Agregador de canales de noticias

REGARDING yesterday's controversy over Gene Sperling's allegedly threatening, actually non-threatening email to Bob Woodward about whether Barack Obama is really actually responsible for inventing the sequester: others have spoken of these things, that we need not. However, putting the non-existent threat issue aside, the exchange detailed in the emails is actually pretty interesting. Mr Woodward, we recall, wrote last weekend that Mr Obama was "moving the goalposts" by proposing that a replacement for the sequester include both revenue and spending cuts. Mr Sperling says that it's very important to understand that this isn't so:

The idea that the sequester was to force both sides to go back to try at a big or grand bargain with a mix of entitlements and revenues (even if there were serious disagreements on composition) was part of the DNA of the thing from the start. It was an accepted part of the understanding—from the start. Really. It was assumed by the Rs on the Supercommittee that came right after: it was assumed in the November-December 2012 negotiations. There may have been big disagreements over rates and ratios—but that it was supposed to be replaced by entitlements and revenues of some form is not controversial.

The argument over who was responsible for coming up with the initial idea for the sequester really isn't very productive. The argument over who is "moving the goalposts" in their proposals is pretty useless, too. What we do know is that the theory of the sequester, that it would be so distasteful as to "force both sides to go back to try at a big or grand bargain", didn't work. The rather S&M-themed scenario in which Congress tries to force itself into behaving with the spectre of whips and cattle prods ends with the US economy handcuffed to the bed and no immediate prospect of escape. Why is that?

The fact that Washington is so interested in Mr Woodward's noodling about who proposed what when two years ago helps explain why the sequester didn't work. To wit: today, when catastrophe looms in Washington, rather than try to avert catastrophe, politicians gin up arguments over who is to blame. Republicans have spent the past few weeks in a weirdly peripheral effort to persuade the world that Barack Obama and his administration came up with the idea for the sequester—as if this would pin blame for the cuts on the administration, even though the point behind the sequester was precisely that it was supposed to be something nobody would want to allow to happen. Democrats, seeing that Republicans appear willing to let the cuts fall, have not backed down; they've started thinking about the political uses of the fact that most of the public blames the budget impasse on the GOP.

Clearly, if we're looking for an incentive that will drive politicians with deep disagreements over the role of government to compromise on a budget, an artificial catastrophic budget deadline isn't it. The sequester, after all, doesn't punish politicians; it punishes the voters. Voters will be unable to do anything in response for another two years, and when they do, their reactions will depend on who they blame, which means politicians will spend their time making accusations. What we need here is a negative incentive that punishes politicians directly. And what do politicians seek to avoid?

Unfortunately it's probably not possible or desirable to craft a deal under which every sitting congressman and senator pledges to resign if they haven't agreed to a budget deal by a date certain. Throwing all the bums out at once appears attractive, but in fact a lot of useful and hard-won information about our elected officials generated over their years of campaigning and service would get thrown away; the public would be forced to elect a complete slate of unknowns, and that's actually very costly and inefficient. An alternative might be a one-time federal election fund, kicking in if Congress hadn't approved a budget by a certain date, that would dole out large matching grants to all challengers in every congressional district in the country. Maybe that would be a prospect that would strike fear into the hearts of representatives and party organisations. In any case, what we need are political disincentives that punish politicians for failing to govern, not budget disincentives that punish the country for having a dysfunctional government. We've suffered enough for that already.

WEDNESDAY’S oral argument at the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 brought an extraordinary piece of analysis from Justice Antonin Scalia—a comment that drew gasps from the audience. The law’s utility as a shield against voting practices that discriminate based on race, Mr Scalia suggested, had evaporated. He argued that requiring nine Southern states and sections of seven others, all with a history of discrimination, to “pre-clear” changes to voting procedures with the Justice Department is now needless interference with “state sovereignty”.

Analysing the most recent reauthorisation of the act in 2006, Mr Scalia explained away its lopsided support in the Senate (98-0) and House of Representatives (390-33):

And this last enactment, not a single vote in the Senate against it. And the House is pretty much the same....I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It's been written about. Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.

After his comment caused a minor stir in the courtroom, Mr Scalia added:

I don't think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act. And I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in perpetuity unless—unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution... [T]his is not the kind of a question you can leave to Congress....Even the name of it is wonderful: The Voting Rights Act. Who is going to vote against that in the future?

This is not Mr Scalia's first impolitic outburst. But for a justice who stakes his jurisprudence on deferring to the democratically elected branches of government, it is a stunning line of reasoning. Consider, by comparison, Mr Scalia’s endorsement of Justice Benjamin Cordozo’s 1933 statement decrying judicial second-guessing of legislative acts:

We do not pause to consider whether a statute differently conceived and framed would yield results more consonant with fairness and reason. We take the statute as we find it.

And recall Mr Scalia’s claim in the 1990 euthanasia case Cruzan v Missouri that it is not for judges to decide when a patient’s life is “worthless”, but “it is up to the citizens of Missouri to decide, through their elected representatives, whether that wish [to end a life] will be honored.”

So why not let the people’s elected representatives handle the matter of racial discrimination and voting? Why, in this case, does Mr Scalia believe he should substitute his views for those of legislators? Members of Congress, after all, considered 12,000 pages worth of testimony in 2006, which showed "pervasive discrimination" in the covered districts. As Justice Elena Kagan said yesterday to Burt Rein, the attorney for the petitioner, “that’s a big, new power that you are giving us...the power now to decide whether racial discrimination has been solved. I did not think that that fell within our bailiwick.”

For a justice who sniffs out closet activism even in his fellow conservative justices—in 2007 he criticised Chief Justice John Roberts for exercising "faux judicial restraint"—Mr Scalia apparently finds the Voting Rights Act to be a uniquely egregious specimen of legislative incompetence. While Mr Scalia has voted to overturn congressional laws from time to time, such as in City of Boerne v Flores (which got a brief mention during Wednesday’s argument), never has he couched his judicial activism in such cynical terms. We cannot trust the Congress to legislate earnestly on questions of race, Mr Scalia implied, because senators and representatives feel bound to uphold “racial entitlements” that their forebears have enacted. Political correctness rules.

