Solving the Budget Deficit: Cleveland Edition

Following the suggestion of one of our readers (as well as Jason’s bold spending cut-dominated march into the breach), I too attempted to solve the deficit using the New York Times’ slick online tool.  Behold, problem solved: here.  I actually produced a budget surplus  – which I’d be more than happy to refund to the taxpayers since it is their money after all and not the government’s. 

To the chagrin no doubt of my fellow classical liberals, I had to use a combination of spending cuts and tax increases given the constraints of the NY Times tool.  Perhaps with greater options I could have done it with fewer or no tax increases, but I could not honestly do so within the parameters of the tool.  Specifically, my combination was 82% budget cuts and 18% tax increases.    

A few notes on my choices: 

I didn’t cut the number of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I’m extremely reluctant to let deficit concerns dictate specific foreign policies like the troop levels in Afghanistan even if I think that our ends should be correlated with our means.  So I wish I had greater options there since I’d love to prune our overall foreign policy ends and commitments which would allow serious cutbacks in the defense budget.

I also refuse to endorse the notion that the military should “reduce the length and frequency of combat tours. No unit or person will be sent to a combat zone for longer than a year, and they will not be sent back involuntarily without spending at least two years at home.”  Although this is good for service members, it isn’t necessarily the best policy to achieve our missions (which should be the first priority assuming the missions are necessary for our national interests narrowly defined).  Indeed, I would argue that if we need to have a large footprint in Afghanistan, it might make sense to have longer and more frequent tours for many of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines given that counterinsurgency requires a deep reservoir of knowledge about the problem set, something that can best be gained by more focus on and more time in the theatre of operations.

I’m also loathe to tinker with medical malpractice.  Given that I’m not an expert in this area, I just don’t know enough about how shielding doctors and others from malpractice might harm the very important tort system.  

Given that we have to fund the government in some way through coercive means (even lotteries, if we could raise enough revenue in that fashion, would have to involve coercion since the logic of the system would require a state monopoly), I tried to choose taxes that would have the least negative consequences and perhaps even some positive ones (like a carbon tax and eliminating tax loopholes).    

Also worth noting that I had a much easier time cutting the longer term deficit than the short-term deficit.

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So what is second order?

It has been widely reported that in 2003, Elena Kagan wrote that the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy regarding gays in the military was “a moral injustice of the first order.”

The first order?  Really?  Surely there are some implicit qualifiers in there.  When you consider genocide, mass rape, sex trafficking, murder, slavery, Jim Crow, and a host of other high crimes and injustices, not letting someone volunteer for the military seems decidedly not first order.  I’m not even sure it is second or third order.

Perhaps if we constrain the discussion to moral injustices that are actively being contested these days, her statement makes more sense. But not really.  Even if I imagine myself an American leftist, I can’t quite come up with first order.  There would be things like abortion, contraception, voting rights, fair housing, collective bargaining and a host of other “rights” ahead of gays serving in the military.

I can’t serve in the military because I’m too old and too fat.  Certainly this is unjust discrimination because  there are definitely assignments around the world where I could make a positive net benefit to the cause, and if I had a strong desire to serve, I would be upset about it.  The military disagrees with me.  Maybe discrimination based on sexual orientation is more serious than age discrimination or weight discrimination, but how much more?

I can understand why people feel passionately about the issue, and I don’t want to debate here the merits of the policy one way or the other (especially since it is mostly dead).  Rightly or wrongly, the military makes policies it thinks will improve the performance of the military.  Certainly they are capable of unjust discrimination, and perhaps the policy really is unjust, but first order?   (Forcing gays to serve in the military might be first order.)

I’m not a moral philosopher and would hesitate ranking moral injustices that exist in the world, but this one seems pretty far down the list.

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Life to Change on Submarines

One of the last all-male enclaves in the military will now be letting in women, according to an announcement by the Navy on Thursday.  I have mixed initial reactions to this.

Certainly, women make valuable contributions to the military, and I’d like women to have the same opportunities in the work force as men do (though I’ll save the topic of anti-discrimination law for another day).  Furthermore, there are definite benefits from moving to gender-mixed work forces.  There may be increased sexual tension, but my experience is that men tend to behave better in mixed company than when they are by themselves.

Maybe this really is a non-story.  The Navy would like us to think so.  One sub commander says,

We’re going to look back on this four or five years from now, shrug our shoulders and say, ‘What was everybody worrying about?’” said Bruner, the top sub commander at Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in coastal Georgia, where the announcement was made.

On the other hand,

There were some protests, particularly from wives of sub sailors, after the military began formulating a plan last fall.

Supposedly, the protesting wives were concerned more about women taking jobs and advancement opportunities from their husbands, but one has to wonder if that was the real reason (since women are serving all over the military without organized protests by military wives).

One also has to wonder that if this is really no big deal, why the Navy has no immediate plans to put female enlisted personnel on subs.  Officers have considerably more privacy on subs than enlisted crew members do.  Mixing the sexes amongst enlisted sailors seems fairly problematic.

Maybe this is just the march of progress, but I have a couple of points I worry about:

1. I think there are a whole host of gender-related issues that the military prefers not to talk about because they get a lot of pressure to be politically correct.  Certainly there is an ugly history (Tailhook, etc.) of sexual harassment in the military and in the Academies.  And in conversations with military people, I have heard reports that, in many cases, the physical performance standards for certain tasks are altered for women.  I doubt that these are significant  (and probably not relevant to being an officer in a sub), but I don’t think we know the full story.
2. The worries of wives who have husbands on submarines shouldn’t be ignored.  And the families of the women put on subs also might have some legitimate concerns.   Military service can be very hard on families.  This move might make things even harder.

