Kevin Drum looks at the new NAEP reading scores and says they’re doing about the same as ever:

When it comes to education, though, it’s always worth peering into the demographics, since socioeconomic factors are so important to student achievement. It looks to me that black eight graders are reading somewhat better. And so are hispanic eighth graders. White eighth graders look to have plateaued since 2002, but improved a lot in 1992-2002. And scores for Asian American eighth graders are also up. Low income kids seem to be doing a bit better.

So I think what’s happening is that we’re actually seeing modest achievements that are being masked by a growing proportion of minority or poor students in the sample. Black kids, Latino kids, and poor kids have all long done worse than white kids or middle class kids. But the performance of the education system is best judged with some kind of demographic controls in place. One way or the other, however, any change taking place is pretty modest.

The US and Russia appear to have reached an agreement on an important new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (START). Such an accord promises to save money for both countries, reduce the risk of a horrible nuclear accident, and restore the credibility of the international nonproliferation regime just as the challenge from Iran makes cear the need for reinvigoration. But as Max Bergmann writes, though the basic framework for the accord used to command wide bipartisan support, today the hard-right seems to have a lot of sway over the Senate:

Despite this treaty having extensive bi-partisan support among senior foreign policy officials – such as George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, Richard Lugar (R-IN), Colin Powell –ratification is far from assured. There are real questions over whether the Senate GOP will seek to obstruct the ratification of the treaty. Treaties require a two-thirds majority, therefore eight or nine Republican votes are needed to ratify this treaty. If the Senate GOP wants to kill it they can. Therefore if ratification becomes a fight – it will not be a fight between Republicans and Obama, it will be a fight within the Republican caucus – between moderates and the far right.

In a sign of how extreme the GOP Senate leadership has become, Bloomberg reported, following word the treaty was done, that “Senate Republicans would object to linkages similar to the one in the 1991 treaty.” In other words, what was acceptable to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, would not be acceptable to Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ).

The only objection that Kyl’s staff could come up with is that the treaty contains irrelevant and entirely symbolic line about missile defense in the preamble to the treaty. Ryan Patmintra, a spokesman for Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, went on the record, insisting that “unilateral declarations that the Russian Federation could use as leverage against you or your successors when U.S. missile defense decisions are made.”

Realistically, your average Senator doesn’t give a fig about nuclear arms control, so this will likely come down to raw politics. If people feel that the “obstruct everything all the time” strategy has paid off, then they’ll side with Kyl. If they feel it’s been counterproductive or problematic, they’ll side with Lugar.

I said the other day that I thought the focus of progressive politics is now set to shift away from expansions in the size of the welfare state. Julian Sanchez raised some doubts about this:

It seems at least as likely that, consistent with the historical pattern, the new status quo will simply be redefined as the “center,” and proposals to further augment the welfare state will move from the fringe to the mainstream of opinion on the left.

Similarly, Eddy Elfenbein writes:

Matthew is basically taking on Wagner’s Law which says that the size of government in a modern industrial state will continue to grow as a share of the economy. Perhaps there’s a Scandinavian upper limit of around 60%. If so, then we’ve still got a long way to go.

So for starters, I think it’s important to see that there does seem to be a limit to Wagner’s Law, as evidenced by the highest tax countries in the developed world. Here’s the OECD numbers on tax revenue as a percent of GDP in Sweden, Finland, France, Denmark, and Belgium, the most-taxed countries in the world:

Basically, it seems to me that jurisdictions that, unlike the United States, don’t have a lot of ideological taboos about taxes and big government already explored this landscape for us. Taxes can be higher than they were under George W Bush. They can be higher than they were under Bill Clinton. But they do reach a point where the impact of growth is a problem, and even tax-friendly political cultures turn around and level off even though these countries are coping with aging populations and rising health care costs. US tax levels are well below what we’re looking at here. But via Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, we have a bunch of tax hikes implicitly programmed into our existing social welfare programs. At the same time, as is frequently noted the Scandinavian countries have a different and probably more efficient tax system than what we use in the United States.

So, again, I think that when the dust clears of this health care fight we’ll find that progressives have important causes that aren’t about the size of the welfare state (climate change, marriage equality, etc.) and also that we’ll see more fighting over the design of existing programs and the share of tax revenue allocated to different constituencies.