Let us posit for the sake of argument that Mr Scalia’s cynicism is on target: American senators voted unanimously to extend the law in 2006 not because they found merit in its provisions but because they feared that a "no" vote would earn them condemnation as racists. What then? Should America trust its Supreme Court to bring a more careful, measured eye to the question? The tenor of the comments from the conservative justices suggests the answer is no. Consider the simplistic suggestion from the chief justice that because “the citizens in the South are [no] more racist than citizens in the North” we can safely ignore evidence that Southern states still systematically discriminate against minorities. Consider the ease with which Mr Scalia equated the guarantee of an equal right to vote with the concept of “racial entitlement”. And consider the failure of any justice to mention efforts in many of the covered states to depress voter turnout among minority voters in 2012. It remains highly questionable whether a majority of the Supreme Court is up to the task of diagnosing America's racial challenges.

(Photo credit: AFP)

THE debate over the minimum wage, which, thanks to Barack Obama's state-of-the-union address, we appear to be having again, is a debate over the question of whether raising the price of something—low-skilled labour, in this case—will reduce demand for that thing. That is to say, it is a debate over the relevance of the law of demand, an enormously robust generalisation about human behaviour confirmed and re-confirmed each day by billions of individual decisions.

Which is not to say that economic "laws" capture strict relations of physical necessity. Economics is not physics. Demand does not have to go down, by dint of creation's quiddity, when price goes up. Economics, like psychology, trucks in propositions that hold other things being equal. Steady or rising demand in the face of rising prices does not flout the law of the conservation of mass, or any such strict basic rule of the universe, but it does call for an explanation of the nature of the exception to the rule. What, exactly, is supposed not to be equal, such that in this case, applying the law of demand will mislead us about the expected effect of raising a price floor?

There are conditions under which raising the minimum wage will increase demand, as well as economic efficiency. According to one story, monopsony conditions for low-wage labour, ie, imperfectly competitive labour-market conditions in which there is but a single buyer of low-wage labour (or a colluding band of buyers) that is able to set wages at a level workers have little choice but to accept. Good old Econ 101 shows that under such conditions, a bump in the minimum wage, within a certain range, can boost employment and enhance efficiency. So there's that. And such conditions no doubt exist in some sectors at some places at some times. One famous, and egregiously misused, study suggests that monopsony-like conditions applied to fast-food restaurants in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the mid-1990s. But there is basically no reason whatsoever to think that such conditions apply generally, across all sector and regions of the American labour market.

In the absence of special conditions, we have every reason to expect the law of demand to hold, such that raising the minimum wage will make it harder for inexperienced workers—workers whose output is worth less to employers than the mandated wage, and especially teenagers from low-income families looking to get a first footing in the labour market—to find work. And this is, in fact, what empirical studies tend to conclude. A comprehensive 2008 survey of the empirical literature from David Neumark, a professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine, and William Wascher, an economist for the Federal Reserve, found that, as one would expect, "[M]inimum wages reduce employment opportunities for less-skilled workers, especially those who are most directly affected by the minimum wage.”

Again, it doesn't have to work this way. Employers can cut hours rather than hiring fewer workers. They can turn down the air-conditioner, strictly police the length of breaks, and otherwise reduce the cost of amenities previously enjoyed by employees. They can shift to off-the-books employees willing to work for less than the legally-mandated minimum. They can raise prices, passing on increased labour costs to consumers. It's conceivable that the only consequence would be that a larger share of profits gets distributed to low-wage workers. Conceivable and exceedingly unlikely. In reality, we probably get small adjustments along each of these dimensions.

Of course, there is some newish empirical research contesting the disemployment effect of increases in the minimum wage, and then there is even newer research debunking it. I'm not about to offer a blow-by-blow of this tedious and technical debate for the same reason I'm not inclined to delve into the "debate" over the reality of global warming. The basic science is sound, and I don't think it is at this juncture especially fruitful to "teach the debate" when deliberating about policy.

I suspect that the reason left-leaning academics and journalists are so ready to tout research shooting holes in the law of demand has more to do with politics than a dogged commitment to truth in economic science. Raising the minimum wage is a very popular policy. It's smart for the Democratic Party to get behind it. So Democratic opinion leaders will be inclined to provide intellectual cover, either by soft-pedaling the downside of the policy, or by selflessly making their minds available to believe whatever most benefits their party. Democratic journalists may find themselves eager to talk about the fascinating new research that contests the conventional wisdom about the effects of raising the minimum wage. None of this is especially surprising or scandalous, and it's naive to think public intellectual life in a closely-divided democracy will ever be much different. Still, it's a tonic to square up now and again to the way things work, and it's worth taking note when Democrats, who are in my opinion generally less prone than Republicans to baldly wishful and/or strategic cognition, behave like thoroughly political animals.

Perhaps it's wishful on my part to think, as I do, that most economically literate observers really do understand that raising the minimum wage will screw up the prospects of a fair number of poor young workers. Those who favour raising the minimum wage anyway just think that, all things considered, that's a price we ought to be willing to pay. But they can't say that, just as second-amendment enthusiasts can't say that an occasional grim harvest of kindergartners is a price we ought to be willing to pay for the freedom to own guns. One of the most maddening things about political debate is that it's rhetorical suicide to accept tragic trade-offs. So one must deny that there are trade-offs. It's got to be all benefit, no cost. And that's why we find so few willing to step forward and say, yes, "minimum wages pose a tradeoff of higher wages for some against job losses for others", but let's raise the minimum wage anyway, because, in the final analysis, the benefit to those who enjoy higher wages will be greater than the cost suffered by those put out of work, and this distribution of burdens and benefits is not too unfair to stomach.

I dearly wish somebody would say this, because then we could go on to have a useful, meaty debate about the mix of policies most likely to succeed in helping low-wage workers. My sense is that we'd do best with no minimum wage, wage subsidies, and transfers to low-income households that phase out in a way that does not tax small increases in income at absurdly punitive rates. As it is, we're left wasting our time debating the minutiae of conditions under which we can expect stones to float.

(Photo credit: AFP)

MOST people would not pay two cents for something worth one. But America’s government spent $116m last year doing just that. The money-losing purchase was money itself: the penny, which has cost more than a cent to produce since 2006, due mainly to the price of zinc, the coin’s primary ingredient.

Steel is hardly better, as Canada has learned. The government there recently ditched its steel-based penny. American politicians, while loth to take lessons from their northern neighbours, may have noticed. In an online forum on February 14th Barack Obama intimated that the penny was no longer change he believes in.

Fifty years ago a handful of pennies would buy a hamburger at McDonald’s, but inflation means the coin won’t even get you a French fry today. Relegated to jars and lost in seat cushions, the near-worthless penny is failing to perform its primary function: to facilitate commerce. Vending machines and parking meters don’t accept it. Penny scourges note that fiddling with them adds some two seconds to each transaction, costing the economy many millions of dollars a year.

