It’s tempting to spend my time banging heads with Professional Right – Raging Republicans and Democratic “deficit hawks” who only seem to get excited about actually doing something about deficits when Democrats get into office. It’d be easy to get sucked into their game. Like Krugman, De Long, and Sons, I could spend my time pointing out the bizarreness of their arguing “we can’t do anything about jobs because if the deficit gets bigger, bond traders will stomp us by pushing borrowing rates through the rooff” when long term bonds rates are almost as low as they can get. Or any number of other brazen hypocracies. It’s a target rich environment right now; take your pick.

Somebody’s got to take them on. That’s what Krugman, De Long, Dean Baker, Ezra Klein, Daily Kos, etc. are for — God bless ‘em for doing it, and doing it well. But in the long term, if our side spends most of our time just stomping out Professional Right bullshit, we’ll lose.

In part we’ll lose because in the process we’ll lose the ability to really talk with the folks we care most about changing how they think about the economy. Because we’ll lose the ability to talk to them with respect.

Right now the Professional Right is playing street ball, and if you don’t give elbow shot for elbow shot, you’ll lose. But the people we need to reach the most aren’t playing street ball. They don’t deserve elbows or body slams. They genuinely mean what they’re saying. The folks who say, I don’t want the government to try to run the economy, I don’t want government telling me what to do. But who two minutes later say we’ve got to make sure lead doesn’t get into our kids’ toys. Or who say, I want less government — and make sure nobody cuts cut Medicare (ok, some of these folks are just old selfish fuckers, but plenty aren’t). Like the rest of us, they’ve got complicated, often contradictory feelings. When they say, “I want smaller government” what they mean isn’t as straightforward as it seems.

(If you’re feeling superior to folks who have this complicated, contradictory mess of feelings and thoughts, just ask a Professional Leftie who says all corporations are evil what they think about their iPhone).

So for now, I’m going to try to step back from the fray a little more. I’ll still take gratuitous shots at the Professional Right on Wednesdays if there’s a particularly juicy example. But when I’m doing my more serious work on Mondays, I’m going to try to spend more time experimenting/stumbling towards a way of bridging the gap between folks who are simultaneously against & for ” government” and how I see the world.

it’s basically a mini mobile home that rents for about $2,000 a month. You park one in the backyard, hook it up to your water and electricity, and it becomes a free-standing spare room for Grandma and Grandpa….

The MEDCottage is homey on the outside, with taupe vinyl siding and white trim around French doors. Inside, it looks like a nice hotel suite, complete with kitchen and bathroom.

According to its creator, it’s designed to take care of the unique needs of older seniors.

The 12-by-24-foot MedCottage is loaded with technology and amenities for the health, comfort and safety of the elderly or those recovering from illness or injury…. The comfortable interior is equipped with the latest technology to monitor vital signs, filter the air for contaminants and communicate with the outside world via high-tech video and cell phone text technology. Sensors alert caregivers to an occupant’s fall, and a computer can remind the occupant to take medications. The technology also provides entertainment, offering a selection of music, reading material and movies. It also contains a family communication center that provides telemetry, environmental control and dynamic interaction to off-site caregivers through smart and robotic technology throughout the charming, comfortable modular home.

Right now, putting a MedCottage in your backyard is illegal in most states — it violates zoning laws. Virginia’s spearheaded the way, with an exemption that started a month ago. Should be interesting to see if the idea lives up to its potential.

In his interview with the Wonk Room, [American Petroleum Institute Chief Economist] Felmy recognized that the [Center for American Progress] report concluded that you would get four times as many clean energy jobs as oil jobs from the same investment, because “green technology is more labor-intensive and less capital-intensive.” He admitted that if you invest money in clean energy instead of oil and gas:

“I have no doubts you can get a lot more jobs.”

In other words, tax hikes improve the economy.

Many suburbanites take free parking for granted, whether it’s in the lot of a big-box store or at home in the driveway. Yet the presence of so many parking spaces is an artifact of regulation and serves as a powerful subsidy to cars and car trips. Legally mandated parking lowers the market price of parking spaces, often to zero. Zoning and development restrictions often require a large number of parking spaces attached to a store or a smaller number of spaces attached to a house or apartment block.

If developers were allowed to face directly the high land costs of providing so much parking, the number of spaces would be a result of a careful economic calculation rather than a matter of satisfying a legal requirement. Parking would be scarcer, and more likely to have a price — or a higher one than it does now — and people would be more careful about when and where they drove.

The subsidies are largely invisible to drivers who park their cars — and thus free or cheap parking spaces feel like natural outcomes of the market, or perhaps even an entitlement….

if we’re going to wean ourselves away from excess use of fossil fuels, we need to remove current subsidies to energy-unfriendly ways of life.

