Last December I took note of Steve Coll’s argument that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is the great underrated statesman of our time. If he manages to hold firm in his campaign against dirty energy subsidies that’ll be another chapter in building the case:

Indian cities limped back to life after a nationwide strike over fuel prices grounded flights, shut offices and triggered sporadic violence, forcing the government to defend cuts to subsidies that had protected the poor.

The main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and communist parties, which independently called nationwide 12-hour stoppages until 6 p.m., said the stoppage has been a success as truckers, shopkeepers and government workers backed them to protest Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s June 25 decision to stop subsidizing gasoline and diesel, a move to reduce spending that spurred the budget deficit to a 16-year high.

Subsidies of this sort are all-too-common around the world but especially in developing nations. And while it’s true that it’s relatively more difficult for poor people to adapt to any kind of change, that’s simply because everything is harder for the poor. The distributive impact of gasoline subsidies in a country like India where most people are too poor to afford a car is clearly regressive. And in any country at any state of development you could always cancel costly dirty energy subsidies and plow some of the savings into targeted financial assistance for poor people. In the long run, subsidizing pollution only hurts economic growth while damaging air quality and public health.

The knowledge that we’ll likely be facing an NBA lockout soon premised on the idea that the league’s owners can’t afford to keep paying their players so much makes it especially hard to look at some of the crazy deals that those very same owners hand out voluntarity. To wit, the Atlanta Hawks want to pay Joe Johnson $119 million over six years.

Johnson is a prototypical overrated NBA player. A perimeter scorer on a middling team who takes a lot of shots and therefore scores a lot without being notably efficient at it or notable good at any other aspect of the game. He’s not a bad player. In fact, he’s a good one. But he’s not great. And at his current age, the odds are that Atlanta is purchasing a declining asset. What’s odder is that nobody seems to deny this. Nobody thinks Johnson is going to improve. Nobody thinks Johnson is one of the top ten players in the game. Nobody thinks “Joe Johnson plus guys who are worse than Joe Johnson” sounds like a recipe for a championship.

This report from Pew on how the recession has changed life in America has a bunch of interesting data. This survey question capturing the broader impact of the recession on the labor market is definitely worth pondering:

I recall having read that during the Great Depression of the 1930s, those workers who didn’t lose their jobs actually wound up experiencing rising living standards thanks to price deflation. Here we seem to see a labor market that, for better or for worse, is more capable of spreading the pain and inflicting damage on the economic interests of the employed.

Congress has acted to ban “earmarks” designed to benefit for-profit companies, but as Eric Lipton and Ron Nixon report for the NYT this ban turns out to be relatively easy to evade.

Which I think only returns us to the point that this is a somewhat silly area for political reformers to emphasize. If you have geographically based constituencies each represented by a single member, and a system of entrepreneurial politicians who are supposed to raise their own money, and you have relatively weak party discipline, then you’re going to have members of congress acting in support of idiosyncratic local interests. That’s baked into the cake of the system. Indeed, it’s the main thing people like about the political system—members of congress are highly responsive to local interests. Personally, I think that’s overrated and America would be better served by more systemic reform of how congress works. But earmarks are just a very small and relatively benign symptom of a system of decentralized political authority.

Via Kevin Drum, an LA Times article that once again makes the point that we’re facing a crisis of demand—small businesses say they have access to credit but can’t expand because they don’t have any customers.

Drum comments, “Until consumers start spending again, economic growth is going to be weak. But what’s going to get consumers spending again?”

I don’t think this is brain surgery. If currently unemployed people had more cash in their pocket because—for example—the government hired them to do a job, then they’d probably spend more. If the federal government offered financial support for mass transit operations, then bus fares would be lower and consumers could spend more. If we did general state and local fiscal relief then taxes would be lower and consumers could spend more. If the Fed acted to raise short- and medium-term inflation expectations, then consumers would be inclined to spend more and businesses would be more inclined to undertake risky expansion projects. Ten percent unemployment is a fixable problem. I think it’s an open question as to whether these tools would become ineffective at 6 percent or 7 percent or 8 percent, but we could definitely make major progress.