Nobody will ever be able to tell friends he’s hiking on the Appalachian Trail again:

— General McChrystal off to a promising start, saying that civilian casualty reduction will be the top tactical priority in Afghanistan.

— Paul Starr worries too much as a general matter, but he’s forgotten more about health care than just about anyone knows so pay some attention to his concerns about the details of public plan design.

— It’s not fancy amenities like climbing walls that are driving up college costs, it’s the fact that colleges refuse to quantify the effectiveness of their instruction that leaves them with no better way to signal quality.

— The CBO’s official Long-Term Budget Outlook is out; the outlook is grim.

— Victor Hugo’s letter to the London News on the subject of John Brown.

— John Carney attempts to revive the lie that the Community Reinvestment Act traveled through time to cause the financial crisis.

Song of the day, in honor of my arrival in my hometown, They Might Be Giant’s “New York City”.

The Heritage Foundation has a blog post complete with chart claiming to demonstrate that “Obama plan cuts defense spending to pre-9/11 levels”. As Benjamin Friedman lays out this is nonsense:

This is a standard rhetorical device for defense hawks (see the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Mitt Romney and lots of others) so it’s worth pointing out that it’s misleading. The unfortunate truth is that Obama is increasing non-war defense spending this year and seems likely to increase it at least by inflation in the near future.

It’s true that defense spending will probably decline as a percentage of GDP, assuming the economy recovers. But that’s because GDP grows. Ours is more than six times bigger than it was in 1950. Meanwhile, we spend more on defense in real, inflation adjusted terms, than we did then, at the height of the Cold War. The denoninator has grown faster than the numerator.

By saying that defense spending needs to grow with GDP to be “level,” you are arguing for an annual increase in defense spending without saying so directly. That’s the point, of course.

Since economic growth causes real wages to rise over time, there is some reason for thinking that a military sized appropriately to the strategic environment would need real increases in spending to maintain its level of capabilities. But one way or another, the crucial issue is that the appropriate level of defense spending is determined by the nature of the strategic environment, not by the pace of economic growth. The US economy grew rapidly during the 1990s but the level of military threats facing the country didn’t—thus, a decline in defense expenditures relative to GDP was appropriate.

One interesting trope both in the substance and rhetoric of this argument from Heritage is the idea that 9/11 ought to have touched off a large and sustained increase in defense spending. On the merits, this is a little hard to figure out. It’s difficult to make the case that the 9/11 plot succeeded because the gap in financial expenditures between the U.S. government and Osama bin Laden was not big enough. Would an extra aircraft carrier have helped? A more advanced fighter plane? A larger Marine Corps? Additional nuclear weapons? One of the most realistic ways an organization like al-Qaeda can damage the United States is to provoke us into wasting resources on a far larger scale than they could ever destroy. The mentality Heritage is expressing here is right in line with that path.

Foreign aid has a lot of critics in part because it has a lot of problems. In particular, in the first couple of post-colonial decades there was enormous overpromising and people thought that foreign aid could really spark economic growth. Hasn’t worked. And while many countries have made progress in terms of sparking increased growth rates, nobody’s figured out a reliable path for external actors to really make that happen. That said, aid critics have a bad habit of terribly overstating their claims and neglecting the fact that, for example, aid aimed at curing disease saves people lives.

At any rate, Peter Robinson seems unduly impressed with Dambisa Moyo:

Today on Uncommon Knowledge, Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid responds to her critics — including former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson. “Surely,” Gerson has written, “Moyo should recognize the difference between aid provided to oppressive kleptocrats and aid given to faith-based organizations distributing AIDS drugs.”

Moyo’s reply?

I’m not going to sit here and say the fact that 2 million Africans are on HIV drugs is a bad thing. Of course that’s a good thing. But whose responsibility is it to provide those HIV drugs? American society does not operate by sitting around and waiting for handouts. Why should we as Africans?

For one thing, in the developed world we clearly do offer financial assistance (“handouts”) to indigent people suffering from illness. Even in the United States there’s Medicaid and people get treated at emergency rooms regardless of their ability to pay. Meanwhile, in terms of HIV drugs obviously the reason Africans find themselves needing to rely on handouts is that the continent is so full of poor people. Ultimately, obviously, the ideal solution would be for Africans to get richer. But the per capita GDP of Africa isn’t going to magically reach American (or even Mexican or even Chinese) levels overnight even if Africa does start seeing strong growth. Meanwhile, people with HIV will die really soon unless someone gives them medicine. And even better, the marginal cost of producing extra HIV medication is really low. There’s just no getting around the fact that giving poor people medicine is a useful and important way of making the world a better place.