the economist

GUN-CONTROL legislation fell short last month in a close Senate vote, but some spy flickers of hope in the "world's greatest deliberative body". However, the sense of urgency that followed the Newtown massacre has definitely faded, and new studies from the Department of Justice and the Pew Research Center showing an astonishing drop in gun violence over the past two decades seem to call into question the need for new, stricter regulations. Americans have been improving control over their many, many guns without it.

Pew reports:

Compared with 1993, the peak of U.S. gun homicides, the firearm homicide rate was 49% lower in 2010, and there were fewer deaths, even though the nation’s population grew. The victimization rate for other violent crimes with a firearm—assaults, robberies and sex crimes—was 75% lower in 2011 than in 1993. Violent non-fatal crime victimization overall (with or without a firearm) also is down markedly (72%) over two decades.

The Department of Justice recently reported similar stats. Gun-rights advocates are crowing. Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review says that the Pew and DOJ reports make "embarrassing reading for those who spend their time trying to make it appear as if America is in the middle of a gun-crime wave". Mr Cooke adds: "And those screaming '. . .but Sandy Hook!' will no doubt be pleased to know that school shootings, too, are down 33 percent since 1993".

This is all most excellent news, though I would resist the impulse to think that these welcome trends will somehow vitiate the felt need for further gun control.

The decline in gun violence is consistent with a truly amazing general decline of violence, a subject recently explored in Steven Pinker's fascinating book, "The Better Angels of our Nature". This trend defies easy explanation. Mr Pinker speculates that we have become more pacific through the gradual cultural refinement of rational capacities that have guided us away from ancient strategies of violence. One of my own pet hypotheses is that human life becomes literally more valuable to the living as we become wealthier and longer-lived. Wealthier lives have, other things equal, a better experiential texture. And as life expectancy increases, early death steals more years. So we become less likely to feel that life is disposable or cheap, and more likely to see intolerably profound loss in premature death.

Insofar as guns are seen as dangerous tools for killing, it makes sense that they would become increasingly odious to increasingly peaceful sensibilities. (And insofar as guns are seen as necessary tools of public safety and self-defence, gun control itself may seem increasingly dangerous. One's side in this debate perhaps depends more than anything on a judgment about the greater source of peril.) New demand for gun control may reflect the same shift in sensibility that has already made us less likely to use guns for violent ends. When the felt value of life increases, a small death toll can add up to a large sense of loss, and a large death toll can add up to an incomprehensible enormity. How many good hours of life were robbed from the children at Sandy Hook Elementary? Perhaps it's callous to the past to imagine that each individual life seems more valuable to us today than it did to our forebears a century ago. Still, I suspect it does. In which case, an almost-50% decrease in gun homicide may not represent quite as much progress as it at first appears. Would the 1993 rate of gun violence seem twice as intolerable today? Who knows? What I do know is that our sense of peril, our sense of what's at risk, does not track crime statistics in any simple way.

The twist in the Pew study is that Americans appear quite ignorant of these happy developments. Indeed, most Americans believe falsely that gun violence has increased. "Despite the attention to gun violence in recent months", the authors of the Pew study write, "most Americans are unaware that gun crime is markedly lower than it was two decades ago." This has some conservatives complaining of liberal "media bias", and there's probably some of that, though selection bias of the "if it bleeds, it leads" variety, and the centrality of gun violence to pop entertainments, probably has more to do with it. I'd add that the psycho-social dynamic I describe—our growing estimate of life's preciousness—might have something to do with it, too. Perhaps the salience of gun crime has increased for the same reason the danger of allowing children to walk to school alone, or to ride bicycles without shoes or helmets, has also increased in salience. Parents don't love their children any more then they used to, but they feel, probably correctly, that children now have more to lose.

In any case, general ignorance of the fall in gun violence ought to cut both ways. Once we understand how much safer we have really become, the felt need to own a gun in order to defend against guns ought to recede. Right?

(Photo credit: AFP)

EARLIER this year, when a lawsuit accused Anheuser-Busch of selling watered-down beer, it caused only a minor buzz. America’s biggest breweries have long produced flavourless tipples. And anyway, those seeking a more robust brew have plenty of options. Today’s beer market increasingly resembles that of the pre-Prohibition era, when smaller, regional breweries dotted the map. Such is the demand for good-tasting beer that, on average, more than one new brewery opened every day last year.

Small and independent breweries have thrived during the recession and its aftermath, taking market share away from traditional brands like Budweiser and Miller Lite. According to Beer Marketer’s Insights, a trade publication, craft beer has grown over 13% by volume in each of the past three years. America’s two biggest brewers, Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors, still account for around three-quarters of the domestic market, to craft’s 6.7%. But even they have noticed the change in consumer tastes. Whereas sales of their big brands have dropped off, gains have been made by offerings derisively called “crafty beer”, which look and taste like craft brews.

This has led to some debate over what constitutes a craft beer and an intra-industry squabble over taxes. The Brewers Association promotes the interests of “small, independent, and traditional” brewers that produce up to 6m barrels of beer a year. The largest craft brewer under this definition is the Boston Beer Company, maker of Samuel Adams, which produced over 2m barrels last year. That number also happens to be the cut-off for favourable treatment by the government, which gives small brewers a break on the federal excise tax.

As the craft-beer industry grows, the Brewers Association thinks more of its members will join Boston Beer on the wrong side of the tax code. So it is pushing Congress to pass a bill that would raise the excise-tax bar to 6m barrels a year. In March hundreds of small-brewery owners took their case to Congress. But the Beer Institute, which represents big and small brewers alike, unsurprisingly favours a different bill that would cut the excise tax for the whole industry.

Opponents of slashing the excise tax, which has not been adjusted since 1991, note that inflation has already reduced its potency. Moreover, some see higher alcohol taxes as a way to increase revenues. But others are sympathetic to the Beer Institute’s claim that taxes have become the most expensive ingredient of beer. Hence, perhaps, the bitter taste of some brews.

IN AN op-ed in the Washington Post, Jim DeMint and Robert Rector of the conservative Heritage Foundation desecrate the methods of sound social science as well as the memory of the sainted dead. On the way to touting a new Heritage study on the costs of immigration reform—a study that was immediately lambasted by the scholars of other right-leaning think tanks—Messrs Demint and Rector appeal to the authority of the late Milton Friedman (pictured). They write:

The economist Milton Friedman warned that the United States cannot have open borders and an extensive welfare state. He was right, and his reasoning extends to amnesty for the more than 11 million unlawful immigrants in this country. In addition to being unfair to those who follow the law and encouraging more unlawful immigration in the future, amnesty has a substantial price tag.