The Economist’s Ryan Avent comments on the entertaining response to the piece by US libertarians, who like most Americans believe free/cheap parking is a God-given Right:

One of the results of the piece was a barrage of perplexing responses from people who normally agree with Tyler…

One thing that surprises me is that libertarian economists wouldn’t immediately adopt the default assumption that mandated parking minimums are bad. What does it mean to be a libertarian if that’s not your default position? Ditto for below-market pricing of scarce resources. You’d expect progressive writers to make a strong case that goods a, b, and c should be affordable to everyone and government subsidized as a matter of basic decency. It’s bizarre that libertarians leap to this position when driving-oriented policies are up for discussion.

The best part of the dustup is where libertarians try to argue that inexpensive parking is one of those rare places where the government needs to step in to provide a “public good.” There’s only one tiny problem:

You’d think that libertarians making the public good argument would have no problem defending government provision of and subsidy for [mass] transit, but of course they don’t. They get around this by arguing that people want to drive and they don’t want to ride transit. This is strange in that in few other cases would a libertarian claim to know what markets want.

Kevin was arguing we need to stop a nasty practice businesses are increasingly using whem hiring — using folks’ credit scores as part of screening them. Matt replied that although at first he is “inclined to agree,” he thinks we should

resist the urge to call for regulating the business practices of private firms when the issue isn’t pollution or some other case where the externalities are clear. After all, it seems like either this credit check business is a sound business practice (in which case allowing it is making the economy more efficient and ultimately building a more prosperous tomorrow) or else it’s an unsound business practice (in which case competition should drive it out).

It’s part of his approach to liberal economics — “take the rich people’s money and use it to pay for stuff, don’t tell them what to do with the companies they run.”

Regulate business to prevent negative environmental externalities, sure. Basic safety, okay. But the idea that what we need is for a bunch of people to get together and say that it would be better to ban this and that and the other capitalist act between consenting adults just strikes me as the wrong way of going about things. Purely economic regulation of this sort doesn’t have a compelling track record, runs into all kinds of Hayek-esque knowledge problems, and is basically an open invitation down the road for regulatory capture and the use of rules to prevent the emergence of competition. Count me out. For me, it’s all about higher taxes to finance more and better public services.

Aside from the fact that Kevin thinks it isn’t politically or economically doable, he’s got a deeper problem with Matt’s argument:

The more I think about this, the more it bothers me. Which is odd, in a way, since I’m not really a ravenous supporter of micro-regulating the business community….

we liberals shouldn’t view the relationship between businesses and individuals as solely economic transactions. There are core questions here of human dignity and basic fairness that exist quite aside from money.

Kevin’s right, our lives can’t be reduced solely to economic transactions. But he’s wrong to imply that the economy is somehow separate from values. Even basic economic transactions are steeped in values that are enshrined in law.

Take a core issue in contract law: when can you walk away from your debts and financial obligations? Recently Republicans and some Centrist Dems have been railing against ordinary folks who are walking away from “underwater mortgages” — mortgages that are tens of thousands of dollars more than the mortgage home is now worth. It’s unethical, they say, and we should make the penalties for dumping your debts as severe as possible (just like they did with personal bankruptcy a few years ago).

But corporations? That’s a different story. Big corporations can use bankruptcy to flush down the toilet 20 years worth of pension and health-care obligations their employees had been counting on for retirement, then reemerge from bankruptcy without a scratch. You can dress up arguments about when people should and shouldn’t be able to walk away purely in the language of efficiency, but fundamentally it’s about what we think is right and wrong.

Ditto for ownership. Some entrepreneurs have been pushing to create “benefit corporations” or B Corporations that are allowed to both maximize shareholder value and do social good. Why? Because right now it’s illegal. Under current law in most states, if a company’s CEO worries about anything other than maximizing shareholder value, they’re likely to get sued.

Ownership law also restricts you if you’re a shareholder. Shareholders may “own” part of a corporation, but unlike most things you own you’re severely limited in what you can do with your ownership power. If you want to file a shareholder resolution that encompasses anything beyond maximizing returns – and short-term returns at that – you have virtually no room to maneuver. And I don’t just mean you can’t consider Kumbaya values. If you own stock in corporations and, you’re worried that waves of corporate downsizing will cost you and lots of other folks in your community their jobs — in short, will hurt you economically — you’re not legally allowed to consider that fact when trying to shape the direction of the corporation you partially “own.”

When we treat values as if they are separate from the economy, we don’t take values out of the economy. We just lock in the values of the rich and powerful. And if we’re trying to create a better world, there’s no sense fighting with one hand tied behind our back.

