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MATTHEW YGLESIAS at Slate discusses a fascinating new paper in the Journal of Economic Literature that asks "Why is the teen birth rate in the United States so high and why does it matter?" The authors, economists Melissa Schettini Kearney of the University of Maryland and Phillip B. Levine of Wellesly, find that having children as a young, unmarried woman doesn't much hurt one's economic prospects. It's true that young, unmarried women who beget don't exactly thrive economically. But that's not motherhood's fault. Ms Kearney and Mr Levine ingeniously use data on miscarriage to more precisely isolate the economic effects specifically due to motherhood from those effects due to other demographic and socioeconomic attributes that may also affect the decision to have a child. They find that young, single women who miscarry don't do significantly better than similarly situated women who don't. Nor do teen moms fare significantly worse than their child-free sisters, whom they tend to closely resemble in most relevant respects. All of which is to say, the alternative to the poverty of teen motherhood tends to be child-free poverty, not child-free non-poverty. As Ms Kearney and Mr Levine put it:

[B]eing on a low economic trajectory in life leads many teenage girls to have children while they are young and unmarried and that poor outcomes seen later in life (relative to teens who do not have children) are simply the continuation of the original low economic trajectory. That is, teen childbearing is explained by the low economic trajectory but is not an additional cause of later difficulties in life. Surprisingly, teen birth itself does not appear to have much direct economic consequence.

So why is there so much teen motherhood in America? Mr Yglesias summarises the papers' findings:

[T]een girls whose mothers have little education are much more likely to give birth than girls with better-educated mothers. Even more interesting is the way that economic inequality amplifies nonmarital births to teen moms. In particular, “women with low socioeconomic status have more teen, nonmarital births when they live in higher-inequality locations, all else equal.” The measure of inequality used here is not the fabled gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent, but the gap between the median income and incomes at the 10th percentile. It measures, in other words, the gap between poor people and the local typical household.* It may be a proxy for how plausible it would be for a girl from a low-income household to rise into the middle class. The more difficult that rise seems, the more births there are to unmarried teens.

Mr Yglesias then concludes that "family life seems to follow real economic opportunities. Where poor people can see that hard work and 'playing by the rules' will reward them, they’re pretty likely to do just that. Where the system looks stacked against them, they’re more likely to abandon mainstream norms."

I'm less sure about the causal story here. As far as I can see, the story is just that teen motherhood goes up when the perceived cost of teen motherhood goes down. What role is bottom-to-middle inequality really playing in the story? As Ms Kearney and Mr Levine note, rates of teen motherhood have declined dramatically in the past two decades. Yet bottom-to-middle inequality has barely changed at all. So something other than bottom-to-middle inequality is out there affecting things a lot. As they also note, other indicators show rising inequality. Did the runaway incomes of the top 1% decrease teen motherhood?! They don't think so, and neither do I.

Mr Yglesias mentions norms. Perhaps it's the case that the larger the proportion of folks at the tenth percentile who happen to think working hard and "playing by the rules" will benefit them, the smaller the income gap between bottom and middle and the larger the perceived cost of teen motherhood. Though they bring up possibilities in this general neighbourhood, I don't see that Ms Kearney and Mr Levine have done anything to rule this hypothesis out. Indeed, why not say that poorly-educated mothers, high bottom-to-middle inequality, and high rates of teen motherhood all have a common cause: a certain kind of culture. In that case, not having kids doesn't help poor teen girls economically because they're stuck having internalised a culture of economic stasis either way, kids or no kids. Isn't this what Charles Murray would say? Why shouldn't we join him in saying it?

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REPUBLICANS, we are told, respect authority and expect conformity. On the one hand, that spurs them to greater discipline than Democrats. "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican," Ronald Reagan said, in what has been dubbed the 11th commandment. On the other hand, people who expect conformity often punish those who deviate. That's why we've seen so many high-profile primary fights on the right this year, with moderate incumbents like Dick Lugar being challenged by tea-party voters who are willing to bin decades of experience in the name of ideological purity. 

I was starting to see it that way myself, but looking at the race for Texas's 16th congressional district, in El Paso, I'm wondering. El Paso is a heavily Democratic city—more Democratic than liberal Austin—and so the race will effectively be decided in the primary on May 29th. In a slightly unusual turn of events, however, it's turning into a serious contest between two Democrats. The incumbent, Silvestre Reyes, has been in office for more than 15 years, and has held influential positions in the House, most recently as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He is, in fact, the most prominent politician in El Paso (a region that never sends a candidate to statewide office, much less has a voice on the national stage); both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have endorsed his bid for re-election.

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COMMON CAUSE, a left-leaning advocacy non-profit, has filed a lawsuit against the Senate on the grounds that the filibuster defies the constitution. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, a leading anti-filibuster opinion-maker, lays out the Common Cause case as it has been articulated by Emmett Bondurant, a celebrated litigator and Common Cause board member:

Between 1840 and 1900, there were 16 filibusters. Between 2009 and 2010, there were more than 130. But that’s changed. Today, Majority Leader Harry Reid says that “60 votes are required for just about everything.”

At the core of Bondurant’s argument is a very simple claim: This isn’t what the Founders intended. The historical record is clear on that fact. The framers debated requiring a supermajority in Congress to pass anything. But they rejected that idea.

The constitution sets out six cases in which a supermajority is required in the senate, and passing ordinary legislation isn't one of them. Mr Bondurant's basic claim is that the upshot of this omission is that the majority vote is the mandatory default for decision-making about legislation. That is to say, the use of anything other than majority voting is prohibited, except for those cases in which another voting rule is explicitly prescribed. If the constitution doesn't outright say this, that's only because the framers thought it was too obvious to mention.

