Reality has a well-known liberal bias

I linked to a transcript of this in my previous post, but then I just had to find the video clip. It's Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner where he makes the famous statement that "reality has a well-known liberal bias."

That's quite true. But the rest of it is hilarious. Really, just from the transcript, I was laughing out loud.

A liberal on defense spending

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist - and science fiction fan, I might add - who writes for The New York Times, is an unabashed liberal. But unlike conservative pundits, he lives in the real world and he's willing to look at the data, rather than just believe whatever he wants to believe.

So here's what he says on defense spending (the above graph, from the federal Office of Management and Budget, was taken from his post, too):

One thing I’m hearing and reading from liberal sources is the argument that we can find big savings by ending the war in Afghanistan, and more generally by cutting bloated defense spending. So, a few words on that issue.

Yes, there’s a lot of wasteful defense spending — in fact, it’s almost surely the most waste-ridden part of the federal budget, because politicians are afraid to say no to anything for fear of being called unpatriotic. And even aside from the question of the Bush wars, it has long been clear that we’re still spending a lot to head off threats that haven’t existed since the fall of the Soviet Union. Read Fred Kaplan for a sense of just how bad it is.

Then there are those wars. I was against Iraq from the beginning — and I was pretty lonely out there on the pages of major newspapers. Afghanistan made sense in 2002, but I have no idea what we’re doing there now.

But if we’re talking about fiscal issues, you have to bear the arithmetic in mind. We’re not living in the 1950s, when defense was half the federal budget. Even a drastic cut in military spending wouldn’t release enough money to offset more than a small fraction of the projected rise in health care costs.

Now 20% of the federal budget is still a large part of it. And in raw numbers, it's certainly an enormous pile of money. If you didn't click on that link to the Fred Kaplan article, I recommend that you do so now. The 2011 Pentagon budget is incredible, far bigger - even after adjusting for inflation - than any military budget since World War II:

Still, $708.2 billion, the sum requested just for fiscal year 2011, is an extraordinary chunk of change. The Center for a New American Security (hardly a dovish think tank) calculates that, adjusting for inflation, this sum is 13 percent higher than the defense budget at the peak of the Korean War, 33 percent higher than at the peak of the Vietnam War, 23 percent higher than at the peak of the Cold War, and 64 percent higher than the Cold War's average.

And there's a lot of waste in it. Our only enemies are a rag-tag bunch of religious terrorists, but the Pentagon budget seems to be more about protecting defense contractors. I thought the part about evenly dividing budget goodies between the Army, Navy, and Air Force to be particularly enlightening:

There has been one constant in the defense budget ever since the mid-1960s: the money has been divided almost exactly evenly—never varying by more than a couple of percentage points—among the Army, Navy, and Air Force. For all of Gates' apparent rationality, the same is true in this budget: 32 percent goes to the Army, 35 percent goes to the Navy, 33 percent goes to the Air Force. (For more on this, click here.) It is extremely unlikely that our national-security needs just so happen to demand a response that gives each of our three services a nearly equal share of the military budget.

In other words, the Defense Department is a monstrous bureaucracy, and its budget is a political document—a set of weights and balances to keep the natural tensions from erupting out of control. (In the 1950s, when budgets were very tight, and before this tacit pie-splitting deal was worked out, the service chiefs saw one another as, quite literally, enemies. For an example, click here.)

And as Kaplan notes, the actual costs are likely to be even higher - much higher, although this budget isn't quite as badly in the realm of pure fantasy as the Bush military budgets were. We could save a lot of money through cuts in defense spending, without impacting our national security much, if at all. (Of course, the political difficulty of that would be immense, but that's a separate issue.)

Nevertheless, as Krugman points out, this isn't the 1950s, when defense spending was half the budget. These days, it's a significant part of the budget - and it's far, far more than any other nation in the world spends, not even in the same ballpark - but cutting the defense budget won't solve our budget woes, not all by itself. And this is from a man whose blog is called The Conscience of a Liberal.

In a follow-up post, Krugman includes the above graph, also from the OMB, that shows defense spending as a percent of gross domestic product. In that respect, too, it's considerably lower today than in the 1950s and 1960s. (Remember, it's not lower in dollars - not even in inflation-adjusted dollars - just as a percent of the federal budget and percent of GDP.)

