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Some things that deserve attention but not a post of their own...

+ Looks like I've got the filibuster thing all wrong. Invoking cloture (i.e. ending a filibuster) is an affirmative process that requires the majority to show up and deliver 60 votes. The only time the side working to sustain the filibuster needs to show up is if and when that number is reached. Then and only then can they be forced to hold the floor by reading from phone books and such. It's not Sen. Reid's fault; its the rules.

+ If you want to understand why the debate over health care reform will be different this time, read this. And this.

+ Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich thinks long term.

All for today....

Just read Jon Cohn. I wish I was still teaching comparative public policy, because this is one of the best intros to comparative welfare state development that I've ever read.

Here's the lede:

In today's political lexicon, "Detroit" has become synonymous with failure--a shell of a city inhabited by a shell of a once-mighty industry. It is, in various tellings, the product of individual achievement laid low by collectivism run amok, or of innovation smothered by addled corporate managers and sclerotic labor contracts. Libertarians against unions, environmentalists against gas-guzzlers, or car enthusiasts against bad engineering--everybody can find something to loathe.

But, for all of Detroit's mistakes, it is also a victim of something it did right: ensuring a middle-class lifestyle for bluecollar workers. When the carmakers, pushed by unions, agreed to provide workers with a steady level of purchasing power, comprehensive health benefits lasting into retirement, and various forms of workplace rights, they were promising something that all Americans covet. And, while the financial costs and managerial constraints associated with that effort have helped bring domestic carmakers to the edge of collapse, ultimate responsibility for this situation lies beyond Detroit.

In a more enlightened society, after all, government would have made those promises and extended them to all workers, thereby spreading the burden of financing them to all taxpayers. That's how it's done in Europe and in Japan--which, not coincidentally, is the home of Detroit's most successful competitors. But the U.S. government never took that step. So, instead of a public welfare state, we got a private one, administered for only some workers and paid for by their employers. Sooner or later, this arrangement was bound to fail.

The creation of this privately run welfare state came neither easily nor quickly. It was the result of a decades-long transformation, carried out in two stages: first, when unions took advantage of New Deal legislation to transform life on the factory floor; then, when unions used their bargaining power to secure more generous compensation. And, to appreciate just how dramatic those changes were, it's worth recalling what life as an autoworker was like before this transformation began.

And the conclusion, for those looking for a quick fix:

Fortunately, there is. It's a model for the welfare state that already exists in other parts of the world and that, as it happens, has been getting a lot of international attention in the last few years. It's the Nordic or Scandinavian model, so named for the part of Europe where it's practiced, and its philosophy is simple. In these countries, government guarantees everybody, even blue-collar workers, most of the things Detroit once guaranteed its workforce--like middle-class wages, full health benefits, and subsidized day care. The government also guarantees nearly full incomes for the unemployed. Organized labor is still a big part of the picture; Scandinavia is actually the most heavily unionized part of Europe. But unions there serve a somewhat different function. Instead of trying to restrict hiring and firing--or, for that matter, obstructing trade--they focus on improving labor conditions and training displaced workers to find new work. They have a less adversarial relationship with management, although that has a lot to do with the fact that Scandinavian employers don't constantly attack unions the way American employers do.

Even though it takes high taxes to support such generous government programs, the Scandinavian economies are strong. That's led some center-left economists to suggest that this model for the welfare state represents the best hope for guaranteeing the kind of economic security companies once provided, but no longer can. As it happens, President-elect Obama's agenda includes universal health insurance, more subsidized child care, and better worker retraining--not to mention labor-law reforms. And, while Obama hasn't been talking up Sweden lately, his approach to policy suggests that he, too, believes government must assume the responsibility for providing benefits--and guaranteeing livelihoods--that once belonged to corporate America.

...in Turkey!

The shoe hurled at President George W. Bush has sent sales soaring at the Turkish maker as orders pour in from Iraq, the U.S. and Iran.

The brown, thick-soled "Model 271" may soon be renamed "The Bush Shoe" or "Bye-Bye Bush," Ramazan Baydan, who owns the Istanbul-based producer Baydan Ayakkabicilik San. & Tic., said in a telephone interview today.

"We've been selling these shoes for years but, thanks to Bush, orders are flying in like crazy," he said. "We've even hired an agency to look at television advertising."

Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zeidi hurled a pair at Bush at a news conference in Baghdad on Dec. 14. Both shoes missed the president after he ducked. The journalist was jailed and is seeking a pardon from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Baydan has received orders for 300,000 pairs of the shoes since the attack, more than four times the number his company sold each year since the model was introduced in 1999. The company plans to employ 100 more staff to meet demand, he said.

"Model 271" is exported to markets including Iraq, Iran, Syria and Egypt. Customers in Iraq ordered 120,000 pairs this week and some Iraqis offered to set up distribution companies for the shoe, Baydan said.

Baydan has received a request for 4,000 pairs from a company called Davidson, based in Maryland. He declined to provide further details.

Yglesias sets the record straight: It didn't happen under Reagan. It happened under Clinton. And it came after a series of historic tax increases, and not after tax cuts.

Like I said before: Facts are stubbornly nonpartisan. What matters is that we get them right, not that they support our particular point of view.

This past week saw a great discussion break out all over the blogosphere about progressive taxation. It all started with this fairly typical column by Robert Samuelson on the "myths" of lobbying. Here are the key grafs:

A second myth is that lobbying favors the wealthy, including corporations, because only they can afford the cost. As a result, government favors the rich and ignores the poor and middle class. Actually, the facts contradict that.

