I like skyscrapers. And DC has no skyscrapers. It does, however, have what’s basically an enormous multi-block vacant lot in the middle of downtown where the old Convention Center used to be. And it’s right between my office and my apartment so I pass it every day, dreaming of the extremely tall buildings that could be put on the site. Instead, we’re going to get City Center DC a mixed-use collection of DC-sized buildings:

At any rate, I was interested to read about the retail plans for the project since if any good stores were to open there it would be a convenient spot for me to shop. I learned that “Thirty percent of retail space will be devoted to merchants with six or fewer stores in the United States.”

I get the sense that this kind of set-aside is a common element of plans for big projects like this that need government approval. But insofar as the objective is promote diverse retail options, it seems a little backwards to me. There are some national chains that right now don’t have any outlets in DC. For a Mac user such as myself, for example, the lack of an Apple Store is noteworthy. Similarly, there’s no K-Mart, Nordstrom, JC Penny, Ikea, or many other national chains. There’d be a big difference in terms of its impact on people’s lives of getting a DC outlet of a store like that than there would be in the opening of the District’s ninety-billionth Starbucks or Cosi. Under the circumstances, it seems to me that if you want a set-aside of some kind, what you want to do is have a set-aside for firms that don’t already have more than such-and-such a number of stores in the District. That’s how you prevent a dull retail monoculture. Just raising the barriers to chains in general just tends to push them outside the District line. That makes life for DC residents less convenient than it might be, and costs the city a certain amount of revenue. Ideally, we should be trying to turn the city into, among other things, a hub of commerce that draws people in from the surrounding area, not a place that pushes people out to peripheral malls.

Matt Miller writes the deficit hawk’s case for running a giant short-term deficit but says it would be worth thinking short-term about what can be done in terms of the long-term deficit:

Bob Litan of the Brookings Institution suggests building such triggers into Obama’s blueprint from the start. Once unemployment gets back beneath 6%, for example, we could require a supermajority vote in Congress to run deficits higher than, say, 2% or 3% of GDP (by comparison, the trillion dollar figure will push us toward 7%, an all-time high).

Yes, promises like this can be broken. But given the extraordinary circumstances, writing this kind of future restraint into law would tell world markets that we know the debt spree has to end. Obama could also set up a bipartisan commission on Social Security and Medicare with a view to building consensus for action in a second term, by which time the current crisis will, with luck, be a fading memory.

This first idea seems problematic. If you have a weak economy and a huge deficit that succeeds in strengthening the economy, you don’t really want to pivot on a dime and implement a catastrophically sudden fiscal contraction. You’d probably have to change it to be more of a sliding-scale thingy. Besides which, the real long-term issue is the long-term projections — i.e., Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — rather than the precise issue of how big the 2011 deficit is going to be. Appointing “a bipartisan commission” would be nice, but what would you be asking the commission to do? Social Security is prone to some basic split-the-difference compromises, but to save money on Medicare you really need to restructure the whole American health care system.

Of course broad restructuring of health care is on the Obama agenda. But I think it would be overly optimistic to expect the first round to result in substantial cost savings. So it’s hard to see what beyond promissory notes you could offer. On Medicaid, by contrast, you’ve got this interesting proposal from Bobby Jindal. That’s happening right now, and the federal government could work to simultaneously push Louisiana in the most constructive possible direction and also, given that, try to facilitate reform and spread best practices to other states. Realistically, that seems like the most promising angle.

The other slice of this is the defense budget. It’s a really big budget. And though it’s desirable in some respects to have this military that costs wildly more than anyone else’s, it’s not really necessary in any recognizable sense. As my colleague Nina Hachigian writes today “Our annual defense outlays are laden with tens of billions of dollars worth of irrelevant weapons systems, such as the F-22 fighter plane—a weapon that costs over $350 million per plane—and would likely be useless if we ever did enter a head-to-head conflict with a big power some decades from now.” To my view, this situation needs to be a huge part of the conversation about keeping Bob Gates on in the Pentagon. He’s made noises in the past indicating that he’s sympathetic to the need for reform. But it’s also under his watch that this plan for a DOD budget ambush on the incoming administration has been hatched. If Gates isn’t willing — eager, I would say — to help push back against that kind of thing, then I’m not really sure what his utility is.

An interesting point from Ezra Klein:

And though this is a direct victory for Waxman, it’s a quiet triumph for Pelosi. Without her tacit support, Waxman’s campaign would have quietly died. Meanwhile, few in the House will forget that she tried to solve this problem months ago by letting Dingell remain at Energy and Commerce and creating a new Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. Dingell fought her efforts, and managed to neuter the new committee. It has nothing more than an advisory role. But it’s now clear that what looked like a win for Dingell was actually prelude to a much larger loss. He not only loses jurisdiction over global warming, but over health care and most everything else.

Indeed. The Energy & Commerce Committee is very powerful, and even modulo climate change issues it would have been an extremely influential post with jurisdiction over, among other things, telecommunications policy. Indeed it’s a reminder that completely independent of the specifics of who chairs what, the general idea of separating the “energy” and “commerce” elements of the Energy & Commerce Committee is reasonably sound. In the real world, of course, it’s essentially impossible to change committee jurisdictions. But this is precisely how things wind up so out of whack in the first place. Everyone knows that the significance of telecommunications issues has changed a lot over the past 100 years but the committee rules stay the same.