Krugman tries to further explain his point:

I’m baffled by commenters who read my earlier note as an endorsement of current levels of defense spending. As I said, the defense budget is full of waste, we’ve been fighting wars that we shouldn’t, and we’re defending against threats that no longer exist. That defense buildup after 9/11 was outrageous: we were attacked by a handful of terrorists wielding box-cutters (or something like that — I’m aware that’s not certain), and we responded by (a) buying a lot of heavy tanks (b) invading a country that had nothing to do with the attack.

... Despite all that, it remains true that defense spending isn’t at the heart of the budget issue. The current Obama budget calls for defense spending of 3.4% of GDP by 2016; you can make the case that the number should be closer to 2%. But that’s not enough to avoid hard choices about health care and revenue.

If you can’t see how it’s possible both to believe that we waste a lot of money on the military, and to believe that ending that waste would make only a modest contribution to our fiscal problem, I can’t help you.

His point, if I can paraphrase it, is that cutting military spending will certainly help, but it wouldn't be a magic fix (not that I think anything is a magic fix). Certainly, cutting defense spending makes far more sense than chopping away at the relatively minor costs of protecting our air and water or actually helping people in other ways, but it's not going to be anywhere near enough by itself.

In order to really solve our budget woes, we're going to have to get a handle on health care costs (not "entitlements") and we're going to have to raise taxes. None of this will be popular, but we can't be serious about deficit reduction without it.

Note that liberals are far more realistic than conservatives when it comes to deficit reduction (when it comes to everything, pretty much). Certainly, cutting defense spending makes a lot more sense than anything Republicans are proposing. But Krugman is saying - and he makes a very persuasive argument - that we're dreaming if we think that will do it by itself.

And personally, I'd really like to stay grounded in reality. Of course, that's easier for us liberals, because reality has a well-known liberal bias. :)

Destroying America in order to "save" it

(Tony Auth)

Well, they've got the "destroy" part down pretty good, anyway.

QOTD: Ideas are not the same as race

Quote of the Day:

Every once in a while you get stories like this one, about the underrepresentation of conservatives in academics, that treat ideological divides as being somehow equivalent to racial differences. This is a really, really bad analogy.

And it’s not just the fact that you can choose your ideology, but not your race. Ideologies have a real effect on overall life outlook, which has a direct impact on job choices. Military officers are much more conservative than the population at large; so? (And funny how you don’t see opinion pieces screaming “bias” and demanding an effort to redress the imbalance.)

It’s particularly troubling to apply some test of equal representation when you’re looking at academics who do research on the very subjects that define the political divide. Biologists, physicists, and chemists are all predominantly liberal; does this reflect discrimination, or the tendency of people who actually know science to reject a political tendency that denies climate change and is broadly hostile to the theory of evolution?

Now, I don’t mean to say that political bias in the academy is absent, although it’s not consistent: I can well imagine that it’s hard to be a conservative in some social sciences, but in economics, the obvious bias in things like acceptance of papers at major journals is towards, not against, a doctrinaire free-market view. But the point is that doing head counts is a terrible way to assess that bias. - Paul Krugman

The GOP orgy of self-congratulation

I must say that I'm jealous. I sure wish Nebraska had even one Representative like this. Or maybe an Anthony Weiner.

Oh, well, I can dream, huh?

Scapegoat

(Stuart Carlson)

QOTD: Department of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Quote of the Day:

Wall Street Journal editorial page columnist Kimberly Strassel lays out the next parts of the Affordable Care Act that Republicans will attack:

If the GOP is to dismember ObamaCare, it must pressure Democrats into helping. That's what Republicans did this week. Next up for debate will be other odious elements: the individual mandate, taxes on kids' braces, restrictions on health savings accounts, cuts to Medicare. The GOP will highlight each one and then ask 2012 Democrats what they are willing to defend.

What holds these elements together? They're all elements of the program that reduce deficits. The conservative attack of the PPACA has centered around the claim that the deficit-reducing elements aren't sustainable because Congress won't follow through with them. And now conservatives are trying to make that a reality by systematically proposing to reduce tax revenues and raise expenditures.

I don't think they'll succeed. But if they do, it won't prove their objections were correct. It will only prove that deficit reduction is very difficult in a political culture in which one party is totally unconcerned about the deficit. - Jonathan Chait

Dummies explain Egypt

I wonder how much of this is taken verbatim from actual comments by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin?