I'll get to the putative costs of amnesty in a moment. First let's set the record straight on Milton Friedman's oft-misunderstood "warning" about open borders and the welfare state. In a lecture titled "What is America?" Mr Friedman offers this thought:

[I]t is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promised a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.

Look, for example, at the obvious, immediate, practical example of illegal Mexican immigration. Now, that Mexican immigration, over the border, is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It’s a good thing for the United States. It’s a good thing for the citizens of the country. But, it’s only good so long as its illegal.

Please note that this is an argument in favour of large-scale illegal immigration, which is not what Messrs Demint and Rector wish to recommend. In the context of a large welfare state, Friedman favoured illegal over legal immigration because, (a) immigration to jobs is "a good thing" for everyone involved, and (b) illegal immigrants are ineligible for most forms of government transfer payments and therefore must be immigrating for jobs, which is just great. Friedman's argument here amounts to little more than the simple observation that it's infeasible to give lots of free money to anyone who shows up, because scads of people will then show up just for free money, and there won't be enough money to go around. However, in order to work as an argument against increased legal immigration, Friedman required a further, false assumption: that legal residency logically entails eligibility for free money. It doesn't.

Residency and eligibility for welfare are logically and legally separable matters, and they are for the most part legally separated. The immigration-reform legislation of 1996 explicitly barred most non-citizens from receiving most benefits, and matters remain much the same to this day. (In any case, poor resident aliens are less likely than poor American citizens to claim the benefits for which they are eligible). America, or any other country, can have relatively open borders and an extensive welfare state. What they can't have is the policy, which no one has ever actually favoured, of giving away free money to anyone who happens to reside within their country's borders. This is the policy Friedman pointlessly warned us against, and it has no real bearing on the current debate over immigration reform.

That said, even if Friedman's argument (for illegal immigration!) did not founder on a simple mistake, it still wouldn't work as an argument against offering illegal residents a path to legal residency. As far as Friedman was concerned, if those immigrants came primarily for work, and not for welfare, we should be happy to have them stick around. If the possibility of a future amnesty sweetens the prospect of illegal immigration for other hard-working foreigners, all the better.

Now, it's quite clear that Messrs Rector and DeMint disagree fundamentally with Mr Friedman on the merits of relatively free immigration. They deny that that those who have illegally immigrated to find jobs are "a good thing" for America, and they argue that providing those residents a path to citizens will exact a terrible price:

Already, illegal immigrants impose costs on police, hospitals, schools and other services. Putting them on a path to citizenship means that within a few years, they will qualify for the full panoply of government programs: more than 80 means-tested welfare programs, as well as Social Security, Medicare and Obamacare. The lifetime fiscal cost (benefits received minus taxes paid) for the average unlawful immigrant after amnesty would be around $590,000. Who is going to pay that tab?

It is for this estimate, among others, that Mr Rector and Jason Richwine, his co-author on the Heritage study, have been flayed. Messrs Rector and Richwine fail entirely to take into account the larger dynamic consequences immigration reform. Tim Kane, an economist formerly of the Heritage Foundation, complains that "The authors estimate fiscal benefits only (and weakly), but ignore economic benefits entirely". He goes on to add that:

Millions of migrants cannot help but add to the GDP, and more importantly to specialization and growth. Dynamically, there are at least two huge channels of positive feedback into the productive side of U.S. economy—think of less expensive farm produce and greater demand for housing.

As Shikha Dalmia, writing for Bloomberg, noted last month:

State-level studies that have taken both [fiscal and dynamic economic effects] into account consistently find that the economic contributions of these immigrants dwarf their fiscal costs. A 2006 analysis by the Texas comptroller estimated that low-skilled unauthorized workers cost the state treasury $504 million more than they paid in taxes in 2005. Without them, however, the state’s economy would have shrunk by 2.1 percent, or $17.7 billion, as the competitive edge of Texas businesses diminished.

Likewise, a 2006 study by the Kenan Institute at the University of North Carolina found that although Hispanic immigrants imposed a net $61 million cost on the state budget, they contributed $9 billion to the gross state product.

A similar result seems likely to hold for the country as a whole. Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute cites a recent paper by Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda, a political scientist at UCLA, which uses a dynamic model to estimate that "immigration reform would increase U.S. GDP by $1.5 trillion in the ten years after enactment", and that the effect of implementing the policy currently favoured by Heritage would lead to "a $2.6 trillion decrease in estimated GDP growth over the next decade".

My guess is that these estimates are too high, but neither Milton Friedman nor the authors of the Heritage study offers a serious reason to doubt that the economic benefits of immigration reform will far outweigh the costs.

(Photo credit: AFP)

LET'S say you consider America's federal gun-control laws to be uniquely dangerous instruments of government oppression. You think the second amendment gives citizens the right to buy, carry, transport and sell pretty much any weapon they like. What do you do? If you’re a Kansas state legislator, you and your governor decide to enact the Second Amendment Protection Act:

Any act, law, treaty, order, rule or regulation of the government of the United States which violates the second amendment to the constitution of the United States is null, void and unenforceable in the state of Kansas.

One might wonder why the second amendment needs protecting by Kansas's politicians. The Supreme Court has been defending it robustly in recent years, with two cases giving wide scope to individual gun-ownership rights. But Kansans insist on more: exempting themselves from laws like the Gun Free School Zones Act and the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. And there’s more: S.B. No. 102 makes it a felony for federal agents to attempt to do their job within the state of Kansas:

It is unlawful for any official, agent or employee of the government of the United States, or employee of a corporation providing services to the government of the United States to enforce or attempt to enforce any act, law, treaty, order, rule or regulation of the government of the United States regarding a firearm, a firearm accessory, or ammunition that is manufactured commercially or privately and owned in the state of Kansas and that remains within the borders of Kansas.

That’s right: it is now a crime for a federal officer to enforce federal law in Kansas.

How can the trapezoidal midwestern state do this? Well, it can’t, and Attorney-General Eric Holder has the unenviable job of explaining why. In a letter to Sam Brownback, the governor of Kansas, Mr Holder was all business:

In purporting to override federal law and to criminalise the official acts of federal officers, SB102 directly conflicts with federal law and is therefore unconstitutional.

