Bishop Juan Antonio Reig Pla

The International Federation of Catholic Doctors Associations has issued a statement criticizing the government for failing to curtail sex-trafficking and sex-education, noting that the Bishop was merely offering “a prudent caution against unhealthy practices“:

“Catholic doctors profoundly lament the failure of modern states and of public international institution to combat ‘sexual tourism,’ involving adults or children,” the association said in its statement.

They also joined the bishop in denouncing “the contents of some textbooks,” especially those used in Spain’s recently axed Education for the Citizenry course, which encouraged children “to ‘explore’ all areas of sexuality.” “We are right in every way to consider these lessons perverse,” the doctors said, “And Bishop Reig is right in every way to condemn these and other abuses of the human being.”

Spain is highly progressive when it comes to LGBT rights, allowing same-sex couples to marry and adopt children. Gays people are allowed to serve openly in the military and are protected from discrimination in employment, the provision of goods and services, and other areas.

CNN had a good piece this weekend looking at how the plant works. It’s worth a watch:

Related Post: “Concentrated solar thermal power — a core climate solution“

What we’re seeing is that a political agenda is being advanced instead of a scientific agenda, and this is leading to massive numbers of jobs being lost. The president told us he wanted to be like Spain when it came to green job creation, and yet Spain has one of the highest levels of unemployment. The president is bringing that here in the United States. And I think tomorrow night, when the nation tunes in to the president, I’m afraid that we won’t be seeing permanent solution. I’m afraid what we’ll be seeing are temporary gimmicks and more of the same that he’s given before.

Watch it:

Bachmann was referencing an Exxon-funded 2009 report about Spain’s renewable energy investments that made the false claim that every new green job destroyed two other jobs. The paper, published by the right-wing think tank Instituto Juan de Mariana, was thoroughly debunked in 2009. Even the regional Spanish government disputed the bad numbers the report’s author used.

It is not too surprising that Bachmann ignores the real numbers about jobs created from renewable energy compared to jobs created by fossil fuels. In fact, green investments create more jobs. A recent Brookings study found that the green economy sector is larger than the fossil fuel sector, and that clean energy sector in particular grew by 8.3 percent between 2003 and 2010, nearly twice as fast as the overall economy.

Should Spain try to break out of this trap by leaving the euro, and re-establishing its own currency? Will it? The answer to both questions is, probably not. Spain would be better off now if it had never adopted the euro — but trying to leave would create a huge banking crisis, as depositors raced to move their money elsewhere. Unless there’s a catastrophic bank crisis anyway — which seems plausible for Greece and increasingly possible in Ireland, but unlikely though not impossible for Spain — it’s hard to see any Spanish government taking the risk of “de-euroizing.”

I suppose one issue is this: Having read this column, if I had a Spanish bank account I’d now be looking for feasible ways to minimize the amount of funds in it. And once everyone starts hedging against a bank run, your bank run is under way.

The larger question posed here is whether it really makes sense to be running separate national banking systems parallel to a single continent-wide monetary authority. A regulatory system that works fine until there’s a problem doesn’t really work at all.

Since taking office in 2004, Spain’s Socialist Party led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has wracked up an impressive array of achievements firmly putting his stamp on the country as the man who decisively led Spain out of Franco’s shadow. And yet his party’s now very unpopular and would get its butt kicked in an election:

Spain’s conservative Popular Party (PP) has widened its lead over the governing Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), according to a poll by NC Report published in La Razón. 45.2 per cent of respondents would vote for the PP in the next legislative election, up 1.6 points since March.

The PSOE is second with 35.8 per cent. 19 per cent of respondents would vote for other parties.

Are we going to start seeing articles in the American press about the “Zapatero Paradox”? Of course not! Everyone understands—and indeed the linked article emphasizes—that the PSOE is in trouble because Spain’s economy is in terrible shape. And in this case, I really do feel bad for Zapatero and the PSOE since the structure of European political institutions means that in practice there’s very little they can do to improve the situation.

If Spain were an American state (call it “Florida”) then the collapse of its economy would spur large net fiscal transfers that help bolster and stabilize its economy. What’s more, the labor market linkages between Spain and other states would be pretty tight, letting people move from place to place. Consequently, in the US all the regions of the country are pretty closely packed on the 45 degree line.

Alternatively, if Spain were an independent country, then the collapse of its economy would spur massive devaluation. Everyone would get suddenly poorer and less able to buy imported goods. But tourists from Germany and the Netherlands would flock in to pick up good deals, Spanish wine sales would boom, and I might be able to afford some jamón ibérico de bellota.