Dumber than...

(Bob Englehart)

Clarence Thomas, the rock

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We've had bad Supreme Courts before, but I wonder if they've ever been this bad? Here's where we pay for our Presidential mistakes for decades after they've left office.

After all, Thomas was appointed by the first President Bush. Scalia was appointed by Reagan. George W. Bush, the worst president in U.S. history, appointed both Roberts and Alito. Yes, we'll be living with those bad decisions for decades.

Well, it will probably be decades before we recover from the Bush administration anyway, I guess. But that doesn't make it any easier to take. Remember, the Roberts Court overturned precedent to give us the Citizens United decision, which gave us unlimited and anonymous corporate funding for political campaigns.

Yes, if you own stock or even mutual funds (say, in your IRA or 401-k), corporate CEOs can donate your money to political campaigns to get tax breaks for themselves (and any other goodies they want). And they can stay completely anonymous, to boot.

Nice, huh? Now the rich don't even have to spend their own money to buy a politician (or, in the case of News Corp., even the entire Republican Party).

QOTD: Soaring food prices

Quote of the Day:

What’s behind the surge in food prices? The usual suspects have made the usual claims — it’s all about the Fed, or it’s all about speculators. But I’ve been looking at the USDA World supply and demand estimates, and what stands out from the data is mainly that we’ve had a huge global harvest failure. ...

Overall grain production is down — and it’s down substantially more when you take account of a growing world population. Wheat production (this time not per capita) is way down.

You might ask why a production shortfall of 5 percent leads to a doubling of prices. Part of the answer is that some kinds of demand are growing faster than population — in particular, China is becoming a growing importer of feed to meet the demand for meat. But the main point is that the demand for grain is highly price-inelastic: it takes big price rises to induce people to consume less, yet collectively that’s what they must do given the shortfall in production.

Why is production down? Most of the decline in world wheat production, and about half of the total decline in grain production, has taken place in the former Soviet Union — mainly Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. And we know what that’s about: an incredible, unprecedented heat wave.

Obligatory disclaimer: no one event can be definitively assigned to climate change, just as you can’t necessarily claim that any one of the fender-benders taking place right now in central New Jersey was caused by the sheet of black ice currently coating our roads. But it sure looks like climate change is a major culprit. And it’s not just the FSU: extreme weather elsewhere, which again is the sort of thing you should expect from climate change, has played a role in bad harvest around the world.

Back to the economics: if you want to know why we’re having a spike in food prices, the data suggest that the key cause is terrible weather leading to bad harvests, especially in the former Soviet Union. - Paul Krugman

How to make a scientist's head explode

(Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

I'm going to assume that all my readers - both of you - understand this. :)

Birthers a majority in the GOP

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Incredible, isn't it? A majority - 51% - of Republicans are birthers! Only 28% of Republicans are actually rational enough to accept that a black man is a "real" American. (The rest say they're "not sure," which is insane enough in itself.)

This is absolutely the most astonishing thing in the world, don't you think? I knew that Republicans tended to be racists, but this is almost beyond belief. Rather than accept that a black man is actually President of the United States, they've turned to one of the most idiotic and downright crazy conspiracy stories of our time, and one readily disproved by the evidence.

Note that, according to the poll, these "birthers" overwhelmingly approve of Sarah Palin, 83% to 12%, which tells you something about Palin's supporters, I guess. (Among the 28% of sane Republicans, Palin is viewed unfavorably, 52% to 41%.)

One other note: Apparently, Donald Trump might as well give up on his presidential ambitions, with an almost two to one unfavorability rating in the GOP. Ah, too bad. It would have been really funny to see him make the attempt, don't you think? And the way things are going, I could use a good laugh.

(Clay Bennett)

Who's teaching our children?

(Nick Anderson)

In case you're wondering, Anderson draws political cartoons for the Houston Chronicle, and "SBOE" stands for the Texas State Board of Education.

See why I like it now?  :)

QOTD: That Koch brother behind the curtain

Quote of the Day:

The many beneficiaries of Koch libertarian largesse bridle at their portrayal as sinister, self-interested moguls pulling strings behind the scenes. But then you read things like this:

Last week, the New York Post's Keith Kelly reported that The Daily Caller, a right-wing news site run by Tucker Carlson, had spent "several weeks" pursuing false allegations that Mayer had committed plagiarism in at least two articles. One of the allegations involved Mayer's landmark expose about Charles and David Koch -- billionaire brothers who have funded conservative organizations tied to the Tea Party movement.