Sure, the wealthy extract privileges from government, but mainly they're its servants. The richest 1 percent of Americans pay 28 percent of federal taxes, says the Congressional Budget Office. About 60 percent of the $3 trillion federal budget goes for payments to individuals -- mostly the poor and middle class. You can argue that those burdens and benefits should be greater, but if the rich were all powerful, their taxes would be much lower. Similarly, the poor and middle class do have powerful advocates. To name three: AARP for retirees; the AFL-CIO for unionized workers; the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for the poor.

After easily dispatching the ludicrous notion that the CBPP is a powerful lobbying group that exists to defend the poor, Ezra Klein got graph happy, posting two important ones tha tI want to reproduce here:

To which he added: "Unless you think politicians change those rates because they like having less federal revenue to play with, than it would seem that the rich have some sway after all."

Also, this:

Adding: "So over the same period of time that the tax rates on the top one percent have fallen dramatically, their share of the national income has skyrocketed. The rich may not be "all powerful," but it's quite a leap to say that they are somehow cowering before the might of Robert Greenstein and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Indeed, over the same period, they managed to (at least temporarily) eliminate the "estate tax," which was a key tax on the rich. And if you don't believe that was the rich flexing their political power, then you haven't read this."

And that sparked a HUGE discussion. After getting seriously wonky here, Ezra took on one of the most often misused facts about taxes: that the richest one percent pay more than 1/4 of all of the nation's taxes. This one deserves a quote in full:

And one more note on how Samuelson presented his data. "The richest 1 percent of Americans pay 28 percent of federal taxes, says the Congressional Budget Office," he wrote, as if that meant something. But the question with the top one percent is not simply how much they pay, but how much they make. If they make 50 percent of the national income, paying 28 percent of taxes is paying very little. If they make two percent of the national income, then their tax burden is heavy indeed. What they pay only makes sense if you know what they make. And this is true for historical comparisons too. You often hear conservatives argue that the rich pay a larger percentage of national taxes than they did in the 1970s, and that shows the system's progressivity. But the rich make much more money than they did in the 70s. The question is whether their share of the national income increased faster or slower than their share of the federal tax burden.

In 1979, the top one percent brought home 9.3 percent of the national income -- which is to say, for every $100 paid in wages, $9.30 went to the top one percent -- and paid 15.4 percent of federal taxes. The ratio of tax share to income share was 1.65. Their tax burden was 1.65 times larger than their income share. In 2005, they brought home 18.1 percent of the national income -- it had doubled -- and paid 27.6 percent of federal taxes. The ration was 1.52. In other words, it has gone down. The rich pay less taxes as a share of their income than they did in the 1970s, and they control much more of the nation's wealth.

This is worse than it even looks on first glance (and it looks quite bad). Progressive taxation rests on a simple theory: As you make more money, you can bear to pay a higher rate. That's how it differs from, say, a flat tax. A flat tax advocate would levy a 25 percent tax on Bob, who makes $50,000, and Russell Wordsforth Skotchpuckett III, who makes $500,000. They might even call that progressive. 25 percent of $500,000 is more than 25 percent of $50,000. The progressive taxer would scoff at this. Bob is left with $37,500 to live on. Russell Wordsforth Skotchpuckett III has $375,000. That's not an equal burden, much less a progressive one.

In other words, as the top one percent's share of the national income grew, their ratio of income-to-taxes shouldn't have simply stayed steady. It should have grown. Instead, it shrunk. Not only were they paying a lower share of federal taxes relative to their share of income, but it had gone down even as their ability to pay more had radically increased.

What's always amazed me about this argument is how simple it is to rebut. Or rather, that despite the simplicity of this counter-argument, you almost never actually hear anyone offer it. It isn't enough to know what percent of the total share of taxes they pay. For that number to make any sense, you need to understand what percentage of income they take in, and what percentage of wealth they hold. Once you get the proper context, you begin to understand how this isn't about soaking the rich. It's simply about getting them to pay their fair share.

And nothing makes that point more clearly than this graph - via Kevin Drum - from the NYT:

Kevin comments on that bar to the far right:

The top 400 taxpayers, a group so rich and elite that I'd need scientific notation to properly represent their proportion of the population, have doubled their share of income in the past decade or two but have decreased their tax burden by nearly half. Nice work! As you can see, Warren Buffett wasn't exaggerating when he said his secretary paid a higher tax rate than he does. If she pays more than 18% — not exactly a tough hurdle when you figure that payroll taxes already account for about 8% of that — she probably does.

Yglesias adds:

The fact that the top 0.1 percent control 8 percent of national income is hugely relevant to thinking about how to understanding living standards in the United States. We have a similar per capita income to Finland, but our top 0.1 percent is way better off than Finland's, whereas Finland's child poverty rate is immensely lower than our own. Various countries come out as slightly poorer on average, even though the average resident of those countries actually has a higher income than the average American.

Repeat after me: We aren't trying to "redistribute wealth." We are simply trying to get the people at the top to pay the same percentage as the people in the middle.

Andrew Sullivan:

"

I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system," George W. Bush. Just as he used torture to defend freedom. And occupied a country in order to liberate it.

Nicholas Beaudrot writes:

Over the past four years, more than 100% of reported earnings has gone into either dividends or stock buybacks. In other words, collectively the companies in the S&P 500 cannot think of a better way to invest money in a way that will produce more money for shareholders than simply giving the money directly to shareholders. This is, I think, a very powerful sign that the U.S. economy hasn't been able to come up with anything to do that is particularly productive. Hopefully a shift in government policy will help change that.

I think that's part of the story, but only part. What happened to the idea of reinvesting money in your employees by, you know, increasing their pay? Who knows, that might even lead them to do some innovating?!?