Penny lovers and zinc-industry lobbyists counter that the coin’s demise would cost consumers, as merchants would round their prices up to the nearest nickel. But some economists disagree, suggesting that shop keepers might well round down in order to avoid moving from a price of, say, $9.99 to $10. Americans anyway seem willing to accept a fee for penny removal, as evidenced by the self-imposed cost of leaving them idle and the success of coin-counting machines, which take a cut when turning them into bills.

Other countries have eliminated low-value coins with less-than-dire results, and indeed, so has America. In 1857 it ditched the half-cent, which was then worth nearly as much in real terms as today’s dime. This has led some to suggest killing the nickel, which costs about ten cents to make, as well as the penny.

Congress has not authorised coin culling as yet, so the Mint is studying ways to make coins more cheaply. Mr Obama, meanwhile, is finding value in the penny’s symbolism. “One of the things you see chronically in government is it’s very hard to get rid of things that don’t work so that we can then invest in the things that do,” said the president. “The penny, I think, ends up being a good metaphor for some of the larger problems we got.”

Adi Gaskell points out that social media can be used to expand your reach if you plan to incorporate Tom's... Shelley Dolley

AN INSURANCE company with an army. That is how some have described the American government. And for good reason.

In 2012, about 20% of federal outlays—not counting interest payments on the debt—were for national defence. The $716 billion that America spent on its armed forces probably accounted for about 40% of world military spending. That’s far more than any other country and about five times as much as China, which has the second largest military budget. So America certainly has an army.

But insurance, really, is the federal government’s "core business". In 2012, by my count, about 65% of federal non-interest spending went to health care, income security and pension programmes. The bulk of it, of course, went to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Altogether, in 2012 the federal government spent some $2.3 trillion on what amounts to a gigantic social safety net. That’s 15% of the nation’s GDP, and it doesn’t include what the states spend on similar programmes. With 64% of federal non-interest spending going to insurance programmes and 20% going to the military, that leaves just 16% for all the other, discretionary functions of the federal government, like running the judicial system, building infrastructure, financing education, and so on.

Pooling risk in this way is arguably the most important function of the modern welfare state, which began to emerge in America in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression. In times of crisis, social insurance functions as a kind of disaster relief. Private insurers have neither deep enough pockets nor the administrative apparatus to insure the population as a whole against disruptions on this scale. And while it’s easy to say our neighbours should be responsible for themselves, it’s hard on society when a large number of citizens fall sick or lose their jobs. Keeping the general population healthy and able to provide for itself is clearly a public good in the sense that it increases productivity, lowers crime, and so on.

But Americans have a poor understanding of how this core business works, and how they benefit. Instead of thinking about entitlement programmes as insurance against economic hardship, they think of them as a kind of charity that goes to other people. They are quick to scold others for taking "handouts", unaware that they are stretching out their own hands. In 2008 a Cornell Survey Research Institute poll found that 57% of Americans said that they had never used a “government social program”. But when those respondents were asked about specific programmes—like Social Security, unemployment insurance, student loans and the home-mortgage interest deduction—94% had used at least one. On average, in fact, they had used four different social programmes over the course of their lifetimes. A more recent Census Bureau survey found that nearly half of Americans received direct benefits in 2011.

The problem is that America cannot make meaningful cuts to federal spending without hacking away at some of its core insurance business. That's easier said than done. Since most Americans benefit directly from some form of social insurance, politicians go to great lengths to avoid proposing specific cuts. Instead, they focus on attacking discretionary spending, where there are few savings to be had. That won't work. The truth is that ultimately Americans have a choice: raise taxes or lose some of their benefits.

EVERYONE agrees that America spends too much on health care (17.9% of GDP, at last count). Everyone agrees that the health system is bogged down by waste. No one agrees on what to cut. One obvious candidate would be medical treatments that don’t do any good or that do active harm. Even this, however, has been the subject of fierce debate.

Last week 17 medical societies, such as the American Academy of Family Physicians and the American Urological Association, presented a list of unnecessary and possibly harmful procedures. The list is the second such announcement from the “Choosing Wisely” campaign, launched by the American Board of Internal Medicine last year.

The goal is to “spark conversations between patients and physicians about what care is really necessary.” Among their recommendations: don’t perform yearly Pap tests in women aged 30-65, don’t use feeding tubes in patients with advanced dementia and don’t prescribe antibiotics for viral illnesses. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has given $2.5m to help Choosing Wisely spread the word. The question is whether it will do much good.

As I’ve written before, America’s health system has a unique aversion to evidence. We favour procedures even when they are expensive and mediocre. (See, for example, a new study on the popularity of robotic hysterectomies, which cost more than laparoscopic surgeries but provide no added benefit.) To say a treatment might be wasteful is to suggest that it might not be available, which sends us into violent spasms of fury. Paranoia of rationing and death panels reigns supreme.

Health officials are trying to inject evidence into American health care, but it is a struggle. The ridiculously titled Patient-Centred Outcome Research Institute (PCORI), created by Obamacare, is charged with evaluating the efficacy of different treatments. But PCORI is forbidden from considering treatments’ costs. Presumably PCORI will still provide some useful information, but the health secretary is barred from using it: she may not use PCORI’s findings to deny coverage for a given treatment under Medicare, the health programme for the old.

Equally absurd is the mission of the United States Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF). This independent body reviews evidence, then makes recommendations to guide medical care. Thanks to the new health law, insurers must cover treatments recommended by the USPSTF. Though there is a requirement to cover good procedures, however, there is no requirement not to cover crummy ones. Nevertheless, recommendations against procedures inspire political furore. When the USPSTF came out against routine prostate-specific antigen tests for prostate cancer, it was dubbed a death panel. The health department quickly promised that Medicare would continue to pay for the screenings.

The Choosing Wisely campaign is bravely entering the fray, but its ambition is modest. It hopes to convey that not all care is good care. Slowly, the culture among physicians and patients may change. But the campaign has no teeth. Its suggestions are phrased in the gentlest possible manner, listing treatments that “patients and physicians should question”. In the tradition of PCORI and USPSTF, the campaign does not suggest limiting reimbursement for useless care.

This may begin to shift the conversation. But it will do no more. Cutting health spending is hard. If we can’t even agree to cut useless treatments, we are doomed. The only way to cut waste is for insurers and taxpayers to stop paying for it. It is too much to expect that doctors, on their own, will simply stop offering unnecessary care. Doctors would like to do the “right” thing. But they also like to get paid.