Under the Supremacy Clause…Kansas may not prevent federal employees and officials from carrying out their official responsibilities. And a state certainly may not criminalise the exercise of federal responsibilities. Because SB102 conflicts with federal firearms laws and regulations, federal law supercedes this new statute; all provisions of federal laws and their implementing regulations therefore continue to apply.

It is remarkable that a civics lesson like this is necessary. But Kansas has actually raised the stakes. Mr Brownback launched a defiant response to Mr Holder’s letter (“the people of Kansas have expressed their sovereign will”, he wrote, and the attorney-general’s perspective is merely “the view of the Obama administration”) and dozens of other states have considered similar legislation. A teachable moment presents itself.

The technical term to describe Kansas’s legislative move is “nullification”. Before the civil war, several states worried the federal government was encroaching on their sovereignty and threatening to regulate slavery against their wishes. After John Calhoun claimed the power of South Carolina to nullify a federal tariff in 1830, President Andrew Jackson was not amused. “The Constitution of the United States...forms a government, not a league”, he wrote. Rejecting a federal law will “destroy the unity of a nation.” In the tome from which this blog borrows its name, Alexis de Tocqueville put it this way: “when the majority has once spoken, it is the duty of the minority to submit.” The civil war put an end to southern nullification efforts, but the idea sprang up again when several states registered intransigent opposition to school desegregation efforts in the 1950s. The Supreme Court unanimously rebuffed legislation to undermine the Brown v Board of Education decision, reminding Arkansas that the constitution is the supreme law of the land and that the court, as per Marbury v Madison, has the final word on what the constitution means.

But legislators in Kansas insist that their interpretation of the second amendment must not be trifled with. Pointing to the guarantees of the ninth and tenth amendments, as well as the second, the Kansas law insists on defending the right to bear arms “as that right was understood at the time that Kansas was admitted to statehood in 1861, and the guaranty of that right is a matter of contract between the state and people of Kansas and the United States...” The legislation is silent on the historical matter of how the second amendment was regarded a century and a half ago; the emphasis, despite this disingenuous social-contract framing, is on how Kansans view that right in 2013. That much is clear. What is less clear is how the people of Kansas think the American story will continue to be written if all 50 states are empowered to ignore federal laws and punish federal agents who try to carry them out.

VOTERS in South Carolina's first congressional district head to the polls today to elect their congressional representative. The seat's previous occupant, Tim Scott, is now in the senate; South Carolina's governor gave him a promotion when Jim DeMint, who held the Senate seat, left to run the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank. Mr Scott's promotion set off a scramble, especially on the right: the primary featured two Democrats and 16 Republicans. Elizabeth Colbert-Busch, a businesswoman with a very famous and supportive brother, won the Democratic nod (though unlike Mr Col-BEAR, she pronounces her surname COAL-bert). Mark Sanford came top of the rightward heap. This is the same Mark Sanford who held this seat in the late 1990s before serving as South Carolina's governor, during which stint he vanished for a few days, having told his spokesman he was hiking the Appalachian Trail when in fact he had jetted off to Argentina to see his mistress. National Republicans bit their tongues. But then came news that two days after the general election, Mr Sanford was due to appear in court on trespassing charges. He contends he was simply watching part of the Super Bowl with his son because "as a father, I didn't think he should sit alone and watch it." National Republicans now loosened their tongues and shut their wallets. National Democrats, sensing the opportunity to seize a Republican seat, did the opposite: the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee bought airtime for Ms Colbert-Busch; the House Majority PAC backed her, as did some labour unions.

All of that has had the odd effect of letting Mr Sanford, a former congressman and governor whose name was floated as a possible vice-presidential nominee in 2008, run as the scrappy, independent underdog campaigning on a shoestring, while tying Ms Colbert-Busch, who has never held elected office, to Republicans' Unholy Trinity: Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. It's a nifty little piece of campaign jujitsu, and Mr Sanford has pulled it off well. Yesterday Ms Colbert-Busch campaigned from a blue bus, with "ELIZABETH MEANS BUSINESS" painted on both sides. Mr Sanford rode in an SUV driven by a sweet, somewhat anxious young woman named Martha (Mr Sanford told another reporter that Martha was "an awful driver, terrible"). Ms Colbert-Busch spent yesterday morning urging people in the heavily black northwestern suburbs to vote; Mr Sanford spent the afternoon in the district's older, whiter and richer southern reaches.

I caught up with him in Bluffton, where he was due to make a stop at Year Round Pools. A group of 13 Colbert-Busch supporters (all women, mainly retirees from the Sun City complex up the road) had massed, waving signs and cheering, on the public ground that flanked the pool shop's driveway. They were the only sign of an impending appearance from Mr Sanford. When he arrived, he went straight up to them, his smile pressed and ironed, and started shaking hands. "I think this is what makes America great," he said, "and I admire you exercising your constitutional rights." One of the protestors asked him to consider casting his vote for Ms Colbert-Busch; he promised to consider it. Before long he had the protestors smiling, laughing and joking with him. He walked into Year Round Pools, trailing a half-dozen journalists, a couple of staffers and seven supporters; inside he found just the store's owner, who said he had "no idea you were coming", and an employee. He pressed the flesh all the same. He gives the impression of finding it utterly incomprehensible that anyone, anywhere for any reason could dislike him. He is compulsively charming.

I tried to ask him a question about dredging Charleston's port; he dodged, instead gaming out a plan to make an impromptu stop at Cracker Barrel on the way to another event in nearby Beaufort. "How about I drive you there," he said to me, "and you can ask anything you want and write on the way. I know where I'm going." I have covered innumerable campaigns; that was the first time I had ever seen, let alone experienced, a candidate driving a journalist to an event (usually they prefer us under the wheels, and then on the road in their rear-view mirrors, not in the passenger seat). I again tried to ask a question about jobs and employment in the district; he parried by saying the election "has little to do with me and Elizabeth. It all has to do with the composition of Congress... If Democrats can win here they can make the case to the political-investor community that they can win another 15 seats and take back the House." It's a shrewd theory, and he certainly has been running harder against Ms Pelosi than against his opponent. In between such analytical nuggets came waves of New Age-y introspection: "I'm at a place where everything is kind of a blessing"; "I had a very quiet and spiritual year where I just retreated from life"; "I'm becoming a Buddhist Christian"; "When you've been through the storm that I've been through, it's a blessing to talk about issues." Like many aggressive, ambitious, hard-charging people who suffer a setback, he was aggressive and hard-charging in his introspection. Just for the sake of argument, I might note that a "storm" is a meterological event over which humans have no control. That does not quite apply to Mr Sanford's situation. I have no doubt that the past few years have been painful and embarrassing for him, but that pain and embarrassment did not simply break upon him like rainclouds; he invited them by abandoning his post, to which his fellow citizens elected him, to commit adultery.