Mr Klein thinks Mr Bondurant "makes a strong case". Gregory Koger, a political scientist at the University of Miami seems not to agree. "I am very excited that Common Cause has filed a lawsuit against the Senate filibuster", Mr Koger confesses at the Monkey Cage blog. "Excited in a John Stuart Mill, isn’t-it-great-when-bad-arguments-get-aired-and-demolished kind of way." In a 2009 post, Mr Koger systematically reviewed the arguments against the proposition that the filibuster is unconstitutional. In his more recent post he responds specifically to the Common Cause/Bondurant brief:

The central argument of the brief is that the use of supermajority procedures in the U.S. Congress is inherently unconstitutional. It states, “The principle of majority was so basic to the concept of a democratically elected legislative body that it did not need to be expressly stated in the Constitution.” Of course, too-important-to-be-written looks exactly like not-important-enough-to-include, so affirming this claim would invite a series of lawsuits claiming other “obvious but unwritten” principles.

Mr Koger goes on to observe that the principle that "every supermajority procedure used by Congress is prohibited" if not explicitly required would take down a number of longstanding and uncontested practices in both houses.

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MITT ROMNEY'S campaign site has a simple statement of principle at the top: "We have a moral responsibility not to spend more than we take in." If Mr Romney actually believes this, he must think America a thoroughly depraved and immoral country. The US government has spent more than it has taken in for 76 of the past 100 years, and 26 of the past 30. The last five Republican presidents, Messrs Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush and Bush, have all violated this putative moral responsibility with joyful abandon, and they have plenty of company. There are almost no countries in the world whose governments spend, on the whole, less than they take in; the ones that come close to breaking even are mostly oil-rich authoritarian plutocracies or theocracies (Kazakhstan, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and so forth; Chile and Estonia are the sole democracies with public debts under 10% of GDP). Most countries with very low public debts are in that position not because they are thrifty or responsible, but because they are so corrupt, poor or unstable that no one will lend them money. North Korea, as far as anyone can tell, has virtually no national debt at all, but is obviously not doing well by its future generations. The world's wealthy, happy democracies, meanwhile, from Sweden to Israel to America to Japan, almost all maintain national debts of upwards of 30% of GDP, meaning they usually spend more than they take in. I would be interested to hear Mr Romney's explanation for this.

If he wins the election, Mr Romney, by his own account, has no intention of fulfilling any moral responsibility the government might have not to spend more than it takes in. Mr Romney has endorsed Paul Ryan's proposed budget, whose chief feature is a quick burst of massive tax cuts that will dramatically increase the federal deficit, compensated for by notional spending cuts which he largely refuses to specify. This budget would, according to Mr Ryan's own highly favourable estimates, still be running a $287 billion annual deficit in 2022, and would not come into balance until 2040, when Mr Romney will be 93. If Mr Romney does actually consider it a "moral responsibility" for the government not to spend more than it takes in, it must be the sort of moral responsibility you pay lip service to, but expect to go on violating in practice every day of your life, like the responsibility to love your neighbour as yourself.

I can't pretend to know whether Mr Romney actually believes in this ridiculous slogan, or whether he is simply plastering it on his website because he knows that it sounds appealing to many people whose ideas about the way economies work are simplistic. It would be easy enough to change the slogan into an accurate one: simply add the words "too much". "We have a moral responsibility not to spend too much more than we take in": that's true. But the entire argument is about how much is "too much", and what kinds of trade-offs you make by failing to spend more than you take in right now, as opposed to later, depending on the circumstances. That's not the kind of statement you can put on your campaign website, because everyone would agree with it, including your opponent, and you'd get bogged down in technical arguments. My best guess is that Mr Romney is perfectly aware that his slogan, as stated, isn't really true, but is willing to stand behind it because in the context of the presidential campaign, it serves as a signaling device to voters on various issues. Indeed, the slogan as used here is actually a link to a section of Mr Romney's website calling for "Smaller, Smarter, Simpler Government". This isn't a call for cutting the deficit at all. It's a call for reducing the size of government, which only cuts the deficit if you don't slash taxes at the same time, which would be fine except that Mr Romney is planning to slash taxes.

This brings me to the point of this post, which I've been a long time getting to. It is this: As we watch the presidential campaigns, how much effort do we put into critiquing what the candidates actually stand for or are likely to do, and how much do we put into critiquing the stuff they put out in their propaganda? For example, yesterday my colleague rightly agreed with many conservative commentators that the Obama administration's "Julia" web cartoon is, considered as an ad campaign, pretty lame. Then he took it a step further: he argued that when conservative commentators slam the cartoon for sketching a vision of a society in which citizens' lives are shaped by government policies from cradle to grave, they're just complaining about the reality of American society, as it would be under any administration, Democratic or Republican. Right. I don't agree that the differences between the Democratic and Republican visions for America in the 2010s aren't significant. But clearly the problem with the Julia cartoon can't be that it described the existence of Head Start, Pell grants, health-insurance regulations, and so forth, all of which will continue to exist under Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, if at different levels of funding.

Fundamentally, I think the Julia cartoon and Mr Romney's declaration that budget deficits are by nature immoral are both responses to the same campaign imperative: the difficulty of representing complex arguments over policy in terms that average voters can get their heads around. The Julia cartoon fell prey to a problem that always haunts Democrats: the "laundry-list of programmes" trap, in which liberals see lots of different social problems, try to address them in different ways (which is, after all, a better way to deal with complex and multifarious social problems than one-size-fits-all systems that don't address many situations), and end up confusing and exhausting the voters. Mr Romney's slogan employs a classic Republican approach: hold out a simple, sweeping principle that voters understand and embrace, even if you don't actually believe in it yourself because it wouldn't really be a good idea. In the long run, the repetition of these bogus principles by political leaders rots the timbers of the body poiltic, but in the near term it'll probably be okay, because most likely nobody will be able to implement them.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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ACCORDING to the internet's hilarious headline writers, Eduardo Saverin, a Facebook co-founder, dis-"likes" America's tax rules and has "un-friended" the land of the free in order to dodge a potentially monumental tax bill after Facebook goes public. Mr Saverin is Brazilian by birth, but has been an American citizen since 1998. Last fall, he filed the papers to renounce his American citizenship. Considering how well Mr Saverin has done here, is this jake? Farhad Manjoo thinks that not only is Mr Saverin's extreme self-deportation unfair, "It’s ungrateful and it’s indecent. Saverin’s decision to decamp the U.S. suggests he’s got no idea how much America has helped him out." Ilyse Hogue of The Nation is incensed:

In making this decision, the Brazilian native did more than expose his blind disregard for all that his adopted country has done for him. He has made himself the poster child for the callous class of 1 percenters who are all too happy to use national resources to enrich themselves, and then skate, or cry foul, when asked to pay their fair share. The story evokes the image of the marauding aliens from the movie Independence Day, who come to Earth to take what they can get before moving on to another planet.