AMERICA is four days away from a bad dream coming true: $85 billion of cuts in defence and discretionary spending. Trying to force a last-minute compromise, the White House is warning of disruptions to the lives of millions of Americans—including the loss of nutrition support for 600,000 disadvantaged women and children, delayed disability payments and "cascading flight delays and closed towers"—if the sequester comes to pass.

The decision to set the sequester in July 2011 was an effort to push off an intractable dispute between the Republicans and Democrats over spending cuts and tax increases. Putting off conflict can be the right tack when tempers are flaring and a cooling-off period would lessen the chances of an all-out conflagration. Machiavelli, though he usually suggests striking opponents early, describes the circumstances in which a more circumspect approach is advisable in chapter 33 of his “Discourses on Livy”:

I say, then, that...the wiser course is to temporize with such evils when they are recognized, instead of violently attacking them; for by temporizing with them they will either die out of themselves, or at least their worst results will be long deferred. And princes or magistrates who wish to destroy such evils must watch all points, and must be careful in attacking them not to increase instead of diminishing them, for they must not believe that a fire can be extinguished by blowing upon it.

When aggression promises to heighten rather than resolve a confrontation, a little restraint is advisable. But even in their restraint, America's political parties have managed to stoke the fire. Since July 2011, relations between the parties have become more hostile and divisions have grown. Though Barack Obama seems to be surprised by the impasse, he should have anticipated it. Mr Obama wagered that the ideological conflicts over spending and taxation would “die out of themselves”, or at least die down in the aftermath of the 2012 election. But presidential mandates are ineffable, indeterminate entities, and Republicans are tax-weary after agreeing to a modest increase in rates for earners over $400,000 in the fiscal-cliff negotiations that added a scent of the apocalypse to the Christmas season.

The parties (blame who you like) thought the sequester would force cooperation. But polls show that Americans aren’t tuning in to the sequester debate, with nearly half of the populace clueless to its details. So even though 49% of Americans polled hold the Republicans responsible for the squabble (compared to 31% blaming Mr Obama), there is little popular pressure on anyone to resolve the dispute this week. This dearth of outrage from the public, coupled with the fact that the sequester’s consequences would be significant but hardly the end of the world, is not a recipe for striking a compromise that has eluded legislators in Washington for nearly two years.

So the sequester will likely hit on March 1st, causing some damage. It will further erode Americans’ confidence in the federal government. And it will disabuse politicians of the illusion that forcing difficult disputes down the road is a reliable strategy for governing. That bit of advice now seems unsuited to this era of unprecedented partisan polarisation. But perhaps another tip from Machiavelli will resonate with today's politicians, who are about to arbitrarily inflict pain on their constituents. "No prince is ever benefited by making himself hated", wrote the wise Italian.

(Painting credit: Santi di Tito)

OUR correspondents discuss Barack Obama's latest attempt to reduce his country's vast quantity of nuclear warheads

DOUGLAS HOLTZ-EAKIN and Avik Roy have penned an op-ed arguing that America should reform Obamacare so that it more closely resembles the Swiss private-sector universal health-insurance system. We should tame Obamacare's ruinous regulations, they write:

“Community rating,” for example, will dramatically increase premiums for young people, a counterproductive approach when one considers that most uninsured Americans are in their 20s and 30s.

Switzerland has community rating. True, it's different from Obamacare: the Swiss version is much more strict. Obamacare allows insurers to charge old people up to several times what they charge young people. In Switzerland they have to charge exactly the same premium regardless of age.

Aaron Carroll explains that, in general, the Swiss system is more heavily regulated than Obamacare. The government sets health-care prices. Subsidies ensure that nobody pays more than 8% of income for health insurance, a level much lower than Obamacare. And there's this interesting wrinkle:

In some important respects, the Swiss law is less market-oriented than ACA. For example, LAMal forbids health insurers from earning profits on their sales of social health insurance.

We look forward to Messrs Holtz-Eakin and Roy's next article calling for eliminating the profit incentive in the health-insurance industry.

You can make this story as long as you want to. But the short version is that there's no such thing as a square wheel. Even in Switzerland.

IN THE hierarchy of Obamacare haters, Rick Scott, the Republican governor of Florida, ranked near the top. In 2009 the former hospital executive bankrolled ads warning of government-run health care, with horror stories from Canada and Britain. In 2010 Mr Scott campaigned with the promise to scuttle the health law. Florida led states’ efforts to challenge Obamacare in court. When the Supreme Court upheld the law in June, Mr Scott declared, “This is just another burden the federal government has put on American families and small businesses.”

Though conservatives despaired over the ruling, some took comfort in the fact that it gave states the option of rejecting a major part of the law: the expansion of Medicaid, which funds health care for the poor. Given the choice, Mr Scott declared that Florida would opt out of the Medicaid expansion. He even wrote a column titled, "More Medicaid? No Thanks."

So Mr Scott's announcement on February 20th that he would, after all, expand Medicaid is, to say the least, a blow to conservatives. “He has squandered his credibility as an opponent of Obamacare”, wrote Cato’s Michael Cannon, who served on Mr Scott’s gubernatorial transition team. The move is “a huge threat to Florida's financial future”, declared Americans for Prosperity. "Terribly disappointed" is how Erick Erickson summed up his reaction. Conservatives are displeased, but they should not be surprised.

The maths are too obvious to ignore. Mr Scott will expand Medicaid for only three years (he says), when the federal government will cover the full bill. So in 2016, for example, Washington will pump an extra $6.7 billion into Florida’s Medicaid programme, 49% more than would've been spent had Florida not expanded the programme, while the state's tab will increase by less than 1%.

Florida has 1.3m uninsured adults who will be newly eligible for Medicaid, according to the Urban Institute. Without an expansion, 995,000 would be without insurance, eligible for neither Medicaid nor the subsidies to buy insurance on a federal exchange. (Mr Scott has drawn the line at creating his own health exchange.) “While the federal government is committed to paying 100% of the cost of new people in Medicaid,” Mr Scott explained, “I cannot, in good conscience, deny the uninsured access to care.”

The politics are obvious, too. Barack Obama won Florida in November, and Mr Scott is up for re-election next year. His tea-party inspired governing has so far led to dismal approval ratings, so he has begun to reverse course in some areas. In the case of Medicaid expansion, the governor was lobbied hard by the state's hospitals.

During the debate over health reform, hospitals agreed to payment cuts in exchange for the promise of more insured patients. But without a Medicaid expansion, this is a bum deal. Florida’s hospitals, in particular, stand to benefit from a bigger Medicaid programme—Medicaid payments to hospitals would jump by $33.6 billion from 2013 to 2022. This 31% increase is larger than that of any other state.