To the first district's voters, that appears to be water under the bridge. The region's biggest newspaper, the Charleston Post and Courier, endorsed Ms Colbert-Busch, calling her a "welcome tonic" for "Sanford fatigue". But a poll released on Saturday had him leading Ms Colbert-Busch by a point, 47-46, after having trailed her by nine points just two weeks earlier (the poll also puts the Green Party candidate, Eugene Platt, at 4%, giving him the chance to become the Lowcountry's Ralph Nader). That earlier poll felt like an outlier, though. This is a conservative district; it supported Mitt Romney over Barack Obama by 18 points—and remember that the electorate in mid-terms and special elections tends to skew older and whiter, which is even better news for Mr Sanford.

NEXT year will bring a huge expansion of Medicaid, the federal-state health programme for the poor. It won’t be quite as big an expansion as Barack Obama hoped, thanks to last year’s Supreme Court ruling that made the expansion optional for each state. But the federal government is poised to spend billions to help willing states extend health insurance to the poor.

Nealy half of the states appear ready to forgo the expansion, with critics believing it not worth the money. Now a new paper has sparked a fresh round of debate over the issue. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, marks the first time that the principles of a randomised trial have been applied to Medicaid. Short on the funds need to cover everyone, in 2008 Oregon used a lottery to draw names of poor adults to participate in its Medicaid programme. This allowed Harvard’s Katherine Baicker and MIT’s Amy Finkelstein to examine the effect of Medicaid on the physical and financial health of poor adults, compared with a control group that didn't receive coverage.

The results were mixed. With two years of data, it seemed that Medicaid had a big impact on patients’ financial health. It all but wiped out catastrophic health spending (when costs exceed 30% of a patient’s income). It also slashed by half the probability of needing to borrow cash or skip other bills due to medical expenses.

But it had little apparent impact on patients’ health. There was no statistically significant effect on the treatment of hypertension. It improved the diagnosis of diabetes and use of diabetes drugs, but with no apparent change to haemoglobin A1C levels. These mediocre health results had a price. Annual medical spending was 35% higher for Medicaid patients, compared with the control group.

Democrats, disappointed with the results, have raised some legitimate concerns about the study. It measured changes to a relatively small sample over just two years, whereas the fight against chronic disease is measured over decades. And, as Ezra Klein notes, "Other studies with a less rigorous—but still credible—design and a longer timeframe have shown that states that expanded Medicaid saw a six percent drop in death rates among the newly insured group."

This has not stopped critics of Medicaid from interpretting the results as evidence of the programme's ineffectiveness. But the study, if accurate, seems to speak to the meagre effect of health insurance on outcomes more generally. Few critics have decided to give up their own coverage. That is likely due to lingering doubts about the results, and also because the financial impact of insurance is real. If we can agree on that, then the main question becomes not whether to do away with Medicaid, but what Medicaid should look like.

Ross Douthat lays out one option: "If the best evidence suggests that health insurance is most helpful in protecting people’s pocketbooks from similar disasters, and that more comprehensive coverage often just pays for doctor visits that don’t improve people’s actual health, then shouldn’t we be promoting catastrophic health coverage, rather than expanding Medicaid?" If the results of the Oregon study are accurate, this would make sense. The government ought to be stingy if its money is not leading to better health outcomes—this general rule goes for the poor as well as the elderly.

For now, though, the takeway from the Oregon study is...more study is needed. And a massive experiment in Medicaid is already underway. Oregon is one of many states that have recently set out to transform their Medicaid programmes through the expansion of managed care. The state has hired “co-ordinated care organisations” (CCO) to oversee the treatment of Medicaid patients. The idea is to lower state costs by keeping patients well. (These CCOs began their work in August, well after the end of the New England Journal study.) This is part of a broader effort to flip the perverse incentives of America’s fee-for-service health system. But the Medicaid experiments are the most aggressive, in part because states are so keen to lower costs and in part because it is easier to transform care for the poor than for stubborn middle-class voters. The expansion of Medicaid managed care may fail. Or it may provide a model for the rest of the country. Either way, it is too soon to abandon Medicaid just yet.

A SENSE has emerged in the American media during President Obama’s visit to Mexico on May 2nd and 3rd that he and his Mexican counterpart, Enrique Peña Nieto, are skirting the most controversial (read important) issue in the relationship: drugs and violence. They point to concerns among American officials that the new Mexican government intends to rein in aspects of its anti-drug co-operation with the United States, following revelations of how deeply embedded American agents had become in Mexico’s war on drugs during the administration that preceded Mr Peña’s.

Yet in Mexico, if you read between the lines, there is something else that gets little mention, which is far more positive. Héctor Aguilar Camín, an expert on the bilateral relationship, says the two countries are beginning to address on their own account two issues that were deliberately left out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) almost 20 years ago because at the time they were considered far too controversial—migration and energy reform. Find solutions to these problems, he says, and the two countries may be on the way to achieving an old dream that could really improve prosperity in Mexico: a North American common market.

Mr Obama mentioned both migration and energy in his speech on May 3rd. Mr Aguilar Camín noted that more than a decade ago, it was Mexico that pushed for immigration reform in America, with little success. Now, it is President Obama who is promising change (acknowledging that Latinos helped put him in office). Mr Peña limited his observations on migration to saying it was a “domestic affair” in America, for which he wished the Obama administration and Congress “the best”.

As for energy, Mr Peña has said he is keen to open up Mexico’s oil industry, which America has long urged. But in his speech, Mr Obama limited his remarks to discussion of green-energy co-operation between the two countries. That deftly avoided the impression that America was exerting pressure over Mexico’s sensitive oil sector, while leaving the idea of a cross-border energy market on the table.

Mr Aguilar Camín noted that two of Mexico’s big exports to America are illegal: manpower and marijuana. These have caused huge tension in the relationship. Yet immigration reform may ease some of the manpower problems; marijuana legalisation in two American states—and for medicinal use—suggests the second problem is likely to improve too.

