and their rights as superior to the supposed or inferred rights of primitive embryonic beings that women would be otherwise gestating, or question the validity of these being counted as "beings" worthy of rights in the first place. Similar problems exist where pro-life/anti-choice proponents expend large amounts of effort portraying abortions as overwhelmingly late-term decisions of irresponsibility rather than the normally early term difficult dilemmas that they are in fact.

Let us suppose first the examination of certainty in claims. I think there are two basic claims of certainty: that a fetus/fertilised collection of cells, is affirmatively a human being, or that this is not. Science would seem to cut toward a notion that mere fertilisation and early development of a fetus is not necessarily viable human life given the extreme frequency of natural failures for such things to result in sustained human life (miscarriages, failure to implant in uterus, ectopic pregnancies, etc). Biblical logic, such as it is, also discounts these "lives" as invalid or at least uncertain. It is unclear on what basis the alternative determinations of certainty are made other than that they are a shared opinion or a deference to the creation of life as paramount for existence. A clear case can be made that claims of certainty for this being being a human with conferred legal benefits are horribly invalid assertions as a result. There is not however a clear case to state affirmatively its opposite, that personhood, or whatever value we assign to human beings, does not or should not be applied to its potential. Or at least, there is not a strong case, the case being that we should assign value to existing human lives, that of women, than their potential for producing progeny, not that their progeny should attain no moral significance.

This cuts against the legal and political value we assign to this issue being very useful, but it does present the necessity of individuals wrestling with these as options, and for social policy, if it is concerned at all with this issue, being aligned with the goal in mind of making it increasingly less likely that very many people do feel such questions as a necessity.

Here is the problem with debates over the certainty of life and personhood, the boring metaphysical premises that always raise their heads in any debate over abortion. It distracts from the actual decisions that must be made by real human beings. I find the debate over global warming or climate change and the required levels of certainty of knowledge and risk to be similarly useless. The real world problem is much simpler: generating energy for homes, cars, and industry, has actual real world costs that are not always being properly captured (pollution, health care, deaths of miners or floods or from lung problems, damage to ecosystem) and focusing massive attention on these would assert powerful political reactions as necessary. In other words, these are real world risks that we have greater certainty over than the potential for massive scale global climate distortions and the hazards these would present as necessary to avert (this is to say nothing of whether this risk is significant, I think it is, or what costs should be paid to avert said risk, which is much less clear). Similarly, in the case of abortion, there are real people who are wrestling with the difficult dilemma of what to do about their pregnant status.

The difficulty of abortion politics obscures that the penultimate question is "why". Why are people having them, what causes a demand? There is little value in asking things like "what value is there to human life or potential human life or their relative balance" so long as people have a desire to terminate pregnancy for some reason. At the ultimate answer we could arrive at is something like "because they don't want to be pregnant", usually for very circumstantial reasons (age of potential mother, health of fetal development, health of pregnant woman, financial constraints, already have other children/family planning efforts, etc). Any attempt to reduce this demand must provide methods of reducing the supply of unwanted pregnancies. This makes it, ultimately, an empirical question of which methods are most effective at this task. Although it is hardly a very simple and easy empirical question of things like "what improves women's educational or occupational opportunities such that their being pregnant does not impede career or life goals" or "what means can we use at a social level to decrease unwanted pregnancy". One of the most obvious responses is to increase access and availability and use of birth control by both men and women. I don't think the administration made a good enough push to do this by making birth control a non-prescription medical procedure and drug and went out about instead in the hamhanded way that most of our health care is delivered instead. That said, there's less of an actual link between access to birth control and demand for abortion than is presumed. It is very strong, but asking women why they are seeking an abortion generally produces a much smaller number of people who lacked birth control. Many women lacked proper use of birth control, which is an entirely different problem than accessibility (training). As a result, less obvious responses are things like using broader sexual education, supporting adoption, providing access to good neonatal care and information on how to wade through the difficulty that is a pregnancy, a relative tolerance for the native sexuality of teenagers, an understanding that there is no casual link between birth control access and the formation of desire and action of our basic sexual natures, and so on.