Though it is unlikely to quiet his conservative critics, Mr Scott can at least claim to have gotten something in return for his reversal—a waiver from the feds allowing him to privatise the management of Medicaid. This may not have been an explicit trade, but the timing of the two announcements certainly makes it seem that way. In a sop to conservatives, Mr Scott also declared that Medicaid expansion would expire after three years. But this seems unlikely to happen. Whoever is governor of Florida in 2017 will not want to yank insurance away from 1m people.

Mr Scott is not the only Republican to support Medicaid’s expansion. The governors of Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota and Ohio have said they will expand Medicaid, too. As more of them come around, the pressure mounts on hold-outs to get their slice of the pie. When such a sweet deal is on offer, it is tough to resist.

(Photo credit: AFP)

FIRST there was the “open mic” incident last March when Barack Obama assured his Russian opposite number, Dmitry Medvedev, that after his election he would have “flexibility” on the subject of missile defence. Then came the briefest of sentences, in his state-of-the-union address on February 12th, on the need to engage Russia in further reductions to both sides’ nuclear arsenals. But together they give a clue to what could become a lasting legacy of Mr Obama’s two terms in office: a serious attempt to realise the commitment he made in Prague four years ago when he promised to take “concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons”.

Those for whom the Prague speech was a rallying call have found Mr Obama, so far, a bit of disappointment. True enough, he succeeded in getting the Senate to ratify the important but relatively unambitious “New START” strategic arms-reduction treaty with Russia in 2010. The treaty restored on-site inspections while limiting the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads on each side to 1,550 by 2018—a figure that Russia is already slightly below and which America, with 1,720, is close to achieving ahead of time. It deals neither with non-deployed strategic warheads (America is reckoned to have 2,800 and Russia 1,000) nor tactical warheads (America has around 500 and Russia more than 2,000) stockpiled by both sides.

And not much has happened since. After the quadrennial “Nuclear Posture Review” in 2010, which narrowed the declared role of nuclear weapons in American strategy, the administration has dragged its feet over explaining how it would put it into practice. In 2011 it launched what was meant to be a 90-day implementation study (NPRIS) that would determine how many weapons and of which types America would need to deter attack on itself and its allies in the light of the changed relationship with Russia since the end of the cold war. But when the NPRIS subsequently leaked, it was temporarily shelved to prevent it becoming a stick for Republicans to beat Mr Obama with during his re-election campaign.

According to Daryl Kimball of the Washington-based Arms Control Association, the NPRIS will be discussed at Mr Obama’s first post-election security cabinet meeting next month. The president is wary of trying to get another treaty through the Senate, so he is contemplating both accelerating the New START reductions and, if agreement can be secured with Russia, moving below the ceiling, perhaps to 1,000 warheads—a figure that the joint chiefs of staff have recently agreed would not put deterrence at any risk.

Tom Donilon, the White House national security adviser, is due to go to Moscow later this month to discuss the proposal. To smooth the rough patches in the present relationship, Mr Donilon may offer to delay the development of new high-speed interceptors in the fourth phase of the European ballistic-missile defence system due for deployment in 2021. Mr Obama is also believed to be keen to “de-alert” his nuclear forces from the hair-trigger, launch-on-warning doctrine that still endures—something he could do with a stroke of the pen.

Bruce Blair, co-founder of the Global Zero movement which campaigns for reducing and eventually eliminating nuclear weapons, believes that Mr Obama could set in train a process that would in time also lead to big cuts in the stockpiles of non-strategic and non-deployed nukes. Neither has any military usefulness, but nobody pretends getting there would be easy, particularly as tactical weapons remain more important to Russia—with its comparatively weak conventional forces—than to America. But the prize for reducing stockpiles would be the chance to draw other nuclear states with much smaller arsenals, such as China, into a multilateral negotiation. That “holy grail”, as Mr Blair calls it, will not be reached, if ever, until well after Mr Obama has left office. But if he could claim at least to have started the quest, it might be just the legacy he yearns for.

My great friend Bob Stone, among other things former head of the (largely) stealth successes of VP Gore's re-inventing government... Tom Peters

LAST week’s state-of-the-union address received unexpectedly low marks from some commentators. For Paul Krugman, it was “not very interesting”. For countless other observers, it was a mere “laundry list” of proposals that have no chance of passing the Republican-led House of Representatives. Leaving aside the obvious questions (does anyone make actual laundry lists anymore? is a pair of dirty socks really the right metaphor for, say, universal pre-school?), another one strikes me: if Mr Obama's speech did not fit the bill for an admirable state-of-the-union address for a recently re-elected president who campaigned on fiscal responsibility coupled with fairness in healing America's vast inequalities, what would?

In our live-blog of the speech, I summed up the evening this way:

This was a good night for Mr Obama. The speech communicated with passion and swagger his administration's priorities in his second term: a mixture of proposals that will appeal to both parties (immigration reform and spending cuts, most notably) and some that are a lot more controversial (further tax increases, gun control, climate-change policy). That's an appropriately audacious agenda. Perhaps he overreached a bit at times in setting goals to end AIDS and world hunger, but drawing Americans' attention to the globe's neediest human beings seems appropriate in this forum. The first state-of-the-union address of a president's second term is no time to be timid, and it was an admirable choice to bookend his proposals with appeals to good citizenship and a call to civic duty and reciprocity.

Looking at the speech a week later, I am even more convinced Mr Obama hit it out of the park. Yes, he presented a grand vision with a lot of policy proposals. But on the other hand: he presented a grand vision with a lot of policy proposals! Who else is advancing a legislative vision for the coming year? Marco Rubio, in rebuttal, offered a pitch that was identical to Mitt Romney’s platform in last year’s losing effort to take the White House. The would-be emperor had new clothes, a surprisingly irrepressible thirst and convincing anti-plutocrat credibility, but he had nothing new to add to the Republicans' electoral platform of 2012. Let's hear it for some new ideas!

And Mr Obama’s ideas—expanding public pre-school, raising the minimum wage, means-testing Medicare, raising taxes on the wealthy, creating more jobs for the middle class, making college more affordable, finding a humane path to citizenship for illegal immigrants—fit together as a coherent response to the increasingly yawning inequalities in America. As Emmanuel Saez, an economist at Berkeley, recently showed, the economic recovery has thus far benefited only the wealthiest Americans:

The numbers...show overall income growing by just 1.7 percent over the period. But there was a wide gap between the top 1 percent, whose earnings rose by 11.2 percent, and the other 99 percent, whose earnings declined by 0.4 percent.