Wait a second! Did Eduardo Saverin plunder us? Are we now a desolate husk of a country, sucked dry by Eduardo Saverin's rapine? Well, no. Facebook created wealth. Mr Saverin is leaving having deployed his capital in a manner that made America better off than it was when he arrived. But will he escape without rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's? Well, no. Both Mr Manjoo and Ms Hogue mumble in passing under their breath while coughing that Mr Saverin will have to pony up an "exit tax". So what's this woefully insufficient tribute come to, such that Mr Saverin may be so bitterly denounced for exploitation and despoilment? According to Danielle Kucera, Sanat Vallikappen and Christine Harper of Bloomberg:

Saverin won’t escape all U.S. taxes. Americans who give up their citizenship owe what is effectively an exit tax on the capital gains from their stock holdings, even if they don’t sell the shares, said Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, director of the international tax program at the University of Michigan’s law school. For tax purposes, the IRS treats the stock as if it has been sold.

Got that? Mr Saverin's on the hook for the amount his capital-gains tax would have come to had he sold all his American stock holdings. Tim Worstall sketches it out on his napkin:

[T]he net effect of his citizenship renunciation on his immediate tax bill is to increase it, hugely. For it will, at minimum, start with the idea that he’s just made a $3.5 billion or so profit (adjusted downwards for the difference between the private market value of Facebook last fall and the IPO price) on his Facebook stock which he got originally for minimal amounts of money. At the standard 15% long term capital gains rate that’s near $500 million right there.

Half a billion dollars! That is not scot-free. Did the marauding aliens in "Independence Day" leave behind a half billion American dollars after having successfully invested in Earth? They did not! One wonders how many pounds of flesh Mr Manjoo and Ms Hogue think Mr Saverin owes for the privilege of having Uncle Sam's hooks out once and for all.

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IN MOST opinion polls, Americans appear reluctant to cut defence spending. Of course, in most opinion polls Americans appear reluctant to cut everything apart from foreign aid. Despite all of the hand-wringing over the federal budget, the truth is most people don't have a firm grasp of how their money is spent. So the Program for Public Consultation (PPC), in collaboration with the Stimson Center and the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), tried to educate a group of Americans on one aspect of the budget. Last month they showed a representative sample of Americans the size of the defence budget from different viewpoints and presented them with arguments for and against cutting funds. The idea was to simulate a congressional debate; to put participants in the shoes of those actually voting on the budget.

Then they asked each member of the group how they would handle the defence budget if they were a member of Congress. They found

Presented the base national defense budget for 2012 and given the opportunity to set a level for 2013, three quarters reduced it, including two thirds of Republicans and 9 in 10 Democrats. On average defense spending was lowered 23%. A majority lowered it at least 11%.

When participants were asked to get more specific and propose changes to the levels of spending in nine areas, a majority cut all nine. "All areas combined were cut 18% on average, with Republicans cutting 12% and Democrats 22%," the study notes. Most participants were surprised by the level of America's defence spending when it was held up against the rest of the discretionary budget, historical levels of spending, and the defence spending of other nations. A previous poll showed similar results—support for defence cuts—when participants were informed about the comparable size of the 31 largest categories in the federal discretionary budget.

The potential cuts to the Pentagon contained in last year's budget deal are actually less than those proposed by the PPC study group on average. So it may seem odd that America's politicians are now scrambling to avoid those reductions. Instead, Republicans have proposed cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, social services and other programmes for poor Americans, while Democrats have proposed raising taxes on the rich. Few have pushed back against the military spendthrifts, who argue that America would swiftly decline were it to return to the level of funding George Bush laboured under at the end of his peaceable presidency.

I'm not sure if this means we need to educate our congressmen, or simply stop listening to them. It probably doesn't matter. As R. Jeffrey Smith, an editor at CPI, tells Suzy Khimm, the debate over the defence budget is one in which the “noisy minorities” dominate. And while knowledge is a powerful weapon, fear mongering is often more effective.

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IT'S a testament to the power of internet remix culture that I saw at least three parodies of "The Life of Julia", an online slideshow from Barack Obama's campaign, before I glimpsed the original. In the official version, we are shown Julia advancing through the stations of life, from girlhood to retirement, and told at each stage just how well she fares under Mr Obama's policies compared to Mr Romney's.

Looking at the real deal for the first time just now, and attempting to put out of mind the spoofs and criticisms I've already absorbed, my first impression is that there is something either metaphysically or politically queer going on. Barack Obama is president Julia's entire life! My second impression, after slapping the shackles on my hair-splitting inner stickler, is that it was really quite generous of Mr Obama's people not to admit outright the truth that Julia probably won't survive past 30 in the terrifying alternative universe in which Mitt Romney is eternally president, for in that timeline her heart is torn out and eaten by a roving band of cannibal savages in the aftermath of the global nuclear devastation precipitated by Mr Romney, who doesn't even have a Nobel peace prize. That is to say, my first impression was that "The Life of Julia" is completely ridiculous, even as a piece of propaganda, and I was immediately moved to satirise it. I guess that's why there are so many send-ups. David Burge at Iowahawk, I think quite accurately captures the flavour of the original's description of Julia's political alternatives, whatever you think of his politics. 

Ross Douthat goes beyond the observation that "The Life of Julia" is a risible piece of propaganda. He argues that "the slide show represents a monument to certain trends in contemporary liberalism" due to the "fascinating ideological purity [of] its attitudes and arguments". "On the one hand", Mr Douthat writes, "its public policy agenda is essentially a defense of existing arrangements no matter their effectiveness or sustainability, apparently premised on the assumption that American women can’t make cost-benefit calculations or indeed do basic math". But here's Mr Douthat's deeper critique:

At the same time, the slide show’s vision of the individual’s relationship to the state seems designed to vindicate every conservative critique of the Obama-era Democratic Party. The liberalism of “the Life of Julia” doesn’t envision government spending the way an older liberalism did—as a backstop for otherwise self-sufficient working families, providing insurance against job loss, decrepitude and catastrophic illness. It offers a more sweeping vision of government’s place in society, in which the individual depends on the state at every stage of life, and no decision—personal, educational, entrepreneurial, sexual—can be contemplated without the promise that it will be somehow subsidized by Washington.