Instead, Spain is having its monetary policy set basically according to Germany preferences and German needs even though conditions are very different. And fiscal transfers won’t be forthcoming. Some people tweeted back at me that the Spanish government is doing an okay job of destroying its economy on its own. But it really isn’t. Before the crash, the Spanish government was running budget surpluses. And it’s simply not possible for your economy to prosper if your monetary policy is set by people who aren’t even trying to create conditions that are appropriate for growth.

Royal Palace, Madrid, Spain (my photo, available under cc license)

Austerity not working out so well for Spain:

Fears of deflation in Spain and renewed concerns that tough new austerity measures across Europe would damp growth spooked investors in the region on Friday, sending the euro to new 18-month lows, share markets tumbling and gold to a new high. [...]

Core consumer prices in Spain, excluding energy and fresh food, fell 0.1 per cent from a year earlier, the National Statistics Institute in Madrid announced on Friday. The surprise fall, following a 0.2 per cent rise in March, marked the first annual decline in data going back to 1986.

Fears that deflation would exacerbate Spain’s debt problems sent financials sharply lower, with the European banking sector down 3.4 per cent in early trade led by Société Générale in France, down 5.9 per cent.

I don’t mean to deny the need for some governments to get their budget situations under control including, in the medium-term, the United States. But across the world, this only works if monetary authorities are taking vigorous measures to ensure growth and combat inflation. Economies don’t function without people, firms, and governments taking on debts. And debts—public debts, consumer debts, corporate debts, etc.—can’t be repaid if there’s not enough growth. I keep hearing that central banks are on the verge of losing their credibility as inflation fighters, but people should look at what’s actually going on. Nothing in the economy that would occur if there were inflation expectations is happening. Instead, you’re seeing the consequences of a belief that the future will hold anemic growth and flat-to-falling prices.

US policy in this regard isn’t all it could be, but it’s much better than European or Japanese policy and consequently we’re going to do much better.

I think it’s obvious that letting southern European governments collapse into insolvency would be bad for the world. But the larger issue is that while Greece combines irresponsible budgeting with a bad growth outlook, even countries like Spain whose budgeting is perfectly sound are going to collapse if they can’t grow. And they can’t grow unless they have appropriate monetary policy. So as Paul Krugman says the monetary aspects of the new European rescue plan are probably the most important part:

Announcement #2, from the ECB, changes things somewhat. It now seems that Trichet has been dragged kicking and screaming into becoming at least a semi-Bernanke, engaging in much more expansionary policies than before. (Yes, the ECB says that they’re only liquidity operations, and will be sterilized, yada yada — we can only hope that they don’t really mean it.)

A more expansionary monetary policy could make a real difference — especially if the ECB ends up accepting somewhat higher inflation. Suppose that Speece or Grain need to get relative prices down 15 percent over the next five years. If the eurozone has 1 percent inflation, that’s 10 percent deflation in the periphery. If the eurozone has 3 percent inflation, all you need is stable prices. Also, a stronger overall eurozone economy means higher GDP and hence higher revenue, making the fiscal slog less grim.

Unfortunately, my sense is that Trichet probably does “really mean it.” What’s more, the fact that its resolve is being called into question means the European Central Bank may feel compelled to err even more on the side of low-inflation, low nominal GDP growth policies.

(cc photo by simon_music)

Republicans caved on filibustering the motion to open debate on the financial regulation bill, so we’ll see what happens with that. The more important story continues to be the Greek debt crisis and the possible meltdown of European monetary institutions. Paul Krugman writes that he used to think leaving the Euro was impossible because it would cause massive bank runs, but that if Greece defaults and starts seeing massive bank runs anyway then leaving the Euro starts to look as possible as anything else.

Certainly my amateur opinion is that if a country can leave the Euro without that prompting a disaster (even if the only reason that’s possible is that a disaster is already under way), then that would look pretty compelling to me. The Euro is a questionable idea in economic theory, but it’s actually proven to be a worse idea in practice. Rather than try to run monetary policy that would be suitable for the median European economy, the European Central Bank has insisted on trying to run monetary policy that would be suitable for Germany. And not even suitable for Germany in general, but “suitable for Germany according to hard money fanatics.” That’s probably bad for Germany, but there’s certainly no reason to think it’s appropriate for southern Europe. Consequently, we’ve seen deflationary bias from the ECB for years and as Nick Rowe points out the ECB is likely to respond to this crisis with measures that prompt further disinflation.