Mr Saez, a winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, an economic laurel considered second only to the Nobel, concluded that “the Great Recession has only depressed top income shares temporarily and will not undo any of the dramatic increase in top income shares that has taken place since the 1970s.”

There is a lot to clarify and squabble about in Mr Obama's proposals to reverse the trend Mr Saez identifies: research supporting the president's proposal to expand pre-school is not unambiguous, as my colleague pointed out; an increase in the minimum wage, some say, may come with a price tag of higher unemployment; higher tax rates for the wealthy may not go far enough. These are all issues on which serious debate is needed, and one virtue of laying out a broad, bold agenda is to let a thousand debates bloom over the details.

Another virtue of this approach is to provide an overarching vision for the republic. The narrative Mr Obama articulates to frame the debates seems to flow directly from the pages of John Rawls’s "A Theory of Justice". In that 1971 masterwork and in "Justice as Fairness" (2001), Rawls developed a political philosophy of liberalism that puts a premium on the value of equality. Though he was no strict egalitarian (Derek Parfit argues that his theory is better construed as "prioritarian"), Rawls hoped to identify the principles of justice that hold for a democracy where people cooperate productively and see each other as moral equals. Rawls's first principle of justice, calling for "equal political liberties", takes precedence over efforts to ease socioeconomic inequalities. But within these bounds, Rawls tried to identify and account for the “social, natural and fortuitous contingencies” that help shape “inequalities in citizens’ life-prospects”.

Boosting the chances of children whose life-prospects are otherwise hampered by their social class is precisely the the case the president made for expanding public pre-school:

Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road. But today, fewer than 3 in 10 four year-olds are enrolled in a high-quality preschool program. Most middle-class parents can’t afford a few hundred bucks a week for a private preschool. And for poor kids who need help the most, this lack of access to preschool education can shadow them for the rest of their lives.

Enhancing what Rawls calls “background justice”—the fair functioning of social institutions necessary for true equality of opportunity—is the moral impetus behind Mr Obama’s proposal. As Joseph Stiglitz pointed out in the New York Times over the weekend, this is exactly what America needs right now. It is also the essence of the justification behind the proposal to increase the minimum wage modestly (E.J. Dionne thinks too modestly) to $9.00 from its current rate of $7.25. In one of the most effective lines all night, Mr Obama coupled a Rawlsian defence of a livable income floor with a paean to the American work ethic: “[L]et’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty.”

One of the most controversial elements of Rawls's theory is the so-called "difference principle" according to which inequalities are only justified insofar as they serve to maximise the position of the least well-off members of society. Income disparities are not inherently problematic, for Rawls or for Mr Obama; they are unjust only when they come at the expense of the poor. Recent research from Mr Saez shows this is exactly what is happening: as the pie is expanding, only the rich are getting an extra slice while the poor and middle class are stuck with the same portion, or less. Rawls's principle may be too demanding, but its gist provides an excellent heuristic for policymakers. Whether Mr Obama's myriad policy suggestions fit the bill is for Congress to decide, but the vision he heralded in his speech—the imperative to build real equality of opportunity for all Americans—has never been more apt.

(Photo credit: AFP)

HOPES are running low for Barack Obama's planned visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories on March 20th, reports Jodi Wilgoren. At most, the Israelis might agree to a partial freeze on settlement construction in exchange for a Palestinian pledge not to take Israel's settlement activity to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Nobody expects any progress towards final-status negotiations; Martin Indyk, a former US ambassador to Israel, suspects both sides are only interested in making sure the other side gets blamed for lack of progress. So why bother? In a perceptive passage, Ms Wilgoren lays out the contrasting ways in which even doves on both sides see the process.

Some Israeli analysts and officials see a resumption of peace talks—even if they lead nowhere—as a tool to stem the rising tide of international criticism of Israel’s policies.

“We have to submit a proposal to the Palestinians, a decent proposal, a fair proposal,” said Amos Yadlin, a former chief of military intelligence who is now director of the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel. “If the Palestinians will accept it, it’s a win of peace. If they refuse—as we think they will—then at least we win the blame game and we can continue to shape our borders by ourselves without the need to wait for the Palestinians to agree.”

This is the nightmare situation for the Palestinians, who accuse Israel of using 20 years of negotiations as a means of managing the conflict.

“The process and the negotiations are not an end in themselves,” said Husam Zomlot, a senior official with Fatah, the party Mr. Abbas leads... If Mr. Obama’s visit, or a resumption of negotiations, derails the recent Palestinian strategy of leveraging the new United Nations status for international sanctions against Israel, Mr. Zomlot added, “it’s a disaster.”

Which tends to back up the hard-headed view of Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard, who believes "there's not going to be a two-state solution." This newspaper is slightly more optimistic, but Mr Walt has a pretty convincing argument, which sets up an interesting paradox. Mr Walt is generally viewed as an opponent of the policies pursued by Binyamin Netanyahu and Israel's right-wing Likud party. The thing is, if Mr Walt is right, it means Mr Netanyahu is right.

The argument of the Israeli right has always been that Israel lives in a tough neighbourhood, and that peace with "the Arabs" is a pipe dream. Given the reality of irresolvable conflict, Israel's goal should be to maximise its military advantage, develop its economy and extend its control over contiguous territory, while avoiding human-rights violations to the extent compatible with national security. Once you accept that no reasonably peaceful two-state solution is possible, that's the strategic terrain you find yourself in.

Critics would argue that Likud, the Israeli right more broadly, and Mr Netanyahu personally bear a large share of the blame for making the two-state solution impossible; it seemed far more realistic in 1993. But it's not clear that Israelis would ever have been willing to offer a bargain Palestinians could accept, or could have mustered the will to drag religious settlers out of Beit El kicking and screaming. And when even founding father Yasser Arafat lacked the political strength to take the deal Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton offered in 2000, it seems doubtful that the bitter, divided Palestinian polity could agree to a less favourable deal today under weaker leaders.

In any case, the question of blame for the failure of the Oslo peace process is a question about the past. It doesn't matter much who blew up the peace process in 1996 if you're an Israeli voter or policymaker today. What you care about as an Israeli today is what steps you should be taking right now to maximise your country's security and well-being. And if Stephen Walt is right that there's not going to be a two-state solution, then the best strategy would seem to be one of cynical, trivial concessions to the Palestinian Authority in order to convince the international community that the failure of the peace process is not your fault, combined with stronger restraint and control of the Palestinian population and expansion of Israeli territorial domination. Which is pretty much what Mr Netanyahu is doing.