Lastly, this is odd:

The Navy declined several requests by The Associated Press to interview female sailors and cadets at U.S. bases about the policy change.

Hmmmmm.  Probably nothing to worry about.

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Beards and Lost Political Opportunities?

Or this guy?

Should we trust this guy?

Rob Farley at LGM cites research finding that “men with beards were deemed more credible than those who were clean-shaven.”  Tongue in cheek, he then confirms the research by pointing to Paul Krugman (bearded and trustworthy) and Bill Kristol (clean shaven and untrustworthy). 

If this is true, contemporary politicians are really losing an opportunity to fool signal constituents of their trustworthiness.  Or as the authors of the study put it: “the presence of a beard on the face of candidates could boost their charisma, reliability, and above all their expertise as perceived by voters, with positive effects on voting intention.” 

The last Presidential candidate with a beard was Republican Charles Evans Hughes in 1916.  Many people think that the last President with a beard was Benjamin Harrison (who lost the Presidency to my namesake in 1892).  However, according to Kenneth Crispell and Carlos Gomez’s book on presidential illnesses, Woodrow Wilson grew a beard after his stroke (pg 70 and HT: Modeled Behavior).  And ironically, given the research Farley cites, Wilson did so to hide his facial paralysis!  So it might not make sense to trust bearded folks - except for Rob that is! 

My guess is that this new research is either wrong period (which is unlikely given that there was an era in US history when esteemed figures wore beards) or is temporally/culturally dependent and thus wrong in some times/places, including the US over the last century plus (more likely).  I’ll trust the behavior of those who have a real stake in winning over the public - CEO’s, pitchmen, campaign advisors, and politicians just to name a few - over one study (of course, the evidence on pitchmen is mixed given Billy Mays, Norm Abram, and Bob Villa).  Thus the politicians who have shunned facial hair are probably not making a mistake, as the research Rob cites suggests they are.  As one news story noted:      

“People don’t trust candidates with facial hair and it comes down to the simple fact that people think they are hiding,” said Jeffrey Adler, a political consultant in Long Beach, Calif., who has run campaigns for 20 years. “It’s the old body-language paradigm, that they are hiding behind the facial hair. There have been numerous studies. Again and again, voters tend to the photos without facial hair. We always advise clients to lose the facial hair.”

I did a quick perusal of JSTOR and nothing popped – but I bet someone has done research on the question. 

Given my culture/time argument, it seems that someone is losing an opportunity to help sell themselves to the populace — the US soldiers in Afghanistan who are forbidden from wearing beards amidst a culture that greatly reveres them.  Indeed, allowing soldiers to grow beards would seem to be most consistent with our current COIN doctrine.  But as with many things involving the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, what the military preaches and what they allow are sometimes (frequently?) two different things.  See here for a story about some soldiers who agree with me.  (BTW, there are some US soldiers who are allowed to wear beards; however, it is not the norm even amongst soldiers in the field).

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What Will Today’s Veterans Think of Government in the Future?

While reading an interview of macroeconomist (and rational expectations theorist) Thomas J. Sargent in Arjo Klamer’s interesting book, Conversations with Economists (1983), I happened upon this notable passage:

I went through ROTC, was commissioned, and then worked in the systems analysis office of the Pentagon.  It changed me in some ways, made me more conservative.  I came to understand more clearly the limitations of government actions.  It was a learning experience.  My conclusions came from seeing the whole decision-making process by which the US got into the war: how we evaluated the situation, how we processed the data from the war, how we understood our options, what we saw as the resources and costs in Southeast Asia, and what we thought was the likely outcome.  We didn’t do a very good job.  There was an incredible volume of inefficient and bad decisions, which one must take into account when devising institutions for making policy [emphasis added]. 

This passage made me wonder how current veterans – many of whom will become our country’s future leaders - will think about government following their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Will they, like Sargent, become more conservative after seeing up-close the frequently ugly way in which policy is made and implemented?  Or will they have a different reaction because of the kind of war they are fighting and the strategy/tactics the U.S. is employing (or at least stressing)?  In particular, will soldiers trained to think that they can win over the “hearts and minds” of the population largely through government directed or guided activities (in the parlance of counterinsurgency, Civil-Military Operations) have more faith in central planning and the use of the government to direct economic and social change at home?    

Of course, this entire discussion is prefaced on the notion that one’s political views aren’t very sticky. 

It is also important to note that soldiers aren’t tabula rasa – the majority of officers are conservatives already (see Peter Feaver and Richard Kohn’s work on this), and thus one could assume that they already have at least some skepticism about the government.  However, as soldier-scholar Jason Dempsey shows in his new book Our Army: Soldiers, Politics, and American Civil-Military Relations, it is a mistake to see the entire military as a single mass of conservatives.  Instead, as Dempsey highlights, ”while army officers are likely to be more conservative, rank-and-file soldiers hold political views that mirror those of the American public as a whole, and army personnel are less partisan and politically engaged than most civilians.”  I would also add that the conservatism of soldiers might not be representative of American conservatives in general.  Many Americans who call themselves conservatives are really classical liberals by another name who are trying to conserve the ideals of the very libertarian American Revolution.  However, many soldiers are only conservative in the realist, Teddy Roosevelt, neoconservative, or New Right sense – none of which have been all that skeptical about the growth of government or fully appreciative of the difficulties inherent to government “solutions.”

Lastly, this is not necessarily a criticism of COIN a la FM 23-4.  It may be the best way to win at counterinsurgency.  However, it would be surprising if doing COIN didn’t have some impact on those tasked with carrying it out.

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