For an example of what I’m talking about with regards to dumb-as-a-post Representative Mike Pence, watch his answer to the question of what kind of compromise he would propose for health reform:

“Well, look, you know, I was, uh, yeah, yeah, look, uh”

Pence then pivoted away from addressing the issue to a kind of stammering evocation of the idea that the health insurance industry should be completely deregulated under the guise of allowing you to buy insurance across state lines. This, of course, is just a longstanding conservative proposal and not an idea for a compromise. It’s not “if the president would agree to x and y then I’d give him a and b.” On the subject of compromise what he has to offer is “well, look, you know, I was, uh, yeah, yeah, look, uh.”

Unfortunately, Chris Matthews didn’t seem to have the policy chops to dig deeper with Pence on the insurance regulation issue. But this is the point. Right now, health insurance is regulated at the state level. That means that if you want to sell insurance in California, you need to develop an insurance policy that’s compliant with California’s insurance regulations. It might be a better idea to instead regulate health insurance at the federal level, and say that if you want to sell insurance in the United States of America you need to develop an insurance policy that’s complaint with America’s insurance regulations.

Pence’s proposal, however, is that one revenue-hungry state should cut a deal with insurers—move your headquarters’ to Sioux Falls (or just bribe enough state legislators) and we’ll let your lobbyists write whatever lax regulations you like. Then next thing you know everyone is “allowed” to buy this unregulated South Dakota health insurance and no other kind of insurance policies are available. This is what’s been done with the credit card industry and it’s the model that Pence wants to extent to health insurance. Although I doubt he actually wants this to happen, most likely he doesn’t understand the issue at all, and just heard this talking point from a guy who heard it from a guy who got it from a lobbyist who got it from Newt Gingrich 20 years ago.

Gotta find a way:

— How to talk to a MILF.

— Transcript of this afternoon’s presidential beat-down.

— Triangle Transit.

— How to scale up effective charter schools.

— Joe Biden presses for Comprehensive Test Ban ratification.

— Sympathy for the Clinton administration.

— Tony Blair looking shaky.

— Melina Mara’s great photo of Kent Conrad.

Kicking it back to my DOS days with “Territorial Pissing”.

Commenter Ted says there’s a revival of “limits to growth” arguments in the UK, typified by this web video, and wants to know what I think:

I’d say the main issue here is that I don’t think anyone actually denies that there’s some theoretical limit to the possible extent of human aggregate economic growth. The laws of physics and the process of entropy, at a maximum, set some kind of limit on what’s possible. The question is whether there’s some reason to think that actually existing human society is pushing up against the limits to growth in some meaningful way.

I would say the answer is no. People normally think about this in the context of resource-scarcity in the energy sector. Note, however, that the energy intensity of our economy is steadily declining:

And this has been during a period when there’s been no real policy emphasis on improving efficiency and energy has generally been cheap, offering a limited economic rationale for efficiency. Many developed countries are far less energy-intense than the United States even with existing technologies, and over time technology will improve. It’s also the case that we’ve really only begun to exploit the energy-generating potential of solar and wind power, that there’s more that can be done with hydro and geothermal power, and that it’s very logistically possible (albeit expensive) to build more nuclear plants. And of course there’s a lot of coal that could be burned.

Talk of coal, of course, raises the question of whether we’re facing a climate-related cap on growth, rather than one that pertains to running out of resources. But the answer is no. It’s worth emphasizing that most research indicates that the world in 2050 will be richer than the world in 2010 regardless of whether environmentalists or the pollution lobby get their way:

A comprehensive report by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern undertaken on behalf of the UK government documents both the costs of climate change and of options for mitigation and adaptation. The Stern report estimates the cost of a changed climate could be from 5 percent to 20 percent of global GDP. Costs include those related to losses from declining agricultural production, heat-waves, droughts, flooding events, extreme precipitation, biodiversity loss, disease spread, and soil erosion. Conversely, the study estimates that a stabilization at 500-550 ppm CO2equivalent (CO2e, a measure of the contribution of six key greenhouse gases) will cost the global community roughly 1 percent of GDP by 2050. Necessary changes would include decarbonizing 60 percent the power sector. Policies called for in the Stern report include a strong carbon signal through taxes, trading, or regulation, and research and development into low carbon-intensive technologies. In addition, Stern suggests that activities to curtail greenhouse gas emissions will be substantially more expensive if action is delayed rather than initiated in the near future: if we fail to act within the next decade or two, stabilization at 550 ppm CO2e may be too challenging to achieve at all.

The IMF is forecasting 3.9 percent global economic growth for 2010 and 2010 is going to be a bad year. Which is just to say that the overall growth trend ought to swamp either the costs of avoiding a climate catastrophe or even the much higher costs of simply coping with one.

The real risk, both ecological and political, is not that we’ll reach a point in the foreseeable where we “can’t grow” anymore. Rather, there’s a risk of catastrophe. There are real low-probability climate outcomes in which things spiral totally out of control and destroy the world. There’s a risk of nuclear war. There’s a risk of cataclysmic asteroid collision. Things could go very badly wrong. But those aren’t the “limits to growth.” A growing economy isn’t like a giant hamster that eats up more and more food—it can innovate. There is a finite quantity of matter in the universe so there’s got to be some kind of limit out there. But what’s realistically happening right now is that people are (rightly!) concerned about global warming and (rightly!) concerned about the fact that the developed world is in a bad economic situation. These are, however, problems that can be solved, not “limits.”

The Spanish deficit situation is getting real:

Elena Salgado, Spain’s finance minister, said after a cabinet meeting in Madrid that spending cuts, tax rises and a return to economic growth would cut the deficit from a higher-than-predicted 11.4 per cent of gross domestic product in 2009 to 3 per cent in 2013, in line with Spain’s promises to meet EU budget rules.

To protect the long-term health of the social security system, which is currently in surplus, Spain also increased the retirement age from 65 to 67, a measure that will be introduced gradually from 2013.

Think about this when you read David Brooks say that Barack Obama should run around the country making deficit reduction his top priority. Does Brooks think that cutting Medicare is popular? That raising taxes is popular? That fighting with generals about defense cuts would be popular? A higher retirement age? All this stuff is unpopular and doing it all simultaneously is super-unpopular. Spain appears to have reached the crisis point where there’s genuinely no choice, so away they go. We should consider ourselves lucky that we’re not there yet and focus on trying to get as much economic growth as we can in the short-term. With luck, we’ll be able to tackle the deficit in a post-recession environment and avoid the sort of catastrophic depression that Spain’s going to be looking at.