We see as a consequence why this becomes a massive political football. It has tendrils in various pies, and is a culture war nightmare for conservatives (watching their kids get instruction on condoms, be able to acquire pills or emergency contraception through a pharmacy without parental supervision, no longer can they pretend to have ultimate control over their child's morals, etc). It is far from clear to me why these methods must become political, or that their preferences on how to manage the situation should be enshrined as policy, but I think we should at least acknowledge that they share a concern over a similar dilemma. Even if their methods are basically outdated and useless or based upon deliberate misinterpretations of shared facts surrounding that dilemma.

SoTU 2012

I haven't had much to say about this. It's largely because the speech read and sounded like a campaign stump speech more so than is typical for Obama. Kind of like a Clinton speech actually now that I've recalled some of the days of Bill's oratory.

Some thoughts though. I really hated the protectionist rhetoric and industrial policy segments. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to think of economists who didn't, even on the left. Personally I usually hate the protectionist parts. It's one thing to call on the ingenuity and hard-working spirits of mythical Americans typically invoked in such speeches. It's quite another to suggest political strategies in trade that somehow "benefit" them that don't involve mutual and mostly free trade accords with other nations. Because I'm not aware of any. It's a further strangeness to call for more manufacturing jobs. Steve Jobs' point some months ago was right. Those jobs are gone. Fuck it and forget about it. Learning to do something else is a far stronger industrial policy. Americans still make lots of things here, but with far fewer workers and a lot more robots and computer programmes. That's not the strangest part though. The real strange part isn't so much the divorce from reality of manufacturing today it suggests, but the feature that somehow manufacturing jobs should be favoured by government largess in the first place. That's a bug, not a feature. If we should be favouring anything, it would be high-tech jobs in fields like biochemistry and various types of engineering. And that's a very strong "if we should be" qualifier. The best thing we could be doing for growth in these areas is a) dramatically expand the number of H1 visas we issue for immigrants and b) dramatically improve our primary education system, in the areas of math and science in particular, so more "American" students are prepared to enter these fields. Or others that will inevitably appear 20 or 30 years from now. We wouldn't need to mess with anything besides that. The whole increasing complexity of the tax code does little to create innovation and stimulate job growth anyway. It simply entrenches current economic power within the available players and shuts down others from getting into it.

This is just as true regarding environmental policies as it is for manufacturing. The safest way to realistically shift environmental policy away from oil or coal is actually to decrease the amount of existing tax credits already in the system for things like ethanol, oil, and coal, not grant new but smaller tax credits for solar or wind power, and to decrease the number of federal regulatory agencies involved in things like nuclear or hydroelectric power to boot in order to make smaller scale generation of power by these means possible in the nearer term while more solar or wind power comes on line and newer batteries or smart grids are created (along with California not encouraging people to move to Arizona or Nevada or Texas with its stringent land use policies, but that's a state matter).

Secondly, I'm greatly disappointed in the Iran war drums. I'd have thought Obama was smarter than that after Egypt, but not so much after Libya. One could write this off as campaign statements to garner the "rally around the flag" voters who like wars so much. But the evidence suggests that voters are weary of wars, and soldiers and their families in particular are weary of enduring them in their endless state by which we now conduct them. One could theorize that people believe that bombing Iranian nuclear sites wouldn't start another shooting war. But that theory would be wrong. One could also theorize that bombing these sites would matter very much. But that theory also would be wrong. Available evidence suggests a) that Iran is doing something related to nuclear technology, but more likely targeting breakout capability than an actual weapon, as there is less public support for nuclear weapons than nuclear power, b) Iran is still pretty far away from either, relatively so that it might not even matter in any putative Obama second term, c) our joint campaign with the Israelis of shadow warfare (cyberwarfare, espionage, assassinations of scientists) is about as effective as dropping bombs would be for delaying any hostile action of nuclear science (ie, creating a real bomb). Without the higher cost in diplomatic and fiscal consequences, and finally d) Iranian nuclear weapons do not threaten American security or interests. They threaten Israeli security or interests, but Israel can handle itself to defend itself against Iran, to retaliate if necessary, and could rely on international support (probably including most of the Arab states too) were it to be attacked by Iran in such a way. Even if it were through irregular forces like Hamas or Hezbollah. Iran is mostly a pariah state, but it would really be a pariah state if it attacked.

Perhaps assuming total rationality from actors playing the part of Iran's power structure is implausible, but it's still not a threat WE need to be worrying about even if the threat is far more real than the creation of a nuclear deterrent power in the Middle East that isn't a US client state (ie, Israel).