As Scott Lemieux says, one of the odder arguments against the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act is the argument that if the federal government has the authority to fine people for not buying health insurance as part of a comprehensive insurance regulation scheme, then there are no limits on federal power.

If anything, I think this is silly on a deeper level than Lemieux suggests. For example, suppose congress passed a law saying “selling books across state lines that criticize US policy in Afghanistan” is illegal. Well, they couldn’t do that notwithstanding the clearly interstate and commercial nature of the activity in question. That’s because there are sharp limits on congress’ authority to restrict freedom of expression and that authority is maximally limited when the expression at issue is political in nature. Similarly, an “individual mandate” for jurors to pay a fine if they rule against the prosecution in a criminal proceeding would be unconstitutional. It’s not difficult to think of limits to congress’ authority to regulate the national economy.

The real issue here is the longstanding dispute over whether or not congress has the authority to regulate the national economy. For the past 75 years or so that’s been the practice, and it was the practice in the Early Republic. It’s certainly true that at times in the 19th century the Supreme Court took a different view of the question, and then since the New Deal a dissident minority has criticized this practice. And it’s certainly true that the authority to regulate the national economy is a lot of authority. But it’s clearly not unlimited authority. Many ACA critics seem to want to hold the view that the law is unconstitutional without committing themselves to wholesale rollback of congressional authority to regulate the national economy. But it would be exceedingly strange to argue that Congress does have authority to regulate the national economy but is limited in the methods by which it can do this and that those limitations aren’t the ones written down in prior caselaw but instead are just ones ginned up ad hoc to rule a single law out of bounds.

Michael Cohen has a piece in The Atlantic arguing that the death of Osama bin Laden will put paid to the notion that Democrats are somehow “weak” on national security issues.

I’m much closer to Ben Adler’s pre-rebuttal of this idea which argues that it’s really all about rhetoric and identity politics, but I’d sort of go even further than this. The basic asymmetry is that Republicans are the party of America’s white Christian ethno-cultural mainstream. Of course atheists, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists complain when someone says “America is a Christian country” but the claim at least parses correctly. We all know what that means. And we know why it is that “minorities” is a word that also means “people substantially descended from non-Europeans. The definition of authentic mainstream Americanness has shifted over time in our history (it now clearly includes Catholics in a way that it didn’t 100 years ago) and will continue to shift in the future. But the party of the mainstream has a clear and obvious edge in seizing the mantle of American nationalism, and thereby “toughness.”

(cc photo by simon_music)

Ryan Avent and Kevin Drum say it’s not the economics that making can-kicking the Greece problem impossible, it’s the politics. I agree that the politics is what’s important here, but I think this is exactly what makes can-kicking so attractive.

Henry Farrell outlines the state of play:

So my worry is straightforward. Greece is not so big a problem that it cannot be kicked down the road by the Europeans indefinitely. So too, Ireland and Portugal, and perhaps even (with more straining) Spain. But the specific manner in which the can is being kicked down the road has consequences for European legitimacy. Greeks, Portuguese and Irish people don’t like being at the sharp end of imposed austerity. They have obvious villains to blame for it – the EU (in particular the ECB and the Commission) and the ‘Germans.’ But Germans, Dutch people etc don’t have much reason to like the EU these days either. For them, it is associated with a giant sucking noise pulling frugal German taxpayers’ savings into the gaping maw of Greek pensioners. Neither those on the receiving or those on the giving end of current policies is very happy. And both have good reason to associate their unhappiness with the EU. And the EU does not have much legitimacy to spare in any event.

This, however, is precisely the genius of the status quo. Greeks are unhappy with what’s happening, but Greeks would be unhappy with the results of a default too. Kicking the can lets Greek politicians try to put blame on the shoulders of the (vicious and cruel) German government and “the EU.” Meanwhile, Germans are unhappy with what’s happening, but Germans would be unhappy with the results of a default too. Kicking the can lets German politicians try to put the blame on the shoulders of the (indolent and corrupt) Greek government and “the EU.” This is the dominant strategy for everyone involved except for “the EU” but “the EU” turns out to not really be anything that’s accountable to anyone.

So I say: The can will be kicked, people will try to muddle through, and the ECB should (but won’t) try to help (a little) with higher inflation.

There’s really not much out there that’s more annoying than the burgeoning genre of articles about food stamp recipients living high on the SNAP lifestyle or condescendingly informing people that they could be doing a better job of allocating their scarce SNAP dollars. So absolutely give Latoya Peterson’s righteous indignation a good read before coming back here for some technocratic musings.

The basic problem with SNAP, as with much of American public policy, is that we’re simultaneously trying to do public service delivery and income redistribution.

Food is really cheap in the United States of America. A family looking to sustain itself in a healthy manner can do so at extremely low cost through bulk purchases of dried beans, rolled oats, frozen vegetables, rice, and fruit juice. A program that was really narrowly aimed at preventing malnutrition among low-income Americans could be both extremely low cost and extremely prescriptive.

A separate issue is that being poor is a sucky experience as witnessed by, say, my proposed diet of bulk purchases of dried beans, rolled oats, frozen vegetables, rice, and fruit juice. By taking money away from people who have lots of money and giving it to people who have very little money, it is possible to effectuate large increases in the quality of life of poor people while doing extremely little to reduce the quality of life of the rich people. But when the point is to improve quality of life, a prescriptive attitude is pointless. Fun is often “bad for you” and different people’s tastes differ. The correct thing to give people in order to make their loves more fun is money. People with more money in their pocket might want to spend it on Fritos or Perrier or a cell phone or beer or an Egg McMuffin or shoes or video games or movie tickets or whatever.

But American political culture is generally hostile to the idea of improving poor people’s lives by giving them more money. So you wind up with a lot of things like SNAP. Viewed very narrowly as a nutrition program, it’s not that well targeted and it costs more than it needs to. But viewed from the point of view of the overall quality of life of low-income Americans it’s incredibly stingy.