Better, instead, to focus the relationships on legal exports—especially as robust trade between the two countries is a bright spot at a time of sluggish global growth. It may be too early to start discussions on a North American common market; neither energy reform in Mexico, nor immigration reform in America will be easy to accomplish, and both hurdles would need to be overcome first before anything so ambitious could be considered. But it is heartening to see the two presidents talk at length about the potential for shared prosperity if they manage to increase access to Asian markets via the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The more they talk free trade, the better for both of them.

(Photo credit: AFP)

LAST month a federal judge overturned a 2011 decision by the Obama administration to restrict the over-the-counter availability of the Plan B emergency-contraception pill to young women ages 17 and up. He ordered the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to make the pill available to all women without a prescription within 30 days. But this week the FDA decided to make the drug available without a prescription only to those 15 and older, while the Justice Department announced an appeal and asked for a stay of the April ruling.

Reproductive rights groups are not thrilled. Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, called the move "a step backward for women's health", and said that "[t]he prevention of unwanted pregnancy, particularly in adolescents, should not be obstructed by politicians."

Having determined that "there is adequate and reasonable, well-supported, and science-based evidence that Plan B One-Step is safe and effective", the FDA in 2011 had been set to approve over-the-counter access to Plan B "for all females of child-bearing potential". However, Kathleen Sibelius, Mr Obama's secretary of health and human services (HHS), demurred. Ms Sibelius cast the issue as one of safety, arguing that further study was needed. The move was nevertheless widely perceived as a sop to social conservatives in the run-up to the 2012 election. An HHS chief had never second-guessed the FDA's scientific assessment in this way before. 

According to Ron Bailey of Reason, "the only plausible reason that the Justice Department would oppose making Plan B available without a prescription to all women of reproductive age now is out of sheer embarrassment at the fact the administration would be admitting its original decision was completely political." Indeed, the arguments now emanating from the Department of Justice are purely procedural, reinforcing the impression that Ms Sibelius's original hesitancy had no real scientific or medical basis, and therefore must reflect other concerns. But those other concerns are almost entirely conservative concerns about Plan B being an "abortion pill" and, more generally, about the right and responsibility of parents to police the sexual and reproductive choices of their minor daughters. The election's over. Mr Obama won. Why continue the charade?

Though I agree with Mr Bailey that the Obama administration's decisions on this matter are "completely political", I don't think this should be understood to imply that the administration is therefore acting with indifference to questions of reproductive health. Consider the fact that the administration has been fighting an extremely heated battle over the provision of Obamacare mandating that health plans offer coverage for all FDA-approved forms of contraception. Though there is a religious exemption for churches, the exemption does not apply to church-affiliated institutions, such as hospitals or universities, and this has earned for Mr Obama a widespread belief that he is waging a "war on religion".

Now, it seems rather plausible that the survival of all-but-universal coverage of contraception under Obamacare is far more important in preventing unwanted pregnancy (and abortion, and child poverty) than a policy ensuring that 15-year-old girls, who are very unlikely to use it in time, can find Plan B at their neighbourhood CVS next to the aspirin. If a more or less symbolic concession to religious conservatives on a far less important controversy reduces hostility to the Obamacare contraceptive mandate, even just a little bit, then it may be well worth doing as a matter of women's reproductive health.

I certainly don't know that this is Mr Obama's calculation, or that it's not a miscalculation. But I do know Mr Obama goes in for this sort of thing. Witness the administration's strategy of beefing up border security and hugely increasing deportations in order to soften the ground for comprehensive immigration reform. This is not to suggest that liberal reproductive-rights advocates ought to stop contemptuously bemoaning Mr Obama's perceived betrayal. It is precisely the sound of liberals howling about Mr Obama "Throwing Teen Girls Under the Bus to Appease Extremists" that appeases the "extremists". 

RUBEN BARRALES (pictured) is notably chipper for a man facing such a tough task. His organisation, GROW Elect, aims to improve the disastrous standing of California’s Republicans among Latinos by seeking out and supporting Latino candidates for elected office, particularly at local level. He says he enjoys his work, and seems to mean it.

California’s Latinos are no fonder of Republicans than their national counterparts were of Mitt Romney, who took just 27% of the Latino vote. And today they make up 24% of registered voters, up from 15% in 2000 (see chart). This helps explain why the state party is in such dire shape. Not one Republican holds statewide office, and since last November, when Democrats won supermajorities in both chambers, the party has been a legislative irrelevance.

Many date the rot to the passage of Proposition 187 in 1994, an anti-immigrant law backed by a Republican governor that enraged Latinos (it was later dismantled in court). But the hated proposition is now fading from memory, and Republicans are doing no better. Jerry Brown won the governor’s race in 2010 with 64% of the Latino vote, an almost identical share as that won by his Democratic predecessor Gray Davis when he was re-elected in 2002.

Over the years prescient Republicans have warned that no Latino votes means no future. Unlike its Texas counterpart, which has produced such Latino-friendly Republicans as George W. Bush and Rick Perry, the California party seemed content to age, whiten and shrink. Gerrymandered districts insulated legislators from demographic changes elsewhere. At statewide level, too, politics took place in a parallel domain: in the 2010 governor’s primary the two leading Republicans battled to see who could sound nastier to immigrants.

But the scale of November’s losses, as well as the change of national mood, may have tilted the balance. The state party’s new chairman, Jim Brulte, seems to understand the problem. More Latino Republican messengers, says Mr Barrales, will help convince Latino voters that the party understands their worries and aspirations.

Still, plenty in the party will see change as capitulation. Until recently the only potential Republican challenge to Mr Brown’s re-election next year came from a former anti-immigrant vigilante once arrested for bringing a loaded gun into an airport. GROW Elect, an independent group, will work closely with the state party, says Mr Barrales. But he is prepared for scraps, including running Latinos against “establishment candidates” in primaries. “We have no qualms about getting involved,” he says. “We’re serious about helping the Republican Party help itself.”

Help may also come from the national party, so long as Republican congressmen do not scupper immigration-reform proposals this summer. Immigration issues have long resonated in California, a border state, and national reform would give state Republicans a chance to change the subject. Jobs and education are two topics Latinos may be happier to discuss.