This seems a bit too heavy to lay upon a cartoon slide-show intended simply to illustrate the difference between a few of Mr Obama's and Mr Romney's policies. Is Mr Douthat disappointed that there are no slides depicting Julia sniffing the crisp fall breeze, attending a pot-luck at a family reunion, backpacking through the Andes, kneeling at her bedside in prayer, or engaged in other mostly government-free activities? But Messrs Romney and Obama are seeking a government office. Mr Douthat grumbles that Julia "seems to have no meaningful relationships apart from her bond with the Obama White House". Now that I think of it, I cannot recall ever seeing a soldier eat nachos in an Army recruitment advert. Does the Army mean to suggest soldiers don't eat nachos? Lies! 

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THOSE who complain that Mitt Romney's privilege has left him insensitive to the workaday problems of the common man fail to consider that the man has apparently struggled for his whole life with the curse of awful timing. There he was Saturday, just days after Barack Obama was garlanded with praise for his surprise endorsement of gay marriage, giving a commencement address at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. That must have been about the last place a candidate would want to turn up if he was hoping to gently waffle about his views on social issues, as Mr Romney has been wont to do. 

The speech was an effort by Mr Romney, a Mormon, to bolster relations with non-Mormon Christians (or, to be precise, that subset of Christians who represent the "religious right"—as Timothy Noah aptly pointed out in March, the category of "Christian" encompasses nearly 80% of Americans). Polls show that a considerable number of people profess to be leery of voting for a Mormon; the wariness is especially pronounced among self-identified evangelical Christians, a demographic that has heavily favoured Republicans in recent elections.

This is actually the second major address Mr Romney has given on the subject of his religion. In 2007, while campaigning for the Republican nomination, he offered a speech that explicitly referenced John F. Kennedy's 1960 address on his Catholicism. In that speech, Mr Romney, like JFK before him, sought to reassure voters who were worried about electing a president whose religion includes a strong, centralised, earthly authority: "Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions."

The fact that Mr Romney became the nominee this year might be taken as evidence that concern about his religion has faded. This time around, Mr Romney focused on voters who were suspicious of Mormonism's beliefs rather than its governing structure. "People of different faiths, like yours and mine, sometimes wonder where we can meet in common purpose, when there are so many differences in creed and theology," he said. "Surely the answer is that we can meet in service, in shared moral convictions about our nation stemming from a common worldview."

Evangelical leaders applauded the speech. More generally, as Brad Knickerbocker notes at the Christian Science Monitor, Mr Romney's overall outreach effort has been "apparently successful". Sceptical though they may be of a Mormon, there are bigger bogeymen. I think back to Richard Land, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention, chuckling at an appearance at the National Press Club in DC last autumn, explaining that nothing unites evangelicals like Barack Obama. If values voters were going to undo Mr Romney, they were going to do it in the primary.

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THIS may get my blogger license yanked, but I haven't the faintest clue whether Barack Obama's endorsement of Dick Cheney's 2004 position on same-sex marriage hurts or helps his re-election prospects, or hurts or helps the fight for marriage equality. For all I know, Mr Obama has summoned the wrath of Jehovah and a horde of locusts is descending upon the South Lawn even as we speak. What I do know for certain is that Mr Obama's announcement made me a little cranky, and in much the same way it made Radley Balko cranky:

Obama’s statement doesn’t change a single policy. He has basically adopted a federalist approach to the issue. To my knowledge, gay marriage also happens to be the only issue in which Obama embraces federalism. Obama apparently believes the states should be able to discriminate when it comes to marriage benefits, but if they allow cancer and AIDS patients to smoke pot, he asserts the supremacy of federal law, and sends in the SWAT teams. What a twisted set of priorities. 

[...]

As leadership goes, it’s little more than acknowledging the direction the wind is blowing. It hardly merits a new chapter for Profiles in Courage.

Still, I think it was the right thing to do, and I'm glad he did it. One only wishes his views on other civil-liberties issues were evolving, or evolving in the direction of justice. 

Having declared my total ignorance of the net cash value of Mr Obama's flip-flop about legal gay nuptials, I will say that it seems quite sure to distract American voters somewhat from the economic recovery, such as it is. And one would expect this to force Mr Romney to spend rather more time than he'd like awkwardly imitating a conservative culture warrior. So Andrew Sullivan argues:

If this is a choice election, and social issues are salient, then Romney's in trouble. Every day he loses his economic message, his referendum on Obama gets shunted back a bit. So no surprise that Romney would rather not discuss immigration, gays, or marijuana. 

I'm rather less confident that the salience of social issues ultimately redounds to Mr Obama's benefit, but I do think Mr Sullivan is on to something, and that Mr Romney's reluctance to serve up a second helping of primary-season red meat does suggest that the long, justice-bending arc of the universe confers upon savvy conservative Democrats certain advantages.

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BARACK OBAMA took cubic miles of guff for spending the last few years insisting his position on gay marriage was "evolving". Now he's finally come out and said what everybody knew he was eventually going to say: he thinks gay people should be allowed to marry the partner of their choice. This puts Mr Obama back in the locomotive of the train of civil rights for gay people, which is where the Democratic Party wants him to be. It's hard to fault him for making the move, on either political or moral grounds.

But it's probably bad for the cause of gay marriage. Until today, the issue had only a moderate partisan cast. Officially, the Republican Party was opposed to gay marriage, and conservatives quickly responded to Mr Obama's declaration by reaffirming their opposition. But the issue didn't have a high profile, and many Republicans of a more libertarian slant on social issues were steadily coming to the conclusion in recent years that there was no reason why gays shouldn't get married just like anybody else can.

