Apparently the man suspected of executing four police officers in Washington State would be in prison in Arkansas today were it not for the fact that former governor Mike Huckabee granted him clemency back in 2000. That probably spells trouble for a guy who seems to still have political aspirations. But based on the few facts I have available, this looks like a reasonable use of clemency authority:

In 1990, Clemmons, then 18, was sentenced in Arkansas to 60 years in prison for burglary and theft of property, according to a news account. Newspaper stories describe a series of disturbing incidents involving Clemmons while he was being tried in Arkansas on various charges. [...]

When Clemmons received the 60-year sentence, he was already serving 48 years on five felony convictions and facing up to 95 more years on charges of robbery, theft of property and possessing a handgun on school property. Records from Clemmons’ sentencing described him as 5-foot-7 and 108 pounds. The crimes were committed when he was 17.

60 years for burglary and theft for an eighteen year-old seems incredibly excessive. In this case, of course, you can’t help but wish he were in fact still in prison. But it’s hard to see what about a record of involvement in burglaries would make you think this was a guy at risk of doing something like this.

The main reason policy toward Afghanistan is so vexing, in my view, is that we basically failed in our main mission back in 2001 and 2002. Demands were made on the Taliban to hand over key al-Qaeda leaders, the Taliban refused, we went to war, and even though we succeeded in marginalizing the Taliban we didn’t succeed in achieving for ourselves what we’d been demanding the Taliban do. Having failed at that mission, we then shifted gears into a hazily defined effort to remake Afghanistan.

A new Senate report, thankfully, finally focuses attention on how we failed and why:

“The decision not to deploy American forces to go after Bin Laden or block his escape was made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commander, General Tommy Franks,” the report says.

“On or around December 16, two days after writing his will, Bin Laden and an entourage of bodyguards walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan’s unregulated tribal area. Most analysts say he is still there today.”

Rumsfeld’s argument at the time, the report says, was that deploying too many American troops could jeopardize the mission by creating an anti-US backlash among the local populace.

The report dismisses arguments at the time from Franks, Vice President Dick Cheney and others defending the decision and arguing that the intelligence was inconclusive about Bin Laden’s location.

“The review of existing literature, unclassified government records and interviews with central participants underlying this report removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora.”

Another reminder of the horrible legacy of the George W. Bush administration.

I liked Louis Uchitelle’s article on the dearth of infrastructure “superprojects” in the contemporary United States. The strangest thing about the situation, which he notes and doesn’t quite dwell on as much as I would have, is that the Obama administration actually is pursuing two superprojects—the construction of a national high-speed rail network, and the construction of a national health care information technology backbone. But it’s somewhat oddly shied away from making the case for really funding them at the required level:

If there is anything in the Obama administration’s approach that can be compared to the megaprojects, it would be the giant computer system, now being planned, to make health records available in hospitals and doctors’ offices across the country. Some economists argue that computerized records would raise economic output just as the Hoover Dam did 73 years ago. Still, only $19 billion has been set aside; the project is expected to cost nearly $100 billion, and who knows if the funding will materialize. [...]

Mr. Obama has allocated just $8 billion as a down payment for high-speed rail — in Mr. Rendell’s view not a drop in a $3 trillion bucket, a bucket that seems unlikely fill anytime soon.

The perversity of this is that you’re really unlikely to find better times than 2009, 2010, and 2011 to spend a bunch of money on large-scale projects. Most of the time, this kind of spending would involve a short-term economic cost in exchange for a long-term economic benefit. But faced with such a weak labor market, it’d be a short-term benefit with even more benefits over the long-term. Clearly there are limits to what you could actually get done in a 30 month time frame—$3 trillion worth of new passenger rail wouldn’t be doable—but the allocations that have been made don’t really seem to be designed to test the limits of the possible.

There also seems to me to be a somewhat counterproductive obsession with avoiding waste. Like there’s an implicit idea that doing $100 million worth of useful projects is better than doing $180 million of useful projects plus $20 million worth of stuff that doesn’t work out. I see the political logic in that, sort of, but it doesn’t really make sense.