In both these areas, says Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist, there are signs of tension among California’s Democrats: between the wealthy whites, who largely represent coastal areas, and poorer, inland Latinos. Latino lawmakers have backed several recent regulatory and education-reform measures, often setting them against members of their own party or their union backers. Over half of pupils in California’s struggling public schools are Latino. “They are the victims of the one-party state,” says Tony Quinn, a political analyst. A plan of Mr Brown’s to divert education funds towards poorer areas is extremely popular among Latinos; less so among the whites who will lose out.

The Republicans are probably not yet ready to seize such opportunities: Mr Barrales speaks of a 20-year effort. Nor does he underplay the task: rightly sceptical of talk of Latinos as “natural conservatives”, he knows that the message as well as the messengers must change. (More emphasis on jobs and social mobility; less on tax rates and other tea-party favourites.) Rather than win the Latino vote, he simply wants the party to compete for it. Not a lofty goal, but still an ambitious one.

ON SUNDAY morning, Paul Krugman made more or less explicit the more or less supressed subtext of most of his columns and blog posts: "Maybe I actually am right, and maybe the other side actually does contain a remarkable number of knaves and fools." Maybe!

Of course Mr Krugman might be right! Of course "the other side" teems with knaves and fools, because knavery and foolishness are the human lot. But we know what he means: I am right. Those who disagree with me are vicious idiots. "The point is not that I have an uncanny ability to be right" Mr Krugman clarifies, "it’s that the other guys have an intense desire to be wrong. And they’ve achieved their goal." Not a model of collegiality, this. As a piqued Clive Crook put it, writing for Bloomberg View:

A line has been crossed when the principal spokesmen for contending opinions have no curiosity whatsoever about their opponents’ ideas and radiate cold, steady contempt for each other. That’s dangerous. Civil society depends on a minimum threshold of tolerance and mutual respect.

He's talking about Mr Krugman. So is David Brooks in his most recent column, though he does not mention his opinion-page counterpart by name. According to Mr Brooks, those of us who write about politics and policy all fall somewhere on a continuum from engagement to detachment. (Why not a continuum from engagement to disengagement or from attachment to detachment? Beats me.) Though engagement and detachment each has its characteristic hazards, it's clear that Mr Brooks aims to denounce the deranging engagement of those like Mr Krugman, whilst praising his own relatively Olympian mode of analysis. 

I don't think Mr Brooks's binary gets at the heart of the matter. "Too engaged" does not capture what's the matter with Mr Krugman. I agree that clear vision and good judgment are incompatible with intense partisan commitment. In this sense, as a "matter of mental hygiene", as Mr Brooks puts it, we should strive for "detachment" from tribal politics. Still, it's well within the power of even the worst sort of unyielding partisan to treat his or her interlocutors with a little respect. Mr Krugman can't seem to manage that. "Engagement" isn't the problem. An excess of engagement might make it hard to see the merit in others' arguments. However, those who hold wrong opinions are not therefore wicked or dim. Our attempts to persuade almost always fail, and the temptation to account for this failure in terms of the stupidity or immorality of others is with us always. A culture's ability consistently to resist this temptation is perhaps the first virtue of public deliberation. The inability to resist it indicates a failure of sympathy and imagination, which is its own sort of stupidity and immorality. Indeed, the tendency to think the worst of those with whom we disagree is a failure of engagement in a different sense. It is a failure to empathise, to try to feel what it's like from the inside of other minds, other histories, other lives. If Mr Krugman cannot imagine an honest and intelligent path to "the anti-Keynesian position" on fiscal policy, then the moral and intellectual failure is his. 

Fiscal policy! Yes, that's what this was about. Veronique de Rugy, an economist at the libertarian-leaning Mercatus Center, offers the most plausible diagnosis of the disagreement that so rankles Mr Krugman:

The debate between Keynesians and free-market economists has been going on for decades, if not longer. The main reason for the dispute’s longevity is that macroeconomics is far from simple. For one thing, for any one condition, there are multiple plausible causal factors and there are no controlled experiments. These limitations, sadly, are unlike to change anytime soon, and as such we should expect that the debate will be going on for many more years, in spite of Mr Krugman’s victory lap.  

Charity is hard. Macroeconomics is harder.

(Photo credit: AFP)

WHEN the Supreme Court decides Fisher v University of Texas this June, it is likely to rule against the university’s consideration of race in its undergraduate admissions policy. In doing so it may also overturn all or part of its 2003 Grutter decision that permitted the colour-conscious admission of a “critical mass” of underrepresented minorities at the University of Michigan law school.

In our recent indictment of affirmative action we cited several defects with such policies. Racial preferences may give a boost to black and Hispanic applicants at the cost of fairness for Asians. They may cater to wealthy and middle-class minorities while failing to create new opportunities for the poor. Using a racial lens may obscure the goal of creating a true diversity of ideas in the classroom. And affirmative action may at times even fail to serve the individuals it is intended to benefit, though some claims to this effect are likely overblown. In short, it is clear that affirmative action is not a costless endeavour. In addition to the reasons put forth in our leader, many plausibly claim that colour-conscious admissions policies may inflame (though do not create) racial resentment and promote (though sometimes quell) stereotyping.

But opponents of racial preferences are often insufficiently sensitive to the negative consequences of ending them. Whatever problems may be associated with affirmative action, the policy is one of the few that, when properly applied, serves as a counterweight to the persistent de facto segregation of American society. Beyond public schools, which have become increasingly segregated in the past two decades, the colour line in American cities and workplaces is about as bright as ever. Consider this report from John Logan of Brown University:

Stark contrasts are readily apparent between the typical experiences of whites versus that of each minority group. In 367 metropolitan areas across the U.S., the typical white lives in a neighborhood that is 75% white, 8% black, 11% Hispanic, and 5% Asian. This represents a notable change since 1980, when the average whites’ neighborhood was 88% white, but it is very different from the makeup of the metropolis as a whole.

The experience of minorities is very different. For example, the typical black lives in a neighborhood that is 45% black, 35% white, 15% Hispanic, and 4% Asian. The typical Hispanic lives in a neighborhood that is 46% Hispanic, 35% white, 11% black and 7% Asian. The typical Asian lives in a neighborhood that is 22% Asian, 49% white, 9% black, and 19% Hispanic.

Mr Logan cites several reasons for continued high levels of segregation: persistent housing discrimination and the “quality of collective resources in neighbourhoods with predominantly minority populations”.