As of today, gay marriage is once again a partisan issue at the heart of a presidential election campaign. Many Republicans who might have had flexible opinions as of yesterday are now going to find themselves psychologically inclined to move towards the party line. Mitt Romney will be forced, within the next hours or days, to come out with a full-throated argument against gay marriage. Republican office-holders will have to vocally support that position. Republican media outfits (Fox News, conservative talk radio, RedState and so forth) will have to join the attack. Millions of GOP voters who otherwise might have gradually reconciled themselves to gay marriage within the next few months will be held back by the ideological alignments created in this presidential campaign.

The announcement is almost certain to help, not hurt, Mr Obama's re-election effort. Those who are radicalised against gay marriage by this announcement weren't going to vote for Mr Obama anyway; they are Republican voters who might have been on the fence about gay marriage. Almost no Democratic-leaning voters will switch or withhold their votes over this announcement. But many Democrats will be enthused to see Mr Obama take leadership on an issue of moral consequence in which they fervently believe. Voter turnout will rise; the tone of support for Mr Obama will become more emphatic. There will be a stronger sense that Mr Obama stands for a vision of America profoundly different from that of Mr Romney. The move may help re-elect a president who supports gay marriage. But my feeling is that it will delay the moment when support for the right of gays to marry becomes a widespread American consensus.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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UNLIKE colleagues such as Bob Bennett, a senator from Utah unceremoniously dumped by the Republican Party in 2010, Dick Lugar was not caught off guard. He had known for well over a year that he would face a strong, tea-party backed rival in the primary for the Senate seat he has held for the past 35 years. He planned accordingly, voting more conservatively, amassing a large war-chest and cranking up his get-out-the-vote operation. Nonetheless, yesterday Mr Lugar lost the primary by a whopping 20-point margin, to Richard Mourdock, Indiana’s state treasurer and a hero to many tea-partiers.

Politicians from both parties had described the race as a test of the tea party’s strength. As the candidate himself puts it, “Rumours of the death of the tea party have been exaggerated.” Jackie Bodnar, of Freedom Works, a campaign outfit that supports tea-party groups, says his victory will give impetus to tea-party candidates seeking the Republican nomination for Senate seats in Florida, Texas and Utah, among other races. Moreover, Mr Lugar’s defeat, says Theda Skocpol, of Harvard, “will send another shudder through the Republican ranks in Congress”.

Those who thought the tea-party movement was wilting after helping to propel Republicans to a thumping victory in the mid-term elections of 2010, Mr Mourdock argues, were simply mistaking evolution for disillusion. Randy Harrison, the founder of the Hancock County tea party, bears this narrative out. At first, he says, “we were just a bunch of people getting together and griping.” Over time, his group began to engage more formally in local politics. They have familiarised themselves with—and objected to—the county government’s scheme for local improvements. They have invited Republican and Democratic candidates to speak at their meetings (no Democrats have ever accepted), and endorsed some of them, including Mr Mourdock. Several members are now running for local office.

Of the 900-odd tea-party groups Ms Skocpol has been tracking around the country, some 600 remain active—a remarkable proportion, she argues, for a maturing protest movement. Tea-party activists, in her experience, display “unusual doggedness”. Mr Harrison agrees. His members are frustrated by Congress’s failure to enact the tea-party agenda, from fierce budget cuts to a repeal of health-care reform. But that failure has only caused them to become more meticulous in their approach to politics, he says. They realise it will take several election cycles to install conservative Republicans in enough offices to bring about the change they seek.

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• As the general election begins, the focus moves to the swing states, where the candidates (and their supporters) are gearing up for some close contests Source: Christopher Fitzgerald
• Ohio, which has picked every president since 1964, was the site of Barack Obama's campaign kick-off rally on May 5th. Here volunteers look up at a motivational video prior to his arrival Source: Christopher Fitzgerald
• To this point, Mrs Obama had been more active on the campaign trail than her husband. But here she prepares to introduce Mr Obama at Ohio State University Source: Christopher Fitzgerald
• Mrs Obama's turquoise dress almost matched the colour of the placards held by supporters. Mr Obama went with no jacket or tie, his typical campaign uniform Source: Christopher Fitzgerald
• The event attracted a crowd of about 14,000. But the president will reach many more voters with a $25m ad buy in Ohio and eight other swing states Source: Christopher Fitzgerald
• "This is not just another election," said Mr Obama. "This is a make or break moment for the middle class, and we've been through too much to turn back now." Source: Christopher Fitzgerald
• Polls show Mr Obama leading in Ohio. But his campaign is looking to expand the electoral map, giving them several routes to victory Source: Christopher Fitzgerald
• Two days after Mr Obama's rally, Mitt Romney campaigned beside an 800-ton press inside a factory near Cleveland, Ohio Source: Christopher Fitzgerald
• Mr Romney is "bracketing" Mr Obama by convening events in the same states and near the same dates as the president's visits Source: Christopher Fitzgerald
• National polls show Mr Romney running neck and neck with the president. His message for Ohioans is simple: Mr Obama has not delivered on his promises Source: Christopher Fitzgerald
• A man was booed for asking Mr Romney about $1.5m in foreign tax credits claimed on his 2010 tax return. Mr Romney said he would review the matter Source: Christopher Fitzgerald
• Outside the Romney event, Greg Smith hawks T-shirts critical of the president. Mr Smith said he would vote for Mr Romney Source: Christopher Fitzgerald

Gallery and Charts:  20120512_ObamaSwingStates

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NORTH CAROLINA passed its constitutional amendment to bar gay marriage by a thumping 61-39 majority yesterday. Celebrating the vote, Tami Fitzgerald of Marriage NC, the group that backed the amendment, provided a slightly different variety of question-begging from the ones my colleague addressed yesterday.

"We are not anti-gay, we are pro-marriage," said Tami Fitzgerald, chairwoman of the group. "And the point—the whole point—is simply that you don't rewrite the nature of God's design for marriage based on the demands of a group of adults."

Ms Fitzgerald's argument here is of the form "because God says so, that's why". I think this may be the most common form of question-begging in human society, though it is more often used by parents, with the word "I" replacing the word "God". One can't really hope to convince people who are resorting to this justification through argument. One valid rebuttal might be: "But God doesn't exist, and the government should not discriminate against gay people on the basis of some lady's characterisation of the intentions of an imaginary being. You may disagree with me about the existence of God, but given that some people think there is a God, some don't, and some think there is one but she's fine with gay marriage, the government shouldn't be picking sides." Unfortunately, given the religious make-up of the American population, this argument may not be entirely politically effective.

