There was recently a post on Forbes going around the Internet called “218 reasons to vote for Obama.” In the interest of fairness and equality I thought it would be helpful to provide 218 reasons not to vote for Obama, and unlike many of the exaggerated or deceptive or completely inaccurate reasons in the original list, I am providing linked citations for every one of my claims.

I tried to avoid sensational and activist blogs and websites and stick to reputable sources. I avoided distractions about birth certificates or quotes from Michelle; I avoided many strong philosophical disagreements I have with President Obama (with the major exception of #71); I avoided connections to Jeremiah Wright or Bill Ayers or anything in Obama’s past. I primarily stuck to things that Obama and his administration have done or not done from his presidential campaign through his first presidential term, highlighting the kinds of things that liberals hated about Bush but grudgingly accept in Obama. These are the kinds of things that I reasonably expect would continue with four more years of Obama, and as such are good reasons not to vote for him.

I am also emphatically not promoting Mitt Romney through this list, as I find little reason to believe that he would not also become guilty of most of the reasons outlined below. This is simply an attempt at an intelligent response to a silly, inaccurate list that was somehow important enough to get circulated around the Internet. I welcome criticism of this list but I ask that you apply the same level of analysis to the pro-bama list. (It’s true that Obama personally didn’t do many of these things, but he also personally didn’t do many of the things on the pro-bama list, and besides, they are still things that happened under his administration that would probably continue to happen if he was re-elected.) Shall we begin?

Foreign Policy

1. Continued the practice of indefinite detentions for alleged terrorists without review (link, link)

2. Dropped threat to veto NDAA (link) and signed it, encoding severe government power advances into law (link)

3. Announced “Withdrawal Plan” that leaves more troops in Afghanistan than when he started (link)

4. Authorized military intervention in Libya without the approval of Congress (link)

5. Did this after emphatically stating as a presidential candidate that the president did not have the authority to do that (link)

6. Defended intervention in Libya by redefining the word “hostilities” (link)

7. Revived “Prompt Global Strike” weapons system, considered too controversial by Bush Administration (link)

8.Announced a $60 billion sale of arms to the Saudi Arabian dictatorship, the largest arms deal in history (link)

9. Sold arms to abusive Bahrain regime and used legal loophole to avoid telling Congress about it (link)

10. Granted a waiver allowing four countries to continue receiving US military aid even though they use child soldiers (link)

11. Argued that the widespread use of Predator drones is a justifiable form of self-defense (link)

12. Claims ACTA could be ratified without Congressional approval and that it would override US law (link)

13. Ordered drone attacks in Yemen (link)

14. Ordered a cruise missile and cluster bomb attack in Yemen that killed women and children, suppressed the civilian casualties, and then imprisoned a journalist who revealed the truth (link)

15. Would seek international permission for intervening in Syria before consulting Congress (link)

16. Broke promise to reject the Military Commissions Act (link)

17. Continuing policy of maintaining thousands of troops at over a thousand military bases around the world (link)

Honorable Mention: Backed off on his promise to close the prison at Guantanamo (link) (Yes, I know you can blame Congress for this. But he backed away from it while Democrats still controlled Congress, and his promise to close Guantanamo was often cited as a reason to vote for him.)

Continue reading 218 reasons NOT to vote for Obama

1. Crazy 3D Printer news of the day. I haven’t really blogged on 3D printers since I don’t like being overly speculative, though I think it has an enormous potential to disrupt multiple industries. We’re so used to the economic forces that make technology-related things endlessly faster and better and cheaper that it’s easy to take it for granted that 3D printers will follow that trend to the point where soon we’ll be able to replicate things Star Trek style. Nothing like that is guaranteed, of course, but I keep reading about more incremental breakthroughs like that one. At some point I’ll have to do a speculative economic blog post…

2. Speaking of disrupted industries, Encyclopedia Britannica announced it will go fully digital and stop its 244-year-old print edition. Analysis by Matt Yglesias: “As Wikipedia drives inferior products out of business, GDP declines but welfare increases.” I generally agree with that line of thinking (it’s why I’m skeptical of stagnant-wages claims as things get cheaper or free and life gets better). Wikipedia is much more up-to-date and much more expansive than any print encyclopedia, and while anyone can edit it, anyone can fix it, which is arguably just as useful as trusting a group of un-editable hand-picked experts. (Here is a list of errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia.) But there’s still a part of me that loves a giant set of physical encyclopedias; maybe it’s an anachronistic irrationality, or maybe it’s a reaction to the negative side effects of online knowledge (what if your Internet gets cut off?). Now that the supply is fixed I might have to try to get my hands on the last set (On the other hand, World Book Encyclopedia is still printing as far as I can tell.)