It is especially true for African Americans and Hispanics that their neighborhoods are often served by the worst performing schools, suffer the highest crime rates, and have the least valuable housing stock in the metropolis. Few whites will choose to move back into these neighborhoods as long as they suffer such problems. At this time it appears that integration of neighborhoods rarely results from white in-migration, but in fact is mostly conditional upon the ability of minorities to move into previously all-white areas. This is happening, but all too often it results in white flight from those places.

As segregation continues to define American society, it fuels further racial inequality. Elizabeth Anderson, a philosopher at the University of Michigan, catalogues the ways that segregation “undermines democracy”:

The democratic ideal seeks a culture and political institutions that realize society as a system of equal citizens. Democratic political institutions should be equally responsive to the interests and concerns of, and equally accountable to, all citizens. Segregation impedes the realization of this ideal and these principles. It impedes the formation of intergroup political coalitions, facilitates divisive political appeals, and enable officeholders to make decisions that disadvantage segregated communities without being accountable to them.

The political weakness of racial minorities exacerbates the problems that give rise to the inequality laid out by Ms Anderson, forging a frustratingly vicious circle. For all its shortcomings, affirmative action is one of few tools that has helped to disrupt this feedback loop over the past few decades. Elite schools practicing affirmative action produce more black and Hispanic graduates who find success in their fields and engage in greater civic activity with individuals of all races. But in states prohibiting racial preferences, minority enrollments at selective colleges have shrunk while white students have seen only a trivially small gain in their prospects for admission. The percentage of students of colour in graduate programmes has dropped 12% overall in four states that have banned affirmative action, with declines as high as 26% in engineering. Race-neutral attempts to admit more minorities—measures like the top 10% plan at the University of Texas, which was supplemented by the race-conscious provision now under judicial scrutiny—also have difficulty matching the outcomes of affirmative action. If the Supreme Court draws a line in the sand against the consideration of race in university admissions next month, it will likely burnish, not erase, the colour lines that still divide the American landscape.

GAVIN WRIGHT, author of a new book on the economics of the civil-rights movement, discusses the progress made since Martin Luther King's landmark speech fifty years ago

THE most urgent research priority for American social science is the question of why so many congresspeople are boastful ignoramuses. But since Tom Coburn, the Republican senator from Oklahoma, succeeded in blocking National Science Foundation funding for political science last month ("except for research projects that the [NSF director] certifies as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States"), this critical research subject will have a hard time getting a grant. Now, not content with having saved American taxpayers 1/12th of the cost of an F-35 fighter by defunding political-science research, our elected representatives are seeking to eliminate yet more wasteful spending on useless stuff like intellectual inquiry.

Yesterday, over the course of two contentious hearings, the new chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology floated the idea of having every NSF grant application include a statement of how the research, if funded, "would directly benefit the American people." Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) said that he was not trying to "micromanage" the $7 billion agency but that NSF needs to do a better job of deciding what to fund given the low success rates for grant applicants and a shrinking federal budget.

After all, how does researching "how the geometry of a surface's Teichmuller space has been used to study its mapping class group" directly benefit the American people? Or what about making detailed digital-imagery databases of fossilised insects? You can't drive on it, and you can't blow up terrorists with it. Yet we're spending literally thousands of dollars on these two grants alone! Why should Lamar Smith's constituents in Comfort, Texas be subsidising this pointy-headed nonsense?

What's particularly admirable about Mr Smith's drive to defund abstract higher-mathematics research, paleontology database-building, and every other branch of science that does not directly benefit the American people is that it's so altruistic. Mr Smith is clearly just trying to save taxpayers money. It's not like there's some private company out there that's trying to get people to pay for their studies of Teichmuller space, and wants to block government-funded research that's free to the public. Like back when Rick Santorum tried to block the National Weather Service from publishing forecasts because it was competing with his campaign donor, who owned for-profit forecaster AccuWeather. No, in this case Mr Smith's motives are entirely pure. He just wants to make sure that Americans' tax money is only spent on things that directly benefit the American people, like giving a gold medal to Arnold Palmer "in recognition of his service to the Nation in promoting excellence and good sportsmanship in golf." (That directly benefits Arnold Palmer, who last time I checked was part of the American people, so there you go.)

And no doubt this also holds true for the GOP's other big research-related priority: outlawing the American Community Survey. If Jeff Duncan, the representative from South Carolina now sponsoring the bill, wants to prohibit the Census Bureau from gathering any real-time social or economic data on Americans in the ten-year interval between censuses, it's not because of any partisan desire to keep Americans from realising that the top 1% of earners are growing fabulously wealthy while average workers are getting poorer. And it's not because private data-gathering firms want to block the feds from doing large-scale research in order to be able to charge a higher price for their own data. Indeed, private industry vehemently opposed ending the survey when it was first proposed last year. Rather, Mr Duncan's reasons are no doubt similar to those offered by the bill's sponsor at that time:

“This is a program that intrudes on people’s lives, just like the Environmental Protection Agency or the bank regulators,” said Daniel Webster, a first-term Republican congressman from Florida who sponsored the relevant legislation.

“We’re spending $70 per person to fill this out. That’s just not cost effective,” he continued, “especially since in the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.”

In fact, the randomness of the survey is precisely what makes the survey scientific, statistical experts say.

I have no doubt that Messrs Duncan and Webster's motivations in offering this bill are not venial or self-serving. I have every faith that they are motivated by a sincere devotion to ignorance, a value they both preach and practice.

THE last Democrat to represent South Carolina's first congressional district in Congress was Mendel Jackson Davis, who served from 1971 to 1981. Davis was not quite a true southern Democrat, as was his godfather L. Mendel Rivers, who held that same seat from 1941 until his death in late 1970, but I suspect he would not have been terribly comfortable in today's Democratic Party. Until early this year, Tim Scott represented the district, but when Jim DeMint left the Senate for the greener pastures of the Heritage Foundation, South Carolina's governor appointed Mr Scott to take Mr DeMint's seat. Voters will elect Mr Scott's replacement on May 7th, and for the first time in 32 years, they may elect a Democrat: Elizabeth Colbert-Busch, perhaps best known not for any great career achievements, but for having a famous brother. A poll released earlier this week had her ahead by nine points. She has strong favourability ratings, and has by all accounts run a smooth campaign, but she has also benefited from the spectacular, can't-look-can't-look-away immolation of her opponent, Mark Sanford.