Kelly tells Media Matters that the plagiarism charges were also pitched to the Post, apparently by a different source than the one that tipped off the Daily Caller. The Post investigated and ultimately reported that the allegations were untrue.

After first saying that the plagiarism story would result in an "extensive piece," The Daily Caller ultimately told both Kelly and The New Yorker that the article had been spiked.

Kelly has reported that "the person or persons behind the allegations remains a shadowy mystery," and both Carlson and Daily Caller reporter Jonathan Strong have declined to identify the original source of the smear. 

The shocking and actually somewhat encouraging thing is that, while the Koch brothers or their minions got a couple reporters to investigate this smear, they didn't get anybody to actually publish it. You'd have to think they could find somebody pliable enough. Hey, I've got two kids and a mortgage. Pay me enough money and I'll swear that I was in a secret Marxist cabal with Jane Mayer. - Jonathan Chait

The gerbil in the room

(Mike Luckovich)

Do you see the problem here? Sure, the American people are incredibly ignorant about federal spending. On average, we think that foreign aid is 27% of the budget! And we think that "wasteful" government spending is anything that goes to someone else.

But how about some real change? How about trying to educate us, rather than simply accepting that ignorance and trying to take advantage of it politically? (After all, the Republicans are already masters of that tactic. You won't beat them at their own game.)

(Mike Thompson)

Note Mike Thompson's commentary:

What’s a caricaturist to do when reality becomes a caricature? On the heels of an agreement that the New York Times estimates will add $700 billion to the nation’s debt by cutting taxes for the richest 2 percent of Americans, President Barrack Obama has proposed a budget that includes cutting heating assistance for the poor. According to ABC News, up to 3 million families would be affected by this proposed cut alone.

This is what we’ve come to?

Crazy, isn't it? Sure, massive tax increases would not help our economic recovery, but neither will cuts in government spending. We have to make smart choices here. Obama could have gone to the mat for the American people, refusing to cut taxes on the richest 2 percent of Americans at a time of record-breaking budget deficits. After all, it's tax breaks for the middle class that's actually stimulative (though still a very expensive form of stimulus).

(Dan Wasserman)

Defense spending is the really big elephant in the room, considering our current situation. As a nation, we spend seven times as much on defense as the next biggest spender. And quite frankly, destroying our economy, our system of education, and our infrastructure is not the way to stay on top militarily, anyway. We are militarily strong because our economy is strong, not the other way around.

Besides, who's the enemy? Do we really need that kind of military budget to defend against a rag-tag bunch of religious terrorists? Or has defense spending simply taken on a life of its own?

(Matt Davies)

Think about it. What kind of country can create and support a powerful military over the long-term? These days, it's not about finding warm bodies for cannon-fodder. A high tech military requires a technically-advanced people. Education is not just critical for developing and operating advanced technology, but for competing in the global economy in order to fund it, too.

Just declaring, over and over again, that We're Number One! isn't going to do it. It's like depending on your cheerleaders in order to build a strong football team. It takes more than that. But Republicans are faith-based. They think the only thing that matters is wishing something to be true. If we watch "Rambo" enough, it will make us tough.

(Stuart Carlson)

And as a nation, taking from the poor in order to give to the rich hardly makes any economic sense, even leaving aside the morality of it. Sure, given the pervasive racism in this country, a black Democrat can't afford to speak out on behalf of the poor, not too much. (Poor whites get far more assistance than minorities, since there are more of them, but that's not how most people imagine it.)

But that hardly means Democrats need to present themselves as Republican-lite, either. Instead of adopting, and thereby confirming, Republican rhetoric (which is generally false - demonstrably false - anyway), why not show us a new way forward? Er, remember all that "change" stuff? I must say that Barack Obama has been terribly disappointing in this respect.

(Dan Wasserman)

OK, sure, it's supposed to be politically dangerous to do the right thing. But is it, really? After all, how is Republican-lite working out for Democrats these days? That hardly seems to be a winning play, does it? And let's face it, no matter how much Obama agrees with the GOP, they will never like him. Their opposition is political. No matter what he does or doesn't do, their complete opposition is absolutely guaranteed.