Of course, this is a description of what kind of strategy might make sense for Israel to pursue, under the assumption that peace is impossible. Whether America has any interest, strategic or moral, in supporting the Israeli pursuit of such a strategy is a different question entirely.

LAST autumn Cody Wilson, a law student at the University of Texas, leased a Stratasys 3D printer. He wanted to print a gun, and more—he and the group he founded, Defense Distributed, wanted to develop blueprints for 3D printing of guns and gun parts, and distribute those blueprints online. Mr Wilson’s motives are overtly political; he wants to “[expand] a free sphere of action...in contradistinction to a planned regulatory scheme...The file is the message. Anyone can have it, anyone can print it, anyone can use it.” Stratasys was not amused. Mr Wilson says they reclaimed their printer before he had even set it up.

Undeterred, Defense Distributed raised enough money first to lease time on 3D printers around Austin, Texas, and then to buy two of their own. Earlier this month they successfully tested a printed, plastic 30-round magazine for an AR-15, one of the most popular rifles in America. They called their magazine “Cuomo”, after New York’s governor, who championed legislation banning magazines that hold more than seven rounds. Others have successfully printed stocks, grips and triggers, though not the chamber or the barrel of a weapon. That is much harder; but all this tinkering makes many people nervous.

Some of that fear may be overblown. Making a gun for personal use is usually not illegal, and home-made guns are nothing new. Ginger Colburn, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), says her agency has seen guns made from “pens, books, belts, clubs. You name it, people have turned it into firearms.” And it may lead to bad law. Michael Weinberg, a staff lawyer at Public Knowledge, an open-source advocacy group, fears clumsy regulation of 3D printing, rather than of the weapons themselves.

To that end, Steve Israel, a Democratic congressman from Long Island, plans to introduce legislation renewing and expanding the Undetectable Firearms Act. That bill outlaws guns undetectable to common X-ray machines. Mr Israel wants to make plastic magazines illegal too. Easier said than done. Banning plastic gun parts when none existed was one thing. Enforcing a ban when anyone with an internet connection and a 3D printer can make them is entirely another.

LIKE most people who post rambling screeds to the internet, Christopher Dorner probably hoped to spark a debate. Unlike almost all of them, he appears partly to have succeeded. When it is not issuing murderous threats or rattling off schoolboyish lists of favourite musicians and comedians, Mr Dorner's document (it does not warrant the term "manifesto") provides the basis of his grievance against the Los Angeles Police Department, from which he was fired in 2008 for making false allegations of violence against a supervising officer.

Mr Dorner unsuccessfully appealed that decision. If his document is to be believed, he then sank into a deep depression. The grudge curdled, and Mr Dorner determined that the vicious LAPD of the Rodney King and Rampart days had not, as the city liked to believed, turned itself into a upstanding, accountable police force worthy of America's second city. Instead it remained shot through with racism and continued to dish out violence with impunity. This is why he had been treated so appallingly, and this is why not only LAPD officers, but members of their families, had to die.

It is hard to imagine many police chiefs feeling they must take seriously complaints served by a homicidal maniac who had twice lost his case in official hearings. But on Sunday, two days before Mr Dorner's escapades appeared to have run their course, Charlie Beck, chief of the LAPD, announced that the department would reopen its investigation into the original allegation. Expressing his concern that "the ghosts of the LAPD’s past", might be resurrected by Mr Dorner's accusations, Mr Beck said he was taking this decision not to "appease a murderer" but to "reassure the public".

Mr Beck's timing was curious, and his motivations less than obvious. Despite a heavy police presence on the roads and in the air last week, Los Angeles hardly felt like a city on the brink of racial strife. Perhaps the police knew something the rest of us didn't. It is true that the elusive Mr Dorner became a sort of cult hero to some, inspiring bumper stickers and Twitter hashtags. Nor did trigger-happy officers do the force any favours when they shot up two women delivering newspapers who happened to be driving a vehicle resembling the suspect's. But the decision to revisit Mr Dorner's allegations seemed, if anything, likely to inflame them, particularly while he remained on the run.

The LAPD of today is a very different creature to the force of the 1990s, thanks partly to an eight-year federal consent decree that was imposed on it after the Rampart scandal. (Mr Beck and his predecessor, Bill Bratton, can also take some of the credit.) Today's officers speak openly and frankly about the shame of the department's past, and delight in opportunities to prove to outsiders how much it has changed, as I discovered in the course of writing this piece last year. Los Angeles, like most other American cities, has also been helped by a drastic drop in the crime rate over the past couple of decades, although it only takes a brief visit to many of the city's poorer areas to see the continuing extent of racial stratification.

The animus that the LAPD of 20 years ago earned itself among minorities, particularly the city's black population, has not been entirely eliminated, and perhaps never will be. A police force of 10,000, even an increasingly diverse one, serving a multicultural city of 4m will never be completely rid of racism. But the fact that the hunt for Mr Dorner appears ultimately to have ignited little more than a few jokes on social media does seem to suggest that the ghosts that haunt Mr Beck are fainter than they once were.

(Photo credit: AFP)

IN LAST night's state-of-the-union address, Barack Obama proposed "working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every child in America". It's not yet fully clear what Mr Obama has in mind. The White House's schematic plan proposes "Supporting all 50 states to provide access to preschool for all low- and moderate-income children", suggesting a largely state-based, means-tested approach, as opposed to a centralised, universal entitlement. Can America afford this? According to Mr Obama, America can't afford not to "invest" in pre-schoolers. "Every dollar we invest in high-quality early education", Mr Obama maintains, "can save more than seven dollars later on—by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime." If that's true, Americans would have to be idiots or masochists not to pony up. Unfortunately, the facts about the effectiveness of this type of programme are rather less clear than Mr Obama would have us believe.

Mr Obama's appears to be drawing heavily on the work of James Heckman, a Nobel-laureate economist at the University of Chicago, who in turn draws heavily on two relatively small studies, one focusing on the Perry Preschool Project and the other on the Carolina Abecedarian Project. Charles Murray, a conservative sociologist, sums up the standard complaint against generalising from the results of these projects:

The samples were small. Perry Preschool had just 58 children in the treatment group and 65 in the control group, while Abecedarian had 57 children in the treatment group and 54 in the control group. In both cases the people who ran the program were also deeply involved in collecting and coding the evaluation data, and they were passionate advocates of early childhood intervention. These shortcomings do not automatically disqualify the results, but think of it this way: if the case against the efficacy of early childhood interventions rested on two studies with small samples conducted by people who were openly hostile to such interventions, no one would pay any attention to them.

