My colleague Matt Duss finds David Broder arguing that “as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war [with Iran], the economy will improve”. I had sort of considered writing a satirical piece along these lines, though my proposed plan of attack was going to be join US-EU military operations against Canada and Norway.

At any rate, Broder is kind of enough to observe the questionable moral logic here and hastens to add “I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected.” The economics, however, is questionable. It’s true that a net increase in government purchases would increase economic growth. But as Dean Baker notes one hardly needs a war to produce a net increase in government purchases: “If spending on war can provide jobs and lift the economy then so can spending on roads, weatherizing homes, or educating our kids.” The point is that anything that mobilizes real resources will fight idleness and unemployment. What’s wanted, however, is to mobilize real resources in order to do something useful.

One should also consider the very real possibility that war with Iran would lead to a depression inducing supply-side shock through a spike in energy prices. Even worse, war is bad for children and other living things! An alternative military stimulus would just involve doing the stepped-up military purchases but then doing absolutely nothing with the new equipment and personnel. That would have the same economic impact, but nobody would need to die.

And to say a bit more about WikiLeaks, I think that absolutely the most valuable thing the latest document dump has done is provoke so many responses along the lines of “there’s nothing new here.”

That raises the obvious question: if there’s nothing new here, then why on earth was this all classified?

Whatever Assange’s subjective overall goals are, one thing he’s demonstrating beyond all possible doubt is that there’s an overwhelming tendency toward overclassification in the US military. I haven’t seen anyone even attempt to assert that literally every single document Assange is released contains life-threatening secrets. They don’t attempt to do so because the charge is laughable. And yet, there’s the United States military. You and I pay for it with our tax dollars. They go around the world purporting to represent us and to act in our names. We’re entitled, in my view, to see their work product. Obviously some degree of military secrecy is necessary, but it’s clearly much less than the degree we’ve now got. Instead a lot of stuff seems to be kept classified merely because it’s convenient to stamp everything that way, or else because sparing the citizens the gory details of war is better for home front morale. Or something.

It’s a bit pedantic, but let me join James Fallows in noting that the idea that the US government should deem Julian Assange guilty of “treason” necessarily falters on the fact that Assange is not an American. If he’s a traitor to any country, it would have to be Australia.

Of course that’s neither here nor there as to the core issues, but it’s a window in the carelessly and slipshod thinking that many of Assange’s critics are engaged in.

I’m not surprised to see a correlation between white voters’ inclination to vote for Democrats and white voters’ inclination to say interracial dating is okay, but Michael Tesler observes that the correlation is sharply up today relative to four years ago:

Obviously John Boehner isn’t going to ban interracial dating, and Nancy Pelosi isn’t going to force your daughter to go out with a black guy. One possibility is that the election of Barack Obama has suddenly made irrelevant racial considerations more salient. But my hypothesis would be that we’re seeing the link between economic distress and xenophobia, the same thing that’s driving so many anti-Chinese themes in midterm advertising.