Besides, Republicans aren't all that popular these days either, you know? So instead of imitating them, maybe a smart politician should choose a different path. How about trying to explain reality to the American people? How radical is that? Right now, Republicans deny reality and Obama tries to avoid mentioning it. How's that working out for us?

(Tom Toles)

Here's reality:  We got into this hole because of tax cuts and stupid, unfunded wars we started for no good reason. And then, thanks to deregulation and the bubbles created by giving windfalls to the rich, we collapsed our economy, which automatically increased the deficit even further.

We can't keep doing the same things we've been doing and expect to have any better result. At the same time, we have to consider both the short-term and long-term implications of everything. Considering that we need to cut spending but also start investing in America again (as Paul Krugman points out, we're currently eating our future), this won't be easy. But it is possible.

To cut the deficit, we need both spending cuts and tax increases. Both need to be targeted so that they have the least impact on our short-term economic activity but the greatest impact on long-term fiscal health and on investments our nation desperately needs (like our children). And if you really want to cut the fat in federal spending, you should probably look at where we actually spend the most money.

(Jack Ohman)

GOP solutions are a joke. Tax-cuts for the rich are the solution to everything. Of course, we tried that solution during the Bush administration, and it was a complete and utter disaster. (At first, Republicans proposed cutting taxes on the rich because economic times were good. Then they proposed the exact same thing because economic times were bad. Obviously, they were just trying to find an excuse, any excuse, for cutting taxes on the rich.)

So why don't the Democrats suggest we try dealing with reality, instead of ignoring it?

Tax increases for the wealthiest of Americans will lower the deficit while having the least effect on our current economic activity. And, after all, we're only talking about returning rates to what they paid under Ronald Reagan, maybe. (If we suggested returning rates to what they paid in the 1950s, there would really be hysteria on the right.)

We've been cutting taxes for decades, and it's only driven us deeper and deeper into debt. Shouldn't that tell us something?

As far as cutting spending goes, well, let's look at where we actually spend the money. First, there's no reason that we need to spend seven times as much on military spending as any other country in the world, especially when our only enemies are a ragged handful of religious fanatics - and especially when continuing down this path will weaken our military in the long-term!

We spend a lot on Social Security, too, but in the short-term, it produces surpluses. In the long-term, it needs a fix, but only a minor one. After all, we already increased the retirement age a bit. And most of the increase in lifespan in the past hundred years has come from cutting childhood mortality, which doesn't affect Social Security at all. (I've been meaning to write a separate post about this.) Basically, just eliminating the earnings cap would do most of what's necessary here - and that wouldn't affect the vast majority of Americans in the slightest.

Medicare is the big problem over the long-term. And it's not an easy problem, either. But that's mostly because even minor fixes result in hysterical screams about "death panels" and "socialism" from the loons on the right (encouraged by amoral Republicans simply for political advantage). Even when Democrats adopted Republican health care reform and worked hard to make sure it also decreased the deficit, Fox "News" and other sources of right-wing propaganda succeeded in demonizing it.

Well, any way you look at it, we Americans need to be smarter than that. And maybe we're not. Maybe we're doomed as a nation. But if you assume that, what's the point of trying to do anything at all? You might as well assume that we can learn something - most of us, at least - if it's presented clearly and rationally. Because if that's not true, there's no hope for us anyway.

Maybe Obama should treat us Americans like rational adults. That's a radical thought, isn't it? Yeah, if you've spent any time at all on the Internet, it seems rather like a Hail Mary pass. But who knows? Maybe we'll surprise ourselves.

A balanced view of multiculturalism

Here's a great post by Kenan Malik that explains why both sides in the debate about multiculturalism are wrong:

What is striking about multiculturalism and the clash of civilizations thesis is how much the two approaches have in common. It is true that there is little love lost between multiculturalists and clash of civilization warriors. The former accuse the latter of pandering to racism and Islamophobia, while the latter talk of the former as appeasing Islamism. Beneath the hostility, however, the two sides share basic assumptions about the nature of culture, identity and difference.  For at the heart of both arguments is a confusion of peoples and values. Multiculturalists claim that the presence in a society of a diversity of peoples limits the possibility of common values. Clash of civilization warriors insist that such values are impossible within an ethnically diverse society. Neither is right.