This is a real human disaster for almost everyone involved, but never fear because one senior European monetary official once assured me that the purpose of central bank independence is that it gives him freedom to fight inflation “regardless of the human cost.” It’s true that Greece’s fiscal situation would be unsustainable regardless of monetary policy, but it’s also true that being subjected to Frankfurt’s monetary policy preferences make balanced growth in Southern Europe impossible regardless of fiscal policy. You just need to look at Spain, which pre-crisis was running a surplus with a low debt-GDP ratio:

But despite having done everything that’s now being urged on Greece, Spain is totally screwed. People like to see pat morality tales in macroeconomic events, so that today’s problem countries are being punished for past irresponsibility. But there’s honestly little reason to see that as a major part of the story. Worse than a crime, we’re looking at a mistake. A mistake for which a very large number of people around the world may wind up paying the price.

So what happened? Spain is an object lesson in the problems of having monetary union without fiscal and labor market integration. First, there was a huge boom in Spain, largely driven by a housing bubble — and financed by capital outflows from Germany. This boom pulled up Spanish wages. Then the bubble burst, leaving Spanish labor overpriced relative to Germany and France, and precipitating a surge in unemployment. It also led to large Spanish budget deficits, mainly because of collapsing revenue but also due to efforts to limit the rise in unemployment.

If Spain had its own currency, this would be a good time to devalue; but it doesn’t.

Alternatively, if the EU were like a real country, then funds would be flowing into Spain from other parts of the union, the way that taxpayers all across the country are sending Social Security and Medicare and Recovery Act funds to Florida.

This sorry situation strikes me as just another example of the accountability free zone the international elite has created for itself. Obviously something like a monetary union is going to be an elite-driven project. Which isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world, but it means that when it doesn’t work out there should be some kind of . . . something . . . from the people in charge. But you don’t hear any hint from the European Central Bank officials that maybe this mass suffering in Southern Europe is the consequence of some flawed thinking out of Brussels and Frankfurt. Instead all you hear are lectures about the need for austerity. The fact of the matter is that the lecturers are right—southern Europe does need austerity. The brunt of the suffering for this error will be borne by the unemployment, and solving the problem will require cutbacks by Spanish pensioners, schoolteachers, cops, and all the rest. But the responsibility for the problems lies elsewhere.

Elena Salgado, Spain’s finance minister, said after a cabinet meeting in Madrid that spending cuts, tax rises and a return to economic growth would cut the deficit from a higher-than-predicted 11.4 per cent of gross domestic product in 2009 to 3 per cent in 2013, in line with Spain’s promises to meet EU budget rules.

To protect the long-term health of the social security system, which is currently in surplus, Spain also increased the retirement age from 65 to 67, a measure that will be introduced gradually from 2013.

Think about this when you read David Brooks say that Barack Obama should run around the country making deficit reduction his top priority. Does Brooks think that cutting Medicare is popular? That raising taxes is popular? That fighting with generals about defense cuts would be popular? A higher retirement age? All this stuff is unpopular and doing it all simultaneously is super-unpopular. Spain appears to have reached the crisis point where there’s genuinely no choice, so away they go. We should consider ourselves lucky that we’re not there yet and focus on trying to get as much economic growth as we can in the short-term. With luck, we’ll be able to tackle the deficit in a post-recession environment and avoid the sort of catastrophic depression that Spain’s going to be looking at.

This leaves peripheral countries in a trap: they cannot readily generate an external surplus; they cannot easily restart private sector borrowing; and they cannot easily sustain present fiscal deficits. Mass emigration would be a possibility, but surely not a recommendation. Mass immigration of wealthy foreigners, to live in now-cheap properties, would be far better. Yet, at worst, a lengthy slump might be needed to grind out a reduction in nominal prices and wages. Ireland seems to have accepted such a future. Spain and Greece have not. Moreover, the affected country would also suffer debt deflation: with falling nominal prices and wages, the real burden of debt denominated in euros will rise. A wave of defaults – private and even public – threaten.

If the European Union were a country, it’d be a country in pretty good shape. Better shape than the United States in many ways. But it’s not a country. And it’s not a nation. People don’t move around the way they do inside a country. So it can’t adjust to shocks in the way that a country would. This risk was known when the Euro was created, and the bet was basically made that there wouldn’t be a giant crisis. Or at any rate that if one did come down the road it might be far enough in the future for Europe to become a much deeper form of union. But the bet’s not paying of.