But it is useful just to briefly inquire where Ms Fitzgerald gets her conviction that the God she believes in has a design for marriage, and that it doesn't include gay men or women marrying each other. The Bible, obviously, doesn't say anything about gay marriage; it wouldn't become a major political issue for a couple of thousand years. What it does talk about, in those famous passages in Leviticus (and the ones in Corinthians, for Ms Fitzgerald and other devotees of the sequel), is homosexuality. It's agin' it. Leviticus says the penalty for a man who lies with a man as one lies with a woman is death. The same, it says a few verses later, goes for someone who has sex with a sheep, or with a woman who's engaged to somebody else. (If she's not engaged, you just have to pay 50 shekels to her family and marry her.) In Corinthians, Paul makes it clear that homosexuals will have no place in the kingdom of heaven (nor will adulterers, people who have sex before they're married, slanderers or thieves). Some interpreters make the hopeful argument that these lines are based on ambiguous translations or that it's anachronistic to apply them to modern understandings of homosexuality, but that seems a bit too optimistic to me. Though Jesus, as far as the Gospels tell us, was silent on the subject, and Matthew has him noting that some people have no interest in the opposite sex because they're just born that way. 

The point is, if Ms Fitzgerald is rooting her objections to gay marriage in biblical theology, then her claim that she is "not anti-gay" but "pro-marriage" is clearly wrong. The Bible is "pro-marriage", sure, in the sense that it thinks people who have sex outside of marriage should be killed, or will go to Hell. But this would suggest that gays should be forced to marry each other, if not for the fact that the Bible also thinks people who have gay sex should be killed, or will go to Hell. If this is where Ms Fitzgerald gets her sense of what "God's design" is, then her motivation is entirely anti-gay. Fortunately it's impossible to call yourself "anti-gay" in polite society these days, which is why Ms Fitzgerald uses the "pro-marriage" nonsense. All that means is that gradually, gradually, equality and freedom are winning, and one of these days (and it won't be long) Ms Fitzgerald is going to lose.

One final question, though: why does the Bible think homosexuality is wrong? Leviticus is simple and clear: it's "an abomination". More question-begging! Paul elaborates a bit more, not on homosexuality itself, but on the more general category of sexual immorality.

Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.

Well okay. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit; don't sin against it. Fair enough. Except...why is having sex with someone of your own sex a sin against your body? Come to think of it, it seems to me I know a fair number of gay people who treat their bodies pretty reverently.

We're begging the question again. It's turtles, all the way down.

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WHILE we're on the subject of gay marriage, I'm often at a loss for a good example of the logical fallacy traditionally known as "begging the question" (petitio principii), which did not historically mean simply "to raise the question". Our style book explains question-begging briefly here. But I think Maggie Gallagher, an opponent of same-sex marriage, actually just provided an even more perfect, real-world example for Daily Beast readers. 

To beg the question means to base an argument on the very conclusion you're trying to argue. It's a form of circular reasoning. So what does Ms Gallagher say when asked what tangible harm has come from same-sex marriage in those states that have allowed it? She responds (1) that people who believe in opposite-sex marriage only are being stigmatised, and (2) that marriage threatens to be re-normed as the union of two people of whatever sex, which means that children may not (by definition) have both a mother and a father.

A more perfect bit of question-begging is hard to devise. To (1), those people are being stigmatised mainly for being wrong, not for being evil, and that's because they can't give any better argument against gay marriage than (2): that gay marriage is not marriage, which they define (without defending) as between a man and a woman.  

I can certainly think of hypothetical bits of evidence that might make people like me and The Economist's editors re-think support for gay marriage. Ms Gallagher was asked to provide it.  But she offers no children suffering because they have two mothers. No higher divorce rates. No other social ills in the states where gays can marry. This is all that one of the country's most prominent opponents of gay marriage has to offer when given a softball question about the harm of gay marriage: no actual harm at all, except to the entry under "marriage" in Maggie Gallagher's personal lexicon. That's a social ill I can live with.

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THE New York Times ought to read this blog more often. In an editorial published today the paper reacts to the increasingly vocal support for gay marriage in the president's cabinet. It notes that Joe Biden and Arne Duncan recently came out in favour of gay marriage and says, "That made it even harder to figure out what Mr. Obama and his political handlers think is gained by the president’s hedging."

Allow me to help. In an earlier post, my colleague summed up the perils of an endorsement by Mr Obama. "Whatever the moral valence of the issue was before the president speaks, it shifts dramatically along partisan axes as soon as he takes a position," he wrote. In other words, were Mr Obama to embrace gay marriage, he might animate the opposition and retard progress towards greater acceptance. That is one argument, anyway. While Gallup reports more good news in its latest poll on the issue (majority support, again), public support has slipped after spikes in the past.

The interesting thing about the current debate over Mr Obama's position is that a good number of his supporters (though certainly not all) are comfortable with his hedge. Browsing the popular comments on another Times piece, I was struck by the amount of patience most readers showed with Mr Obama's caginess. They are confident that his motivations are noble, and believe that his support for gay marriage is real if not vocalised. So they are willing to wait for his second term, which they think will be more attainable if he is allowed to stay his hand.

This implicit trust in Mr Obama's core beliefs is an advantage the president has over Mitt Romney, whose principles are so opaque that he has had to make over-the-top pronouncements on issues that he might rather avoid. Mr Romney cannot hedge because he has already evolved too many times, on too many issues, in ways that are too convenient. Whereas a more reliably conservative candidate could dodge an issue like gay marriage, Mr Romney must not, lest he sow doubt in his conservative base. So the lesson for you young aspiring politicians out there is that having some principles is a good thing because it allows you to be a little less principled when it's politically advantageous.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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THIS George Will column is strange. The main subject is "The People's Rights Amendment" recently put before the house by Jim McGovern, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts. The proposed amendment to the constitution specifies that constitutional rights apply only to "natural persons" and thus would deny "all corporate entities—for-profit and nonprofit alike" constitutional protections. As Mr Will points out, many collective human enterprises are formally organised as corporations. This newspaper is one. So is the UAW. Under Mr McGovern's amendment, Mr Will writes:

Congress—and state legislatures and local governments—could regulate to the point of proscription political speech, or any other speech, by the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association, NARAL Pro-Choice America or any of the other tens of thousands of nonprofit corporate advocacy groups, including political parties and campaign committees.

