Conor Clarke

It was fast. Very fast.At 8.04am, Politico's Mike Allen publishes an article: "For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few" -- Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper's own reporters and editors."At 10.33am, Washington Post editor Marcus Brauchli sends out an email: A flyer was distributed this week offering an "underwriting… More »

There are two charts this morning -- both on the updated employment situation and both from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. First, the unemployment rate increased to 9.5%: The second (and more worrying) chart is the month-over-month change in employment, which declined by 467,000. Stating the obvious: That's bad, and substantially worse than May.David Leonhardt has more details. For the full BLS release see here (PDF).UPDATE: Over at Atlantic Business, Daniel… More »

Paul Krugman says he's been getting hatemail calling him the new Thomas Malthus. (Which actually strikes me as pretty thoughtful, high-minded hatemail.) Paul responds by pointing out that Thomas Malthus was actually right for just about all of human history, and reprints a graph from Brad DeLong to prove it.I have slightly different graph on this point, drawn from Gregory Clark's fantastic A Farewell To Alms. (IMHO the book really is worth a read.) The graph is,… More »

Roger C. Altman argued in yesterday's Wall Street Journal that it's time to consider new taxes: "A bipartisan deficit reduction commission, structured like the one on Social Security headed by Alan Greenspan in 1982, may be necessary to create sufficient support for a [value-added tax] or other new taxes." Over at the National Review, Veronique de Rugy cuffed him around a bit: "When will lawmakers in Washington understand that the only way out of this mess is for… More »

This is really, really outside the normal purview of this blog, but a bunch of Washington DC-based writers are doing a group blog about David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest as part of the Infinite Summer book project. (And this is even more shameless than a typical blog plug, because I am supposed to be one of those writers.) It goes without saying that none of us is qualified to write about literature.I've gotten through about 60 of the book's 1,079 pages. I am… More »

It's perfectly fine to fisk the administration for backtracking on Obama's pledge not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000. Why? Because Obama's people now say they won't rule out taxing employer-sponsored health benefits. (As it stands, health benefits you get through an employer are not subject to payroll or income taxation. More here.) Additional fisking might be deserved here on account of the laughable defenses employed ("we're going to let the… More »

My colleague Clive Crook thinks so -- he calls the new bill a "travesty" and a "playground for special interests" in his new FT column -- and so do many of the commenters on this blog. But while my instinct is always to be a shameless comment demagogue, and while I agree with Clive that there are a lot of warts on the new American Clean Energy and Security Act, I do think it's worth making one point about the bill's 'corpoate giveaways.'I've written elsewhere that… More »

This is outside the normal purview of this blog, but I do find the continued controversy over whether or not Nico Pitney colluded with the White House before asking about his famous Iran question slightly odd. As far as I can tell there is no real evidence that the White House pressured him to ask a specific question, and no real contention that the question was anything but a tough one, and no real disagreement over the fact that the president dodged it. If this… More »

Since I think a lot of this discussion of global and national GDP obscures the most worrying cost of global warming -- namely, the vast impact climate change will have on developing nations -- I thought I would dig up some charts on global warming and global agriculture production. The most rigorous study on this subject that I know of is William Cline's Global Warming and Agriculture. (You can actually download the chapters from that link.)The basic points of… More »

Jim Manzi slaps me with two charges of being a predictable liberal and one (implicit) charge of being insufficiently familiar with the blogging oeuvre of Jim Manzi. Your honor, I'd like to contest one of those charges. Manzi says I claim the science "now says things will be even worse than we previously thought," as a way to "inflate the analyzed costs of global warming." I think that pretty adeptly misses the point of my last post, so let me try making it… More »

The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) -- the bill that would impose a cap and trade regime for U.S. carbon emissions -- has passed the House of Representatives. Was it worth it? Well, on its own, ACES will in no sense make the world a cooler place. Other nations will help themselves to more coal, like bad kids on Christmas morning. An American cap and trade bill will have a meaningful impact only if it induces other nations to follow suit. So the hope… More »

[Update: Jim Manzi responds here and I respond to him here.]As you might know, the House is voting later today on the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, The American Clean Energy and Security Act. Feelings are mixed. For one, there were a lot of mischievous compromises. For another, the bill doesn't have any immediate, selfish economic benefits for the country, and there's no point pretending otherwise. I think Jim Manzi and others are right to say -- if you… More »

There's plenty of stuff worth quibbling over in this big Wall Street Journal editorial on climate change and the Waxman-Markey bill, and some decent food for thought. Then I arrived at the last paragraph and saw this:Americans should know that those Members who vote for this climate bill are voting for what is likely to be the biggest tax in American history.So here's what I'm wondering: Is there any possible, conceivable way this statement can be true? I mean the… More »

Via Catherine Rampell, I see there's some new research about the relationship between height and quality of life. The findings? Tall people enjoy a higher quality of life. Specifically, the Talls are richer and happier than the Shorts. (The paper in question has some cool charts, which I'll happily steal.) Here's happier: And here's richer:A while back Greg Mankiw suggested that maybe we should have a height tax -- not with the intention of enacting one (as was… More »

So it looks like the Waxman-Markey climate change bill will pass in the House this week: The sponsors hammered out an agreement last night with Collin Peterson, the chair of the Agriculture Committee. The main sticking point was over whether the EPA or the Department of Agriculture would administer a carbon offset program intended for farmers. (The offset program will pay farmers to do environmentally friendly things like plant trees.) Peterson got his way: The… More »

Washington DC's terrible Metro accident -- yikes, I used to ride the red line every day -- made we want to go look up information about the city's train system. So I went to the National Transit Database historical tables to see what I could find. Had there been big changes in services? A drop off in funding? Not really. Here are the total operating expenses of the Metro over the past ten years, in millions and billions of dollars: Of course, this needs to be… More »

Yesterday I made a chart that tried to put the burdens of the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in context. The share of C&T costs paid by the poorest Americans will be lower than the share of all federal taxes paid by the same group. But the share of C&T costs paid by the wealthiest Americans is also far lower than the group's federal tax share. This means that a unusually high portion of cap and trade's costs fall on middle-income Americans. The top… More »

Is cap and trade going to screw the poor? Turns out there is some debate about this. You have the Tax Foundation going on about how the costs of cap and trade will be "disproportionately borne by low-income households," and Warren Buffett saying that cap and trade is "probably going to be pretty regressive." And then you have the CBO's weekend estimate of what cap and trade will cost the individual families, which both Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias use to make the… More »

Joy of joys, I woke up this morning to find that the Congressional Budget Office answered this question. From the CBO's new per-household cost estimate (pdf):[T]he Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the net annual economywide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion -- or about $175 per household.This does not include the potential economic benefits of slowing climate change. Still, I think it's worth noting that the net cost… More »

Why is the government about to give you $4,500 for an old car? More »