As Bobby Peirce points out at Foreign Policy, this wound up taking the Spanish press by surprise since over there they take the privacy of the family thing super-seriously and the public had never before seen photos of Zapatero’s daughters.

That’s mostly just a funny story, but it is worth recalling that this whole incident could have been avoided had America elected John McCain last November since he promised to continue the Bush administration’s insane policy of snubbing Zapatero. No meeting, no photo snafu. Except, again, refusing to meet with the head of government of a NATO ally in good standing was nuts.

Scott Horton reports that the wheels of justice continue to move forward in Spain:

Spanish prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo, several reliable sources close to the investigation have told The Daily Beast. Their decision is expected to be announced on Tuesday before the Spanish central criminal court, the Audencia Nacional, in Madrid. [...]

But prosecutors will also ask that Judge Garzón, an internationally known figure due to his management of the case against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and other high-profile cases, step aside. The case originally came to Garzón because he presided over efforts to bring terrorism charges against the five Spaniards previously held at Guantánamo. Spanish prosecutors consider it “awkward” for the same judge to have both the case against former U.S. officials based on the possible torture of the five Spaniards at Guantánamo and the case against those very same Spaniards. A source close to the prosecution also noted that there was concern about the reaction to the case in some parts of the U.S. media, where it had been viewed, incorrectly, as a sort of personal frolic of Judge Garzón. Instead, the prosecutors will ask Garzón to transfer the case to Judge Ismail Moreno, who is currently handling an investigation into kidnapping charges surrounding the CIA’s use of facilities as a safe harbor in connection with the seizure of Khalid el-Masri, a German greengrocer who was seized and held at various CIA blacksites for about half a year as a result of mistaken identity.

I’m glad to see this happen, as I think the Spanish tradition of moving aggressively to find rationales to prosecute violators of international humanitarian law has had a good impact on the world. But as Hilzoy says, it’s a bit ridiculous that we can’t have this investigation in the United States. Torture is illegal in the United States, and we have obligations under treaties we’ve signed to investigate and prosecute cases of torture. Besides which, there’s no reason the scope of investigations should be arbitrarily limited to cases that have a Spanish angle.

Recall that Bush administration officials have stated, in public, that they have ordered waterboarding. And waterboarding has traditionally held to be torture by both the United States government and international law. The defense has several arguments to make on its behalf. One is that tradition is mistaken, and waterboarding isn’t really torture because it doesn’t lead to permanent organ damage. Another is that the illegality of torture is a sham, because neither congress nor international treaties can bind the president’s inherent power to torture. A third is some kind of exigent circumstances defense related to ticking time bombs or some such. I don’t, personally, take any of those arguments very seriously.

But a lot of people blogging for National Review or on talk radio seem to. And they deserve to have their day in court, to be put before a judge and a jury so we can have a proper decision about what is and isn’t illegal in the United States. Instead this issue has kind of lingered in the political chattering classes where if you say that the “extreme interrogations” were wise and good you count as a proper conservative motivated by Christian values while if you rant on about torture and international law you’re fitted for a tinfoil hat, and the sober-minded and sensible position is to be hand-wavingly against both torture and the investigation of torture. Thus, it all winds up in the hands of the Spanish, which is nuts.

Sometimes the publishing house PR people do a good job of deciding who needs review copies of what, and thus I recently opened up a package to discover My Kind of Transit My Kind of Transit: Rethinking Public Transportation in America. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but in the interests of rewarding those who send me books I’m actually interested in, why not offer you some PR copy:

In America’s car-dominated landscape, public transit has long played second fiddle, but rising gasoline prices and the global warming crisis point to a need for alternative means of transportation. Darrin Nordahl sets the stage for these efforts by proposing that the experience of public transit and the quality of the ride are pivotal to the success of public transit.

My Kind of Transit explores America’s most beloved transit systems and how they work. From San Francisco’s cable cars to Pittsburgh’s funiculars to the streetcars of New Orleans, Nordahl recounts a transportation history of both short-sighted planning and visionary policies, and reveals that current American transit systems contain many key elements for successfully expanding public transport. My Kind of Transit explains the characteristics of ideal transit, or “passenger enrichment,” such as transit vehicles that offer views of the surrounding landscape and systems that enable diverse peoples to interact.