Newspapers, magazines, broadcasting entities, online journalism operations—and most religious institutions—are corporate entities. McGovern’s amendment would strip them of all constitutional rights. By doing so, the amendment would empower the government to do much more than proscribe speech.

I agree with Mr Will that the amendment is therefore an extremely bad idea. However, there is no danger whatsoever that Mr McGovern's proposal will make it through even the first step of the amendment process. So what's Mr Will really on about?

Here's the oddity of the column: it begins with a discussion of a recent academic paper in which "the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled". That is to say, the authors argue it's morally okay to kill newborn babies. According to Mr Will, the argument "helpfully validates the right-to-life contention that the pro-abortion argument, which already defends third-trimester abortions, contains no standard for why the killing should be stopped by arbitrarily assigning moral significance to the moment of birth". And then he writes, "Now comes Rep. Jim McGovern ..."

Oh no! What does he want to do? Kill babies!? Not quite. As we've seen, Mr McGovern wants to deny that corporations should enjoy the rights of "natural persons". Though Mr Will never returns to the argument in favour of the permissibility of baby-killing, the connection seems clear enough. Just as the philosophers writing in the pages of The Journal of Medical Ethics can find in pro-choice arguments no principle of personhood that would forbid the slaughter of burbling newborns, there is likewise no principle implied by progressives' denial of legal personhood to corporations that would forbid further violence against our divine endowment of rights. So look out, Americans! Progressives want to put your first-amendment rights on the chopping block. And then what? Newborn gumbo?

I think we'd do well to acknowledge that rights cannot function as effective constraints on individuals or governments unless they are widely acknowledged as legitimate. You may believe, as I do, that rights are conventional rules of a certain kind. Or you may believe that they are an objective part of mind-independent moral reality. It doesn't matter. Even if rights are written by God into the book of nature, it doesn't make a whit of difference unless enough of us happen to agree about which rights of what shape are "out there". Now, I happen to think that newborns ought to enjoy the legal protection afforded "natural persons" whether or not they have crossed some metaphysical finish line and attained natural and/or moral personhood. I also happen to think that if citizens have certain rights, then it is not possible to deny incorporated groups of citizens these rights without violating the rights of their members. But this is by no means obvious. We should talk about it. But Mr Will's column discourages reasoned conversation not only by characterising a proposal to alter the status quo conventions about corporate rights as "proposed vandalism of the Bill of Rights"—that is, as the defilement of our sacred civic text—but also by very shadily associating the proposal with the idea that it's morally okay to slay newly-baked babies. I suggest we resist the sophistical, anti-deliberative drift of Mr Will's column and take this chance not only to continue the debate about the justifiability of corporate personhood but also to commence an open-minded public conversation about the justifiability of our society's baby-slaying conventions.

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OFTEN it happens that the ideal technocratic solution to an urgent economic problem of national scope is incompatible with the beliefs or incentives of policymakers. A small cadre of economists specialise in understanding how the incentives of politicians and bureaucrats affect economic policy and performance, and they often have enlightening things to say about the gap between ideal and politically feasible policy. Most economists, however, do not.

The toy worlds of economic models—even the most sophisticated—rarely account for politics, and almost never account for ideology. Consequently, most economists have nothing especially useful to say about the failure of governments to implement the best blackboard solution. It doesn't have to be this way. For decades Douglass North, a Nobel-laureate economic historian, has been harping on the importance of integrating into economic explanations the beliefs or "mental models" that account for the way culturally-embedded individuals mentally represent and order their choices. In his 1993 Nobel lecture, Mr North said:

Belief structures get transformed into societal and economic structures by institutions—both formal rules and informal norms of behavior. The relationship between mental models and institutions is an intimate one. Mental models are the internal representations that individual cognitive systems create to interpret the environment; institutions are the external (to the mind) mechanisms individuals create to structure and order the environment

There is no guarantee that the beliefs and institutions that evolve through time will produce economic growth.

Indeed, as Mr North makes plain, growth is the great exception to the historical rule. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that, to a first approximation, human beliefs and institutions have never produced economic growth. 

I bring all this up because economists lately seem to be flailing around a great deal in search of an explanation for the failure of Congress and/or the Fed to implement the policies their models prescribe. Watching economists concoct political explanations is by turns painful and amusing in much the same way watching ballet dancers try to sing opera is painful and amusing. Few of them have any relevant training, most of them do it terribly, but a handful seem to have a touch of delightful talent. Judging from his column last week, Paul Krugman should stick to dancing.

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JUST up the street from me at the moment, on the corner of the Bernauerstrasse, is a massive photo-mural depicting the same street corner on an August day in 1961: a snapshot of Hans Conrad Schumann, an East German soldier, hurdling the barbed wire on top of the still-under-construction Berlin Wall to get to the West, and freedom. In those days, the stakes that led communist regimes to construct obstacles to emigration were clear: they were afraid that combined envy of the West's prosperity and, to a lesser extent, its intellectual and religious freedom would lead huge masses of their citizens to flee abroad. That, obviously, is not an anxiety that affects today's Chinese Communist regime. The fact that China does not fear that any sign of openness will lead large numbers of its citizens to emigrate is one background factor behind Beijing's apparent willingness to reach a face-saving agreement to allow dissident lawyer Chen Guangcheng to apply to "study" in the United States.

