David Leonhardt explains the confused public:

The new Times/CBS News poll highlights the problem, by asking more specific questions about taxes and spending than many previous polls have. (See questions 33 through 45 here.) Not surprisingly, when given a straight-up choice between broad spending cuts and tax increases, Americans say they would prefer to reduce the deficit mostly through less spending. It’s not even close: 62 percent for spending cuts, 29 percent for tax increases.

A few questions later, though, our pollsters offered a different choice. Would people rather eliminate Medicare’s shortfall through reduced Medicare benefits or higher taxes?

The percentages then switch, becoming nearly a mirror image of what they had been. Some 64 percent of respondents preferred tax increases, while 24 percent chose Medicare cuts. The same is true of Social Security: 63 percent for higher taxes, 25 percent for reduced benefits.

What I think we ultimately need to see is Universal Medicare rather than Medicare for old people only. But it would be Medicare operating under a global budget and with a dedicated source of tax revenue. People won’t be happy with the rationing that results from the global budget, but they also won’t be happy with the idea of raising the tax rate, and the balance between the two will be a very reasonable thing for political parties to argue about. Personally, I’d favor focusing on catastrophic coverage and preventive services, while leaving routine care up to individuals, but reasonable people will disagree about exactly how many social resources should be devoted to health care overall. Currently, though, the public debate is distorted by widespread misunderstanding of what’s happening (Jeb Hensarling doesn’t help) and by the sharp divergence in how we treat people above and below the age of 65.

Ken Auletta on Google:

Was Eric Schmidt pushed or did he jump? Both. According to close advisors, the Google C.E.O. was upset a year ago when co-founder Larry Page sided with his founding partner, Sergey Brin, to withdraw censored searches from China. Schmidt did not hide his belief that Google should stay in the world’s largest consumer marketplace. It was an indication of the nature of the relationship Schmidt had with the founders that he—as Brian Cashman of the Yankees did this week—acknowledged that the decision was made above his head. He often joked that he provided “adult supervision,” and was never shy about interrupting the founders at meetings to crystallize a point. In the eleven interviews I conducted with him for my book on Google, he freely told anecdotes about the founders, sometimes making gentle fun of them, never seeming to look over his shoulder. Yet he always made clear that they were “geniuses” and he, in effect, was their manager. After a bumpy first couple of years after he joined Google as C.E.O. in 2001, they had developed a remarkable relationship. But also a weird one. How many successful organizations have a troika making decisions?

I guess not that many, but maybe more should. After all, are there are lot of organizations out there that are more successful than Google? Is the one CEO supervised by a large and diffuse Board of Directors model really such a stunning success? There doesn’t seem to be anything obviously wrong with the troika idea other than that it’s unusual. Admittedly in ancient Rome this form of government mostly led to civil wars, but under Roman conditions just about everything seemed to lead to civil wars, right?

I agree with Jon Chait that Jim Kessler from Third Way has hit upon some good advice here about the State of the Union* address:

The President ought to make long term economic growth the theme of his State of the Union. He should declare that with the passage of health care reform, America’s 85-year quest to weave a strong safety net is now complete. From there he would describe a clear, tangible, and compelling destination for the nation – that of American excellence. It is a destination where America has the strongest, most vibrant, and most advanced economy on earth.

This isn’t precisely how I would put it, but Kessler is right about this. When Bill Clinton pronounced that “the era of big government is over” in 1995, he was clearly wrong. And since that time we’ve gotten SCHIP, Medicare started covering prescription drugs, and now we have the Affordable Care Act. So the era of big government wasn’t over in 1995 and it’s not over in 2010, but what is over is the era of big government liberalism. That’s not to say there will be no new changes to health care policy or to education policy or any of the rest of it. But there aren’t any major new fundamental commitments to be undertaken and there isn’t any more money to undertake it with.

Future public policy has to be about ways to maximize sustainable economic growth, and ways to maximize the efficiency with which services are delivered. Right now Medicare is projected to cost more money than Democrats are willing to tax, and yet Republicans are positioning themselves as defenders of the program against the ACA’s insidious cuts. The future of American politics is really about how to square this circle. How to find the revenue in viable ways, and how to streamline these services to maximize value to citizens and minimize rent-seeking. Big government isn’t over, or going away. It’s utterly victorious and yet at its limits.

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One crucial distinction in regional planning is between approaches to commuting that simply look at moving people as far as possible as fast as possible and approaches that look instead at moving people from where they are to where they’re going as fast as possible. For example, consider the Texas Transportation Institute’s new report on congestion in America which lists DC as tied for first for hours wasted in traffic, in the context of how their methodology actually works:

The TTI report narrowly looks at only one factor: how fast traffic moves. Consider two hypothetical cities. In Denseopolis, people live within 2 miles of work on average, but the roads are fairly clogged and drivers can only go about 20 miles per hour. However, it only takes an average of 6 minutes to get to work, which isn’t bad.

On the other hand, in Sprawlville, people live about 30 miles from work on average, but there are lots and lots of fast-moving freeways, so people can drive 60 mph. That means it takes 30 minutes to get to work.

Which city is more congested? By TTI’s methods, it’s Denseopolis. But it’s the people of Sprawlville who spend more time commuting, and thus have less time to be with their families and for recreation.

The point is that if you simply want people to be inside fast-moving vehicles, that will always bias policy toward sprawl. If you make each house sit on a large enough lot and build reasonable wide roads, then traffic will always move very quickly. But it will move quickly in part because everything’s so far away. Living in downtown DC where things are very close together, it’s most practical for me to commute to work via the incredibly slow method of walking. But I love only 0.8 miles from my office, so the trip only takes 10-15 minutes and by any sensible estimation it’s a very pleasant and convenient commute.

Like everyone, I’m a bit puzzled/shocked/distressed by this Keith Olbermann news. It’s not every day a TV network sacks its highest rated host. It had seemed to be the case that Olbermann’s success was leading MSNBC to walk further and further down the road of recognizing that there’s a market niche for progressive cable television programming. Are they now walking away from that?