The more you hear about the business community being worried about the future because it is “uncertain” about federal income taxes, the more you realize that it actually is the one pushing for increased uncertainty.

There already is absolute certainty about the tax cuts enacted in the early 2000s: Under existing law they expire at midnight December 31, 2010. Do nothing and we can all be absolutely certain that rates will go up. Somehow, however, that certainty is being defined as creating uncertainty.

By contrast, the changes to the existing law the business community is saying are so important to economic growth will require new legislation and, especially these days, the legislative process is about as unpredictable as you can get. So pushing for the three changes the business community says are so important to the economic recovery — keeping the current rate on upper income individuals and the existing rates on capital gains and dividends — has nothing to do with certainty and everything to do with lowering taxes compared to what they would be under current law.

The most certainty would be provided not just if there were no changes at all, but also if there were no discussion about whether there should be any changes. You can’t demand certainty and change at the same time. When you do that, the only thing that’s really certain is that certainty is not what you’re seeking.

Right now, the economy isn’t working for most of us. It isn’t surprising, because right now our society is shaping our economy based on the values of big corporations and the rich.

We don’t really see it, because of a sleight-of-hand/shell game our society plays. We pretend that most of us only want the government to play a small role in the economy — that’s how we end up with “keep the government’s hands off my Medicare” — and we pretend that political power plays a small role in the economy.

If we want a future where country worth fighting for, we need to stop playing these games and start talking about how to get an economy that’s based in our values. To do that, we need to answer 3 questions:
What values should shape our economy?
Who gets to decide?
How do we translate our values into the real world?

What
Stack the Odds In Favor of the Good Guys
Get Real: making tough decisions (versus NIMBY-ism)

Who (Power)
Democracy = everybody should have a real say
But voting isn’t enough. To have real democracy, we need to deal with power
Checks and Balances
You Haven’t Succeeded until It’s Politically Sustainable
Get Real: Confronting Conflicting Interests (versus carbon tax folks)
Mobilize over “Pony up”

How
No Magic Wand — free-market cheerleaders say “government bureaucrats can’t be smarter than the market.” But any intervention, including “market-based” solutions, runs into the same problem.
We Aren’t As Smart As We Think We Are
So what do we do?
Create/nurture markets
Make it easy (a.k.a., people & organizations aren’t calculators)
Ban some actions
Feedback loops & hold people accountable (e.g., Wall Street and creating good jobs)

Some of the strongest backing for the bill has come from AARP, which sent a letter to committee members on Monday pointing out that the country’s aging population will be poorly served if development patterns don’t evolve to make driving less necessary. “Nine out of ten of our members tell us they want to stay in their own homes as they age — most are living in suburban or rural areas and don’t have access to public transportation,” said Debra Alvarez, senior legislative representative for AARP. “There’s a lot of things that can be done in small towns: co-locating things like post offices, grocery stores, pharmacies, and putting housing there too.”

A few Smart Growth advocates have been making the connection between our aging population and the need for Smart Growth for a while now. It’s great to see that the ideas have gone from theory to senior boots on the ground.

But it turns out that Grove is not your average CEO.

the great Silicon Valley innovation machine hasn’t been creating many jobs of late—unless you’re counting Asia, where American tech companies have been adding jobs like mad for years.

The underlying problem isn’t simply lower Asian costs. It’s our own misplaced faith in the power of startups to create U.S. jobs…

Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.

The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that’s the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.

The underlying problem: the rules are stacked in favor of off shoring manufacturing jobs.

Each company, ruggedly individualistic, does its best to expand efficiently and improve its own profitability. However, our pursuit of our individual businesses, which often involves transferring manufacturing and a great deal of engineering out of the country, has hindered our ability to bring innovations to scale at home. Without scaling, we don’t just lose jobs—we lose our hold on new technologies. Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate…

We got to our current state as a consequence of many of us taking actions focused on our own companies’ next milestones. An example: Five years ago a friend joined a large VC firm as a partner. His responsibility was to make sure that all the startups they funded had a “China strategy,” meaning a plan to move what jobs they could to China.

How do we get out of this mess? Not by big corporate tax cuts but by rebuilding “our industrial commons.”

We should develop a system of financial incentives: Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars—fight to win.) Keep that money separate. Deposit it in the coffers of what we might call the Scaling Bank of the U.S. and make these sums available to companies that will scale their American operations. Such a system would be a daily reminder that while pursuing our company goals, all of us in business have a responsibility to maintain the industrial base on which we depend and the society whose adaptability—and stability—we may have taken for granted.

Grove’s strategy doesn’t address how we could at the same time ensure our brothers and sisters in China also get good jobs . But it’s still a pretty amazing statement from the head of one of the most successful US manufacturing companies in the last 25 years.