The thing that has surprised me from the beginning of the drama is that it could possibly take place. We still don't know how Mr Chen managed to get from his village to the American embassy, but it seems extraordinary that the Chinese could have allowed a high-profile dissident to escape, could have lost track of him after his escape, or could have allowed him to approach the embassy to ask for asylum. On a couple of occasions during the time I spent in Vietnam, dissidents made surprise, unauthorised contact with American personnel at the embassy or ambassador's residence, but secret police stationed on the street nearby intervened extremely rapidly. In general, police seemed to know beforehand when dissidents were likely to stage such moves. That knowledge turned the relationship between dissidents, the regime, and the US government into a sort of choreographed dance, with limits drawn and signals sent based on mutual interest in avoiding embarrassment over declared positions. So it's not surprising that the result of the Chen Guangcheng drama looks likely to be one that allows America to maintain it has been true to its commitment to defending freedom of conscience, and also allows China to maintain it has not allowed Mr Chen to flee and claim political asylum.

That's not that different from the way things operated in the old days. The relationship between communist states and America around dissidents has always been a bit of a dance. What's changed is that America's interest in protecting dissidents is no longer a matter of either economic or strategic self-interest. China is not a military foe, or an enemy of capitalism; it's our largest trading partner. And now I'm going to go out on a limb and say something rather gushy and perhaps obnoxiously self-congratulatory: The fact that China is not our enemy makes our continued commitment to defending freedom of conscience for Chinese citizens all the more laudable. We really have nothing to gain from protecting Chen Guangcheng, except that it lets us give ourselves a pat on the back and walk down the street feeling all free and democratic. So let's! Sure, as William Dobson points out, China is probably just as interested in getting rid of Mr Chen as we are in protecting him. And sure, immigrants these days tend to come more because they're tired, poor and hungry than because they're yearning to breathe free, and Chinese citizens these days are less interested in coming to America precisely because the path to middle-class security probably leads through Guangdong rather than Los Angeles. Still, when that rare individual comes along who really considers the freedom thing more important than the wealth thing, we apparently still feel honour-bound to do something for him. And that's a nice thing.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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YOU probably can't fund a government on the basis of voluntary donations. I'm not sure it's ever been tried, but it seems like an idea that's unlikely to work. This, I think, is the gist of what Stephen King is saying when he takes on the irritatingly undead meme that rich people who think rich people should pay more taxes ought to just donate more of their own money to the government. My colleague is right that Mr King's rebuttal of this position may not be the most cogent one imaginable; Mr King is a master of enticing people to suspend their disbelief in unlikely theories, not of cutting those theories down. But I don't understand the distinction my colleague draws here:

First, he seems to think there is a class of problems that belong to the nation as a whole. Then there's the thought that problem-solving efforts financed by gifts from the rich people will prove ineffective, while efforts financed by taxes can work.

It seems clear to me that part of the reason why certain classes of problems belong to the nation as a whole is precisely that efforts to solve those problems through gifts from rich people will prove ineffective.

The key to Mr King's point here turns on a phrase i think my colleague glosses over too quickly. Mr King says rich people cannot "assume responsibility" for America's national problems. "Assume responsibility" is different from "write the occasional cheque", no matter how large. Rich people can make donations that may accomplish a short-term goal or two. They cannot guarantee long-term funding for projects or social institutions at the national level. What Steve Ballmer funds today, he may decide not to fund tomorrow. Indeed, this is precisely the problem with the way charitable foundations like the Gates Foundation or the Clinton Foundation work: they tend to lavishly fund the "hot", media-friendly priorities of the moment; they rarely or never endow projects that are not sexy and not counterintuitive, have no ultimate goal or exit strategy, and require many years or decades to take effect. Billionaires can accomplish things, but they cannot assume responsibility for national problems. No voluntary group of billionaires can guarantee benefits to every American retiree 25 years from now, not just because they don't have enough money, but because their commitments are voluntary. This is not a difference of scale; it is a difference of kind. Of course, nothing in this world is certain. But the closest we can come to making guarantees, in our society, is to assign the issue to the body which, with the authority vested in it through democratic elections, can levy taxes on the entirety of the economy and set binding rules to address that problem.

In the end I think my colleague is as anxious as I am to see the "if-you-want-your-taxes-raised-why-don't-you-send-the-IRS-a-bigger-cheque" meme finally dead and buried. As he says (referencing Mike Konczal), in the end, the question is about "the fairness of the way the tax code distributes the burden of taxation. Only changes to the tax code can fix inequities in the tax code. Donating or not donating to the government has nothing much to do with it." But this is a hard meme to kill! Stephen King seems to be doing a pretty decent job of trying, and the distinction my colleague draws seems to me to only breathe a vapour of false vitality into a tortured undead creature that ought to be allowed to go into the light.

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THE value-added tax is getting some love lately, but will anyone listen? In his new book, "The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform—Why We Need It and What It Will Take", Bruce Bartlett, an erstwhile Republican wonk, comes out in favour of a VAT. Josh Barro, a center-right economic policy analyst, writes today in favour of a VAT at Bloomberg View. Just one more curmudgeonly self-hating conservative tax analyst and we have a trend! (If you're not sure how a VAT works, Mr Barro's third paragraph has you covered.) 

Conservatives have long opposed a VAT on the grounds that it makes raising revenue too easy. Rather than starving the beast, a VAT awards the beast a lifetime pass to the Golden Corral. In a review of "The Benefit and the Burden", David Henderson, a research fellow at the Hoover Institute, tracks the evolution of Mr Bartlett's VATitude:

For a few years now, he has argued that the United States should adopt a vat, and he continues that argument in his book. Conservatives and libertarians tend to oppose a vat on the grounds that it is a “money machine” for the federal government. Indeed, Bartlett writes that he had opposed the vat on those grounds. So why did he change his mind Because he no longer sees “any hope of controlling entitlement spending before the baby-boom deluge hits.” He writes, “The United States [he means the U.S. government] needs a money machine.”

Mr Henderson contends that Mr Bartlett fails to justify the spending to be financed by the VAT money machine, and suggests that if it's indeed politically infeasible to rein in spending, it might be better for the government to shaft its creditors by defaulting on its debt rather than bleeding taxpayers with a VAT. Mr Bartlett says default would amount to "grossly immoral theft", but Mr Henderson isn't so sure. "Really?" he says. "It’s worse to default on creditors who took a risk than to forcibly take money from taxpayers who have no choice?" This question deserves some serious reflection, but for now I'll just say "Yes" and move on. 

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