Health Care And Ending The War Secure Obama's Legacy, Nick Gillespie. Okay, Pot Would Be Nice Too

I imagine we're going to see lots more frivolous Obama-legacy commentary as his second term draws to an end. But here's a fine entry in the genre from Nick Gillespie, whose Reason article is headlined "Ending the War on Pot is Obama's Best Hope for a Legacy." The earlier Daily Beast version replaces "Best Hope" with "Last Chance". Look, I'd love to see marijuana legalized, and I'd be very happy to see him push towards legalization however he can. But Obama's legacy is already set.

Obama's legacy is health care reform, ending the Iraq War, and his economic role after the financial crisis. (Also Kagan, Sotomayor, and Yellen.) With getting the health care system closer to a government monopoly that can force down prices, we made a big move towards resolving the greatest risk of structural economic catastrophe, where the percentage of GDP spent on health care rises from 18% to even more insane proportions and strangles the whole economy. Really, the legislators are the superstars there, but Obama played his Chris Bosh role behind Harry Reid's Dwyane Wade and Nancy Pelosi's LeBron, and he deserves credit. There are lots of terrible things going on with Afghanistan and drones and such, but the total death tolls and financial cost of the Iraq War were insane in a way nothing else in US foreign policy has been since. And while I'll give Obama not-too-great grades on economic recovery -- I'm with Krugman in thinking he could've done better -- that's going to be a huge part of how we look back on him.

No doubt about this: I'd be very happy if Obama helped us move towards marijuana legalization. Legally prohibiting the use of marijuana is stupid public policy and it should change. Now, I don't think it's as big a deal in prison-related terms as some of our left-wing allies make it out to be. If you want the dour case that marijuana isn't that huge a deal incarceration-wise and in other broad public policy terms, here it is, and scroll down to section III. (Summary: marijuana generates a large proportion of arrests, but not a large proportion of prison time, since tons of people get arrested for possessing marijuana, but they don't usually end up in prison.) I think a weakness of Scott Alexander's analysis is that it leaves out one of the best effects of marijuana legalization: cannabis is a cause of some very pleasant experiences, and people would have a great time smoking it more often. If the high-minded factors he considers come out even, fun would easily tip the balance.

At the end of this, I'm realizing that this post is basically "I totally agree with your cause, but I got annoyed at your overblown rhetorical strategy." So, sorry about that. 

December Donations: Deworm The World

Over this month, I plan to give away over $10,000 to the best charitable and political causes I can find.

First off is $2,000 to Deworm the World. Medicine to cure children's parasitic worm infections costs about 35 cents per child. DtW has been working with local governments in India to administer school deworming programs, particularly in the state of Bihar where about 2/3 of children have some kind of worm infection. I've given DtW a lot of money before, and I'm happy to do so again, as GiveWell has recently named them one of the 3 most cost-effective ways to help people.

You can see the thing I wrote previously about Deworm the World here. Since then, a couple things have changed. On the downside, it looks like the "two cents for an extra day of school" thing applied only in one situation where flooding had gotten so many kids so sick with worms that you could actually buy an extra day of school for every two cents donated. That doesn't usually happen. But on the upside, Deworm the World has come under new management that has made a lot more information about what they're doing available, leading to the GiveWell recommendation. 

Most Americans Don't Remember JFK's Assassination, Because They Weren't Alive

The median age of Americans is 36.8 years, and from the graph at right it looks like about a third of us are over age 50. So 50 years later, the country is mostly populated by people who don't remember where they were when Kennedy was assassinated, because they weren't anywhere.

I don't really know how significantly the assassination changed history. Lyndon Johnson was probably the most significant president after FDR, with impressive achievements on civil rights, Medicare, and the War on Poverty, and a disaster in Vietnam. How do all those things go in the counterfactual scenario where Kennedy becomes president? My impression is that his approach wouldn't be too different from Johnson's, but I'm not at all confident about this. If it's true that it would've all gone more or less the same way, the assassination becomes more a moment of Baby Boomer cultural memory than a turning point in the history of anything that matters. 

Reid Goes Nuclear

Harry Reid has just carried out the "nuclear option", eliminating the filibuster for executive branch and non-Supreme judicial nominations. All Democrats in the Senate supported the effort, except for red-staters Mark Pryor and Joe Manchin, who have an excuse, and general opponent of change Carl Levin, whose impending retirement will end his time as the Least Valuable Player in the Democratic caucus.

The timing is pretty good. It would've been especially good to fill executive branch vacancies faster, but at least the judicial vacancies can now be filled by the end of Obama's second term, letting Democrats refresh the bench with lots of smart young judges. Some of them will be appellate and Supreme Court nominees someday.

I see that Scott Lemieux is saying this is probably the most important vote of Obama's second term. Sounds right to me. Scott's been saying good things about Harry Reid, and I agree with that too. I wish we'd gotten here sooner, but the delay is probably more the fault of the Carl Levin types than anything Reid could control. Reid has been an excellent Senate Majority (and briefly Minority) Leader. 

Bailouts For The 99%

As Yglesias writes, it's hard to write legislation separating the socially beneficial side of the finance industry (like airlines using derivatives to hedge against unpredictable changes in fuel costs, without which they'd go bankrupt whenever fuel costs jump) from the speculative side where people are just gambling and can be bailed out if their bad bets wreck the economy. He's responding to John Quiggin's piece here. 

I thought I'd say a bit more about bailouts. Mere promises never to support more bailouts aren't worth the paper they aren't written on. Once a big enough financial crisis looms, policymakers will have to do something to prevent economic catastrophe. If bailing out banks is the only feasible way to do that, that's the policy we'll get. Quiggin's proposal to shrink the financial sector would solve this problem by eliminating the problem of financial institutions being too big to fail by just preventing the from being too big. The problem is how to implement it, eliminating the gambling while preserving the hedging. 

Setting up policies for stabilizing the economy in the face of financial crisis, but which don't involve bailing out banks, would be a good way to go. For example, you could allow the Federal Reserve, in times of crisis, to simply print enough money and distribute it evenly among all residents of the USA. Then if the financial crisis led to people losing their jobs and incomes, free money from the Fed would provide a cushion. It'd probably do a lot to prevent the job losses in the first place, as the anticipated introduction of new money would counteract the forecasted economic gloom that leads to layoffs and recessions. And it'd prevent banks from gambling with the expectation that they'll be bailed out, because the bailouts wouldn't go to the gamblers. If that's a major factor in the growth of the financial sector (I don't know if it is, but to whatever extent it is, it should stop) it'd be a way of implementing Quiggin's financial sector shrinking agenda. 

Obviously there are massive political obstacles here and we might never get circumstances where we'd be able to pass such a thing. But if we're talking about a legislative proposal that would actually have the right effects, this seems to be one.