I think Mr Murray's right. So then what? Katherine Mangu Ward of Reason writes:

If only we had some kind of large scale well-tracked pilot program that could give us some information about whether that is a good idea. Oh wait! We do! It's called Head Start, the $8 billion federal program catering to more than 1 million low-income kids.

Better still, the federal government has done a huge study, tracking 5,000 kids and comparing them to kids who did not have access to Head Start.

The findings are not impressive. A 2010 analysis of that group found that the cognitive, health, parenting, and social benefits of the program had vanished by first grade. And a 2012 look at the third grade outcomes was even less heartening, with no discernible academic gains and teachers reporting slightly more behavioral problems in the Head Start kids.

This is basically the state of the debate over subsidised pre-school for families who can't otherwise afford it. If you favour the idea, you cite Mr Heckman on the Perry and Abecedarian results; if you oppose it, you cite the lacklustre performance of Head Start. Indeed, the miserable performance of Head Start likely accounts for Mr Obama citing a rate of return from specifically "high-quality" early education programmes. He's following Mr Heckman here. As Dylan Matthews of the Washington Post puts it in a valuable account of the debate, "[W]hat do we mean by 'high-quality'? When talking to experts like Heckman, one gets the sense that it’s a euphemism for 'not Head Start.'" So why think that an initiative that would seem to amount to little more than an expanded and bulked-up version of Head Start would exceed Head Start in quality?

One of the most common explanations of why it is that Head Start's early salutary effects evaporate by second grade is that the quality of post-pre-school education in America is so often substandard. If that's right, it would seem that taxpayer money would be better spent "investing" in improvements in the existing system of primary education. Such considerations lead Tyler Cowen to ask, "Is adding on another layer of education, and building that up more or less from scratch in many cases, better than fixing the often quite broken systems we have now?... Why not have much better kindergartens and first and second grade experiences in the ailing school districts?" Good questions, these. Which is not to say that it's not worth experimenting further in early-childhood education. State-based programmes in Oklahoma and Georgia, which has a voucher system, have shown some promise.

Another account of Head Start's ineffectuality has it that Head Start programmes spend too little per pupil. Most studies on the return to education spending find that how schools spend matters rather more than how much they spend. So the real question about funding has to do with the likelihood that the right kind of spending on early-childhood education will prevail with the expansion of current efforts. And even if we suppose that simply spending more money would improve on Head Start, it's not clear where that money is going to come from. "The president was silent last night on whether more funds would be available, or from where", notes Clare McCann of the New America Foundation. "But given statutory restrictions on the next decade of federal spending under the Budget Control Act of 2011, a significantly larger early education investment from Congress seems out of reach."

So here's the score. Expanding access to early-childhood schooling is unlikely to do much better than Head Start in the absence of significant improvements to the status quo system of early primary education, and Mr Obama has proposed no such reforms. That very important point aside, if the problem with Head Start is in the way money is currently spent, there is at present no realistic prospect of more effective administration in an even larger effort. And if the problem with Head Start is just that not enough money is spent, there is little realistic prospect, given America's straitened fiscal condition, for a large infusion of new spending.

It's nice to make money by spending it. But when you're short on money, you'd better not be short on evidence that conditions are really right for a fat return. Mr Obama, I'm afraid, has misled us.

Read on: Learning for the very young

(Photo credit: AFP)

OUR correspondents reflect on Barack Obama's state-of-the-union address to Congress

“THERE is much progress to report,” Barack Obama stated with satisfaction at the beginning of his state-of-the-union address. He was referring to the improving health of the economy and the diminishing number of American soldiers in harm’s way abroad. But he might just as well have been speaking of his strategy for facing down Republican opposition in a time of divided government.

During last year’s election campaign, a line in the president’s standard stump speech decried the idea of cutting spending on popular government programmes, “while asking nothing” from the richest Americans. This depiction of himself as the champion of ordinary Americans, and the Republicans as hand-maidens to the rich, was very effective. It not only helped him to win a second term, but also prompted the Republicans in Congress to acquiesce to his demand for higher taxes on the rich at the beginning of the year, for fear of living up to the president’s jibes.

No wonder, then, that Mr Obama has returned to the theme. In fact, he used exactly the same line in his address to Congress, modified only by a single word: “more”. “We can’t ask senior citizens and working families to shoulder the entire burden of deficit reduction while asking nothing more from the wealthiest and most powerful,” he intoned. The implication was that Republicans should agree to another tax increase in exchange for spending cuts that together would help stabilise America’s ballooning debt and avert the various fiscal stand-offs that loom. The president, it seems, has concluded that he can only get what he wants out of his political adversaries by rallying public opinion to his side, and that accusing them of coddling the rich is the easiest way to do it.

Thus instead of striking a conciliatory tone and proposing compromises, as he did throughout much of his first term, Mr Obama laid out an unashamedly partisan agenda. He reiterated past calls not just for higher taxes on the rich, but also for more restrictive gun laws and for concerted action to slow climate change—all ideas which Republicans abhor, and which will therefore struggle to make headway in the House of Representatives, which is under Republican control.

To his past demands Mr Obama added some new suggestions which are bound to be unpopular with Republicans, such as raising the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation. He also talked about making it easier to vote, not a popular cause on the right. On top of all this came various proposals which, while not especially controversial in themselves, sounded rather expensive. The president said he wants to ensure universal access to pre-school, and to expand vocational training in high school, and to set up a network of institutes promoting manufacturing and to create a tax credit for hiring the long-term unemployed, among other new schemes. All of this, he promised, would not add a dime to the deficit, although he provided no details of how it would be paid for.

Republicans immediately pointed out that the public debt has grown by 58.4 trillion dimes on Mr Obama’s watch. How could a man with such a record be trusted, they asked. Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida who gave the Republican rebuttal to the president’s speech, complained, “his solution to virtually every problem we face is for Washington to tax more, borrow more and spend more.” Referring to his own, working-class parents, Mr Rubio rejected the idea that the Republicans were the party of the rich and accused the president of being obsessed with raising taxes.

Mr Rubio made all this sound plausible, but Mr Obama has a much bigger bullhorn. No sooner had he finished his speech than he joined an online call with supporters. He is due to hold a series of rallies over the coming days to press his case. The president seems to see his ongoing stand-off with the Republicans over the budget as a win-win. Either they back down, and he gets the concessions he wants on policy, or they stand firm, and he gets to accuse them of recalcitrance. For a president who spent much of his first term courting Republicans without success, that must feel like progress.

(Photo credit: AFP)