3. New CBO score on the health care bill. Conservatives say Obamacare is now projected to cost twice as much as the previous projection. Mainstream media says Obamacare cost is now projected to drop slightly. It never ceases to amaze me how biased observers can draw completely different conclusions from the same set of objective numbers. From a brief perusal through the official Congressional Budget Office analysis, it looks like conservatives are looking at gross cost and MSM is looking at net cost, perhaps over different time windows. I’ll outsource further analysis to someone more competent…

4. World’s tallest man stops growing at 8′ 3″. 29-year-old Turkish man Sultan Kosen had an excessive amount of growth hormone that was beginning to damage his body as he continued to grow, but it sounds like doctors in Virginia were able to “fix” the hormone. I guess you can file that under “The United States has the best medical care in the world, if you can afford access to it.”

5. Could The Use Of Flying Death Robots Be Hurting America’s Reputation Worldwide? (video) The Onion is amazing.

6. Random funny Internet pic of the day. (Star Wars edition)

Intrade is an interesting site that the political junkies all love these days. Basically it lets you trade shares of real-world events based on whether or not you think they will happen. For example, right now there’s a 25% chance that any country using the Euro will drop it before the end of the year. If you think there’s a bigger chance, you can buy shares for $2.50, and if it actually happens, you get four times the money when the contract closes. If it doesn’t happen, you lose it all.

It’s like a cross between stock trading and gambling, but it’s interesting because you can “put your money where your mouth is” based on your bias about what’s going to happen in the world, and as lots of people do this we can get an interesting snapshot in the overall “conventional wisdom” by where the percentage is holding at any given time.

Anyway, last night before Super Tuesday election results rolled started rolling in, Romney was an 85% favorite on Intrade to win Ohio. Poll junkie @fivethirtyeight thought this was way too high considering the close polling: “Continue not to understand why Intrade has Romney at 85% to win OH. A ~2 point lead in the polls simply isn’t 85% safe.” Of course, this prompted the usual discussion about how Intrade is not a very reliable prediction market because it’s not used by enough people and markets are unreliable anyway, etc, etc.

The contract even approached 90%. I toyed with the idea of finally creating an account and buying a few Santorum shares. It looked like it was gonna be a close race, and if Santorum won, you could put in $10 and make $100. But I didn’t.

Continue reading The Rise and Fall of Intrade’s Santorum Ohio Contract

I heard about Jonathan Gruber’s Health Care Reform comic book on the Internet, so when I saw it in my library’s New Item Shelf I checked it out. It almost looks like a parody, as some opening pages show a movie-theater marquee announcing with great fanfare: “Everyone will be able to afford insurance… And we will do all this while reducing the federal deficit!” (There is a crowd of people yelling “Yay! Hoo-raay!”) But it’s a very serious graphic novel by a very serious MIT economist who wants to explain to laypeople how the “Affordable Care Act” is supposed to work.

Gruber does an admirable job explaining both the problems of the current American health care system, and the ways Obamacare will try to fix that. It also provides helpful context for understanding news about health care reform (like the recent birth control hoopla). From a technocrat’s point of view, or if you’re optimistic about the things government can do, this book makes the ACA look like an intelligent and pragmatic attempt to fix a real problem. There are a few things I find reasonably hopeful, and a few things I find commendable (like experimenting with five different methods of cost control with the flexibility to adjust these methods as we figure out what works. Reminds me of the Little Bets book I’ve been reading, and it’s pleasantly surprising to see the government trying to be more flexible than usual.)