Successful public transport must be a uniquely enjoyable experience for riders, My Kind of Transit contends, and it offers a new vision of civic engagement that occurs when we step out of our cars and onto the train.

At first glance, I do think that this sort of issue is oftentimes under-appreciated. Streetcar systems have some substantial advantages over buses. But I don’t think that reciting those advantages, in a technical sense, fully captures the difference. Something like the Barcelona Tram is cool and futuristic, and the MetroBus in DC is not. On some level, it’s just impossible for a bus to replicate that—no bus can ever be as quiet or smooth. But DC’s Circulator bus actually does a pretty good job of capturing some of that “cool and futuristic” appeal while running alongside WMATA’s generally unappealing main bus service.

As I was just over there recently, this post on Spain where the recession is extremely bad due to enormous dependence on tourism and the construction center (it’s the Florida of Europe) is biting employment deeply.

One of the first things you encounter when you read personal finance gurus like Dave Ramsey or Suze Orman is the concept of the “latte factor”–the surprising way that little luxury purchases add up. A Starbucks latte a day is well over $1000 a year, which sounds less like an “affordable luxury” than a sizeable chunk of after-tax income for many, even most, of the people who buy them. When Dunkin Donuts is selling for less, and your office is giving it away for free, it seems like a relatively painless way to shore up your finances.

Probably. The real reason I quoted that, though, was that ever since I realized that the Dunkin Donuts outlets that are surprisingly ubiquitous in Barcelona are branded as “Dunkin Coffee” I’ve been waiting for a pretext to blog about this fact:

For whatever reason, I find the subtle differences embedded within the uniformity of fast food chains sort of fascinating.

The guest bloggers are doing great work, but seem unfamiliar with the idea that the blog looks better when some images are put into the posts. Hence, a photo of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia church:

Cool building. My guess is that this kind of construction wouldn’t meet the land use regulations of your typical city—such tall spires, and no underground parking!—and yet how many cities would actually be worse off if they featured a landmark work of architecture?

By Matthew Yglesias

The Spanish economy is hurting in a bad way amidst the global recession. I won’t try to pretend to have a particular deep grasp of the situation, but while the whole world is doing poorly right now Spain is doing especially badly — it’s a bit akin to the Florida of Europe, they grow citrus fruit and they had a ridiculous property bubble and now the economy’s in the toilet:

In barely a year, Spain has gone from creating a third of Europe’s new jobs to losing 40,000 a week as its decade-long housing bonanza collapsed at the same time as the global credit crisis. Spain’s jobless rate rose from 8.7 per cent to 14.4 per cent in 2008, a far bigger jump than elsewhere in the European Union. On average EU unemployment levels rose from 6.8 per cent to 7.4 per cent. Already 3.2 million people are out of work, but economists believe that 18 per cent of the workforce will be out of work by the end of 2009. In Spain unemployment benefit is usually paid for a year, so thousands who lost their jobs last year will be without state support this summer. Most will try to find work in the growing black economy.

The Bank of Spain was forced to concede last week what everyone knew already: the economy is in recession. During the fourth quarter of 2008, Spain’s gross domestic product contracted by 1.1 per cent, after a decline of 0.2 per cent in the previous quarter.

The Euro probably makes things worse. In the past, unusually poor economic conditions in Spain would lead to sharp devaluation of the peseta and boost the competitiveness of Spanish exports, but that’s now not the case. Meanwhile, the European Central Bank is going to set monetary policy based on a combination of the general situation in Europe (bad, but not as bad as in Spain) mixed with its habitual over-caution. And E.U. authorities in Brussels have enough clout to make it difficult for peripheral countries to pursue fiscal expansion, but not enough muscle to seriously focus resources on especially hard-hit countries.

The weather’s pretty soggy in Barcelona this week, but it still looks to be a pretty solid bicycling town. One feature that I wish more American cities has is bike lanes that are actually separated from the flow of traffic so that they can be used for bicycling rather than as double-parking lanes:

They also have a bike sharing service called “Bicing” that appears to use identical infrastructure to our smaller SmartBike DC program in Washington:

It occurs to me every time I see a bike share service in another city that it would do a lot to extend the utility of these things if there were some kind of reciprocity agreement in place between different bike sharing cities. I’m a SmartBikeDC member, but I rarely use it because like most people inclined to get around town on a bike I own a bike and usually ride that. It’s when I’m not in DC that I really want to use a bike share.