For any given federal expenditure of funds, there’s an argument to be had over whether the deadweight loss to the economy caused by the taxation required to generate the funds exceeds the benefit obtained by the expenditure. But this is a technical argument that’s difficult to win decisively. And at the same time, the government rarely spends money on anything that’s genuinely pointless—though presidents do sometime propose the idea of a manned mission to Mars. Consequently, even though everyone’s against “out of control spending” and “pork” and everyone knows that “fiscal responsibility” is good, it’s difficult to criticize specific actual expenditures in a persuasive way. One popular thing the GOP has been doing to get around this problem in recent months is to criticize made-up programs. So the right is against a $30 million mouse earmark that they’re pretending Nancy Pelosi put in the stimulus, they’re against an $8 billion scheme to build a Disneyland-Vegas mag-lev train that they’re pretending Harry Reid put in the stimulus, and now they’ve invented a tattoo removal program that they’re pretending is in the omnibus appropriations bill.

Their other big idea is feigned stupidity. Michael Steele pretended not to know what a fish passage barrier removal program is. Turns out that these are programs designed to remove barriers to the passage of fish. So that fish species don’t vanish from certain habits and wreck entire ecosystems. Bobby Jindal was inspired to denounce “something called volcano monitoring”. Volcano monitoring is when you monitor volcanos to try to understand when they might erupt. And now we get this Tweet from John McCain:

Not having ever worked in beaver management before, I couldn’t say in detail how a beaver-management program would work. But again the basic concept here is really pretty clear. But if McCain is really confused, he could look it up. Brendan Nyhan suggests that we may need to let the GOP know about Let Me Google That For You. If anyone out there wants to know why beavers could be a problem for a given area, or about different ways that you can manage the beaver population and minimize beaver-related problems I would direct them to the Beaver Control and Management Information page on the Internet Center for Wildlife Damage Management. I found that right away using Google.

If you want an idea of how completely brain-dead the conservative movement is, you desperately need to read this post from Patrick Ruffini.

It starts strong:

If you want to get a sense of how unserious and ungrounded most Americans think the Republican Party is, look no further than how conservatives elevate Joe the Plumber as a spokesman. The movement has become so gimmick-driven that Wurzelbacher will be a conservative hero long after people have forgotten what his legitimate policy beef with Obama was. [...]In these serious times, conservatives need to get serious and ditch the gimmicks and the self-referential credentializing and talk to the entire country. If the average apolitical American walked into CPAC or any movement conservative gathering would they feel like they learned something new or that we presented a vision compelling to them in their daily lives? Or would it all be talk of a President from 25 years ago and Adam Smith lapel pins?

And then it ends . . . um . . . not so strong:

This is why I love Newt’s emphasis on finding 80/20 issues and defining them in completely non-ideological terms.

That’s right; the man to bring the right-wing out of its addiction to gimmicks and icons of the past is—Newt Gingrich! I could see someone arguing, perhaps, that these gimmicks are clever gimmicks but the idea that they’re an alternative to gimmick-based politics is insane.

See also what Chris Orr says here.

By now everyone’s seen the headline about the revised fourth quarter growth numbers. They’re now saying we shrank at a 6.2 percent annualized rate. This explains the semi-mysterious fact that the U.S.-originating global recession seemed to be hitting Europe harder than it was hitting the United States. Now it just looks like we were undercounting the extent of the downturn. At the point, we all seem to be pulling each other down:

A wider trade gap than previously reported — that is, fewer American goods being purchased abroad — also pushed G.D.P. further downward. Exports fell at an annualized rate of 23.6 percent last quarter.

U.S. exports are falling, it would seem, because economies abroad are shrinking. And those economies, in turn, are shrinking because they were previously dependent on exports to the United States. New demand is going to be needed.

Upon closer examination, the Obama Iraq announcement turns out to be more clear-cut and less in need of analysis than I’d initially thought:

What threw me off initially was that he’d slightly pushed back his already somewhat-murky promise to withdraw “combat forces” to a 19-month schedule rather than a 16-month schedule. That’s a little disappointing, but the precise calendar was always much less important than the question of what happens next. And here the news is extremely good. As Spencer Ackerman writes:

For the first time as president, Obama attempted to resolve ambiguities about a full withdrawal along the Dec. 2011 framework that the Iraqi government insisted upon in last year’s Status of Forces Agreement, committing himself to its mechanisms. Some on the left have wondered warily why Obama hadn’t made such a public commitment. Those worries will probably end with this line: “Under the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government, I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. We will complete this transition to Iraqi responsibility, and we will bring our troops home with the honor that they have earned.”

Larry Korb observes:

By strengthening our commitment to leave, and setting an earlier deadline for the end of combat operations, Obama has also taken an essential step in building trust with the Iraqi government and people. Even after the signing of the SOFA, some Iraqis publicly doubted whether the United States would leave the country. Obama’s announcement today is a definitive sign that he does not intend to keep forces in Iraq indefinitely, and will work toward fully turning over our responsibilities to the Iraqi government and security forces.

This is huge, and calls for some Rancid:

Now if only he could fix the banking system.

David Leonhardt had an excellent article the other day on the long-run need for more tax revenue than can be generated merely be allowing for the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. He makes mention of something called Wagner’s Law, which is related to what I was talking about here, and that basically states that as society gets wealthier it demands more and more of the sort of services that need to be provided by the government. That means that over time as the economy grows the share of the economy that becomes tax revenue goes up. This not only meets public demand for more public services, but provided the tax rate doesn’t go up too rapidly, people’s after-tax income is still rising so private consumption goes up along with public services. And as he observed “the problem can’t be solved just by taxing the rich” largely because there aren’t that many very rich people.

The moral of the story, I would say, is that the left will need to embrace some revenue enhancements that are not-so-progressive in their distributional impact. I think that means, in the first instance, taxes on behavior that’s undesirable—carbon taxes, alcohol taxes, congestion pricing, market pricing of parking, etc. (obviously some of this stuff would be for local government rather than the federal government)—and in the second instance the dread VAT.

But why would progressives want to embrace non-progressive revenue sources? Well, fortunately Lane Kenworthy did an excellent post on this a year ago that contains graphs I can steal. The first chart shows that if you look around the one at what it is countries do to mitigate income inequality, nobody is substantially equalizing things through the tax system, but many countries are substantially equalizing things on the spending side:

Not that progressive taxation is a bad thing, or meaningless in the contribution it makes, but clearly insofar as direct public policy interventions (as opposed to things like wider distribution of educational attainment) are going to reduce inequality, it needs to be done on the spending side. Now this raises the question how do you get the spending side to do more? Is it by “means testing” existing programs and creating new small-bore “targeted” programs aimed at the neediest? Well, not really:

The most important thing is to just have lots of tax revenue. Public expenditures are pretty progressive in their impact everywhere, and the difference between a very progressive and a not-so-progressive system is mostly that the more progressive ones are bigger. So while liberals have no reason to give in to conservative demands to make the existing revenue scheme less progressive—by adopting a flat tax, say, or replacing the income tax with a consumption tax—there’s very good reason to basically be looking for revenue by any means necessary. If it’s easier, politically, to get some center-right politicians on board for new consumption taxes than for higher income taxes, then it’s incumbent on progressives to walk through that door and take the revenue. At the moment, of course, that’s not an open door so there’s really no need to worry about it either way. But this is the kind of choice you can imagine progressive politicians and/or activists facing at some future point, and I think it’s important to start building understanding of the structure of the choice.