But from my bias, it also makes the bill look like an insanely complex technocratic mess. To cite just one example: it explains how employers with 50+ employees that do not provide insurance plans will face fines of $2,000 per employee, and how this is supposed to incentivize employers to provide plans. Will this encourage 49-person businesses to delay hiring another person? Who will be deciding whether or not that incentive is effective enough, and how much the fine needs to be changed as time goes by to keep the proper incentives aligned? But that’s just an example of arbitrary complexity, and not a “problem,” per se; it’s just how government regulation works. However, I do have ten real problems with the health care reform comic book based on information it provides that either lacks context or is wrong or outdated:

10. Death Panels. “What about death panels…?” “There are no ‘death panels.’ That’s a political contrivance. It was a myth designed by reform opponents to scare people away from the facts.” (136)

The “death panel” talk came from statements in the health care bill about “end-of-life” counseling. Many conservatives exaggerated such statements or took them out of context, but it’s a little disingenuous to completely write it off as a “political contrivance” and a “myth.” But, hey, maybe Gruber just didn’t have room to explain that…

Continue reading 10 Problems With the Health Care Reform Comic Book

I don’t usually like to comment on things like candidate tax plans, since they rarely see the light of day and actually affect anything, but I had several reactions to an article I read about a plan from Obama this morning.

The New York Times says, “Obama Offers to Cut Corporate Tax Rate to 28%.” The United States is frequently cited as having the highest or one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, and as a result, corporate tax revenue has actually been shrinking as businesses play international accounting games to avoid that rate. (A few months ago Twitter joined the technology trend and set up an office in Dublin, Ireland.) I know Republicans have been complaining about that tax rate for years, so it’s nice to see Obama now joining the effort to lower it.

Of course, Obama can’t resist trying to do it in a government-optimizing technocratic manner. He wants to lower the maximum rate from 35% to 28% but give “preferences to manufacturers that would set their maximum effective rate at 25 percent.” He probably thinks that’s a brilliant way to “help” out our manufacturing industry; I think it’s one of those arbitrary differences that causes unintended consequences and invites definition lobbyists. Hey, maybe non-manufacturing businesses will start buying those newfangled 3D printers so they can get classified as “manufacturing” and get the lower rate!

Continue reading Reactions to Obama’s Corporate Tax Plan

Everyone knows that the American federal government is going broke. What is not as well-known is that many American cities are going broke even faster. Reason is talking about the extreme case of Harrisburg, PA (h/t Classical Values), whose dictatorial mayor squandered funds buying hotels and sports teams. But many more cities are getting swamped in pension obligations to their retiring public employees. They promised generous benefits that they now can’t afford to pay, but in many cases they aren’t allowed to cut back on those contracts, so other parts of city budgets must suffer.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has been doing some scathing reporting the last couple of weeks on the extreme pension collection of its city firefighters. Somehow 48% of them are retiring “disabled,” which gives them even more annual benefits than they would get otherwise, all tax-free with automatic annual raises. But many of them are conveniently working other jobs or living out very active hobbies while they collect more than $40,000 a year in “disability” pension payments from the city. Hopefully reporting like this will keep St. Louis from following Central Falls, RI, which filed bankruptcy last year after “retirees failed to accept cuts in pensions and benefits.”

Continue reading Backward Government: Help Individuals, Hurt the Community

In the wonderful world of Internet politics, it’s common for people to freak out about an outrageous story that seems less outrageous as more information comes out. But all this really does is reveal our biases, and even though I’ve known that for awhile, I can now offer quantitative evidence for it thanks to Reddit.

Earlier this week libertarians and conservatives were going ballistic about a North Carolina preschooler who was forced to eat cafeteria nuggets because a state inspector determined her home-packed turkey sandwich and banana wasn’t nutritional enough. The story hit all the right buttons: the government setting arbitrary standards about health, the government wasting money, the government messing with children and usurping the right of the parent. It made me angry, and I was planning to whip up a blog post about the increasing tyranny of government around the United States, combining this story with the ones about the LA County frisbee fine and the Amish milk farm shutdown.

Continue reading Chicken Nuggets and Climate Research