Via Mark Thoma, Ben Bernanke makes the case for more power and autonomy for the Fed. He makes a number of good points. He also argues that the Fed’s “ability to take [emergency rescue actions] actions without engendering sharp increases in inflation depends heavily on our credibility and independence from short-term political pressures.”

It’s worth asking what might be going on right now if Bernanke had a bit less credibility. Suppose people were anticipating two percent inflation for 2010 probably rising the three or higher in 2011. Well, then it seems to me that prosperous folks (people who are employed in jobs that give them higher-than-average levels of disposable income and who were probably really freaked out six months ago about 401(k) losses and layoffs everywhere, but are feeling secure now that the situation has stabilized) would probably decide that in light of likely rising prices, it probably makes sense to take advantage of the discounts available right now. Maybe this Christmas is the time to upgrade to a Blu-Ray player and a TV with true 1080p display capabilities. Maybe it’s a good time to get the kitchen remodeled. Maybe you get extra generous with your gifts to the kids. After all, stuff is relatively cheap right now thanks to the weak economy, but Bernanke’s got no credibility and prices will be rising soon.

By the same token cash-rich businesses and very wealthy individuals are probably going to say that the super-safe investment vehicles they parked their money in back during the summer/fall of 2008 are suddenly looking not so safe. After all, they’re not safe from the inflation bug and Bernanke’s not credible. So there’s no real choice but to get out of all cash and treasuries and start loaning to businesses again.

Conveniently, what with prosperous folks going on their pre-inflation spending spree, there’s a need to start giving retail sales people more hours. There’s also more employment in transporting goods, in building trades, and to an extent in manufacturing. Business is perking up at the ports. And at the coffee shops and bars near the ports, and the truck stops along the highways. So the unemployment rate is falling, inventories are needing to be restocked, and those business loans are mostly paying off as people need to expand their activities to meet this surge in demand. All those sales fuel state and local tax revenues, so cops are working overtime again and the library is keeping longer hours. That’s more convenient for people, and also more income. Of course inflation is eating away at some of that income. But American households are pretty heavily indebted, so even a mere increase in nominal income makes debt service easier.

Basically, we’re on the road back to prosperity.

The problem, as I’m sure Bernanke would tell you, is that getting onto that road to prosperity by wrecking the credibility of American monetary policy would cause a lot of problems down the road. But the best way to avoid that is not to insist on two more years of grinding near-deflation and sky-high unemployment. The way to avoid that would be for Bernanke to observe that nominal GDP growth is way below its long-run trend and unemployment is ridiculously high and that he’s committed—credibly!—to catching up to trend and returning to something like a normal level of employment.

Americans still enjoy consuming goods and services, and Americans who’ve lost their jobs over the past 18 months—or who’ve left school and can’t find jobs—are just as capable of producing goods and services as they were 18 months ago. It’s absurd for us to be sitting around so blithely accepting of such a large proportion of the population sitting around idle.

Melanie Warner has a piece in the NYT about companies looking to reduce their health care costs by engineering healthier cafeteria items for their employees and the like. Since employees don’t stick around forever, there’s reason to believe this can be made to work. Eat right and exercise and you probably won’t develop any major medical problems until Medicare is picking up the tab. What’s a lot less clear is whether this kind of information saves money overall, since living to 104 in an assisted living facility can be very expensive. But as I was saying yesterday this is probably the wrong way to think about it.

The problem with America’s giant health care expenditures isn’t so much that they’re large per se (though they are) as it is that we don’t seem to be getting that much for our trouble. Investments in healthy lifestyles, by contrast, have pretty modest costs and very large benefits in terms of better health and longer lives. Whether that better health and longer life ultimately results in lower overall costs is an interesting question to pursue, but ultimately public health interventions that buy us a lot of extra high-quality life years at low cost are worth undertaking on their own merits.

The correct worry about high health care spending is that much of what we spend isn’t very useful. Useful spending, however, is good.