And that is because both assume that minority communities are homogenous wholes whose members will forever be attached to the cultures, faiths, beliefs and values of their forebears. Being born to European parents is not a passport to Enlightenment beliefs. So why should we imagine that having Bangladeshi or Moroccan ancestry makes one automatically believe in sharia? Multiculturalists and the clash of civilization warriors have different views about the nature of Islam. Both, however, look upon Muslims as constituting a distinct population, defined almost solely by its faith, and whose difference must dictate the way that wider society deals with it. In viewing cultural differences in this fashion, both sides have been led to betray basic liberal principles.

In reality, of course, there are more than two sides to this complex issue. And certainly we're all likely to disagree on the details. But Malik's thinking is much like mine.

Oddly, Malik is a determined foe of multiculturalism, while I tend to focus my opposition on their right-wing opponents. But this, I think, is mainly because Malik is British, while I'm American. "Multiculturalism" in Europe tends to be a far different thing than in America. And here, the greatest danger, overwhelmingly, is from extremists on the right, not the left.

Well, this is a problem when arguing generalities anyway. That's still what we must do sometimes, but it's frequently misleading. I tend to avoid the label "multiculturalism" - partly because it tends to result in a knee-jerk response, and partly because it sounds more benign than it is, at least in Europe. So why not just talk about "diversity," which really should be the key issue for progressives?

As Malik also understands, it's individual freedom that's the important thing. You should not gain or lose any rights just because of your religion, your ethnic identity, or your cultural community. A woman from a patriarchal culture still has the exact same rights as any other woman - indeed, any other person. And although your religion may demand certain behavior, (1) it must always be voluntary and (2) it can't infringe on the rights of anyone else, member or not.

Now I have absolutely no interest in cultural preservation and no concern about "cultural imperialism." Cultures should change with the times. But a culture doesn't change as a unit. It's always a matter of individuals. Those individuals have the right to choose for themselves - not just in choosing a particular culture, but in continuing to make their own decisions, whether they consider themselves to be part of a particular culture or not.

At the same time, diversity - including cultural diversity - is a very good thing. "Multiculturalism" in that respect is great. It makes us all richer, as it leads to a vibrant, creative society. But it's the individuals who are important, not the cultures. It's the individuals who have rights, the individuals who make choices, the individuals who matter. Cultures don't have rights. It's the individual within a culture who has rights, and those rights are neither more nor less than what anyone else has.

Given the freedom to make choices, many people will make bad ones. That's a fact. It's the downside of freedom. But there are far too many upsides for that to dissuade us. And besides, you will never get all of us to agree on what really is a bad choice. You may think you know, but you could be wrong. And what gives you the right to decide for everyone else?

That's the essence of a diverse, pluralistic, democratic society. In this, America led the way, with our strict separation of church and state. Above all else, that was our gift to the world. Now we just need to live up to our own ideals.

The fundamental difference between books and TV

(Savage Chickens)

Gould/Bolton 2012

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QOTD: Eat the future

Quote of the Day:

The public says it wants to see government spending cut — and the Tea Partiers really, really want spending cut — but people don’t want to cut any program they like; and they like almost everything. What’s a conservative to do?

The obvious answer, once you think about it, is to eat the future: to cut spending in a way that undermines the nation’s long-run prospects, but doesn’t impose all that much pain on voters right now.

And that, as best as I can tell, is the running theme in the cuts proposed by House Republicans. The proposal is, deliberately I think, hard to read and interpret; I hope and assume that the good folks at CBPP will do the detail soon. But on a quick read, here are some of the cuts that jumped out at me:

WIC 1008 million
Food for Peace 544 million
NOAA 450 million
NASA 579 million
Energy efficiency and renewable energy 899
Science 1111 million
Nuclear nonproliferation 648 million
Federal buildings fund 1653 million
Homeland security administration 489 million
FEMA, various, around 1.2 billion
EPA clean water and drinking water about 1.8 billion
Community health centers 1.3 billion
Centers for disease control 900 million

WIC is nutritional aid for pregnant women and women with young children; let’s cut that, because the damage to the nation from malnourishment is a problem for future politicians. NOAA is weather and climate — hey, what we don’t know can’t hurt us. Nuclear nonproliferation — well, we probably won’t feel the pain of a terrorist nuke assembled from old Soviet fissile material for a couple of years. FEMA — well, how often do hurricanes hit New Orleans? CDC — with luck, by the time plague hits someone else can be blamed.

Don’t start thinking about tomorrow. - Paul Krugman