Mr Sanford held this seat in the late 1990s. He then served as South Carolina's governor for two terms. Late in his second term, you may recall, he jetted off to Buenos Aires to be with his "soulmate", Maria Belen Chapur. She was not his wife. He told neither his staff nor his family where he was going (his soulmating happened to take place over Father's Day weekend; Mr Sanford has four sons). His spokesman told reporters Mr Sanford was "hiking the Appalachian trail", thus introducing a wonderful new euphemism to the English language. But after some time in the political wilderness, it seems that old itch returned. He eked out a victory in a crowded Republican primary thanks largely to name recognition.

Since then, Mr Sanford has shown himself to have a prodigious talent for scoring own-goals. He invited Ms Chapur, now his fiancée, to his victory party, upsetting his sons, who had never met their father's soulmate before. Then news leaked that two days after the election, Mr Sanford was due to appear in family court to answer charges that he trespassed on his ex-wife's property. The National Republican Congressional Committee, Congressional Leadership Fund and Club For Growth—groups created to help elect Republicans to Congress—all declined to help this particular Republican get elected to Congress. Mr Sanford then published an odd, rambling full-page newspaper ad explaining his side of the story: he went to watch the second half of the Super Bowl with his son because "as a father, I didn't think he should sit alone and watch it". He even provided his personal mobile-phone number for voters to call "if they had any further questions". A PAC supporting Ms Colbert-Busch sent out a mailer reprinting his phone number and telling voters to call and ask "why he spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on luxury travel". Some did. Mr Sanford then did something not just weird, but truly petty and unjustified: he published the phone numbers of people who called him—private citizens who used a phone number he provided (I'm not going to link to the page, but it's on his campaign website).

A South Carolina Republican quoted in the Roll Call article above called Mr Sanford's behaviour "inexplicable", and unless one wants to delve into psychological back stories, it certainly seems to be. All politicians are self-regarding, of course; that's part of the job description. But Mr Sanford's behaviour borders on the solipsistic. The NRCC and Club for Growth types no doubt fear, with good reason, that Mr Sanford would be a liability and an embarrassment to Republicans nationally, and hope he will just go away quietly. The calculation makes sense: it's just one House seat; they will retain a 30-seat majority; and in a little more than a year Ms Colbert-Busch will have to defend her seat, presumably against a non-adulterous candidate with good enough sense to know that when a judge tells you not to go somewhere, you don't go there. Even if that means letting a 14-year-old watch the Super Bowl alone.

(Photo credit: AFP)

RICHARD SANDER, co-author of a book on how affirmative action hurts students it means to help, on how to improve the use of preferences in higher education

ROSS DOUTHAT isn't a big fan of George W. Bush, but he does think a lot of the liberal critique leveled at the time seems "misguided or absurd" in retrospect. Mostly on domestic policy issues, but on foreign and security issues as well:

The continuities between Bush and Obama on civil liberties, presidential power and the war on terror make the same point: In order to critique Bushism appropriately, you need to recognize that on many, many issues, his presidency was much more centrist and establishmentarian than it was radical or right-wing.

There may be some issues on which George W. Bush was "centrist and establishmentarian", but his stances on civil liberties and the war on terror were not among them. The only reason they may appear so now is that the Bush administration and the Republican Party succeeded in shifting the political debate so far towards militarism and unchecked security-statism in the previous decade that it now feels normal. We've been right so long it looks like centre to us. It is hard to tell how much personal responsibility Mr Bush bears for many of the most egregious precedent-setting violations of human rights that took place during his tenure, since he was a relatively ill-informed and often disengaged chief executive who delegated an unusual level of power in these areas to his vice-president. But we were talking about the administration, not just the man. On civil liberties, it was the Bush administration that decided that America ought to torture people and imprison them without trial indefinitely (ie, possibly forever) in extra-territorial jails. On the war on terror, it was the Bush administration that decided that America ought to launch preemptive wars against other countries in defiance of international public opinion, based on a delusional belief in the irresistible glory and rightness of American power. I would call that radical and right-wing. I can think of some meaner words, too.

On the question of "presidential power", Mr Douthat is right that most administrations tend to want more of it rather than less. Certainly Barack Obama has not been eager to ramp back his prerogatives. In other continuities, the Obama administration has presided over the expansion of drone-based targeted killing programmes that have killed thousands of civilians across the Middle East, has expanded domestic surveillance powers, and has used the same reprehensible personality-destruction techniques on Bradley Manning that the Bush administration used on José Padilla. All of which is lousy. But how sharp a shift was really possible? The Obama administration inherited a security apparatus swollen to a multiple of its previous size, full of people who had spent the previous eight years carrying out the Bush administration's policies. Those people had a very strong interest in defending those policies, not least because a number of them were guilty of ordering or carrying out torture. Torture is a crime against humanity. America has signed treaties that oblige it to try its own officials when they commit crimes against humanity. And yet you can feel how far the Bush administration moved politics permanently to the right when you speak the words "officials who ordered people tortured should be tried for crimes against humanity", and realise that you sound like a ranting far-left extremist.

Maybe Barack Obama could have reversed course more sharply on civil liberties and held Bush-era officials accountable for torture, if he had been willing to stage a partisan ideological battle on those grounds that would have left him unable to accomplish much else. I'm not convinced it would have achieved anything; Mr Obama has been trying to close Guantánamo since the day he took office, but has failed in the face of congressional opposition. Either way, it's absurd to believe that America would have started torturing people or invading countries unprovoked if Barack Obama, Al Gore, Bill Clinton or George H.W. Bush had been in the White House on September 11th, 2001. That is George W. Bush's historical responsibility, and it's what he should be remembered for—along with the financial crisis, the rich-skewed tax cuts that left us with a half-trillion-dollar structural deficit, the listless cronyism that hollowed out the SEC and FEMA, a couple of positive public-health initiatives marred by corporate giveaways (PEPFAR, Medicare Part D), and the decision to doom the world to global warming by opposing the Kyoto Protocol. On balance, a legacy worthy of contempt.

(Photo credit: AFP)

IT IS the sad fate of American overseas food aid to occupy a policy “sweet spot”, says Chris Barratt, an expert in the subject at Cornell University. Its budget, the largest of any country’s, is big enough to attract rapacious special interests, but still sufficiently small and complex that its scandalous inefficiencies rarely make headlines.

Scandalous barely covers it. Since America began donating surplus wheat, corn meal, vegetable oil and other farm commodities to the world’s hungry six decades ago, the programme has been captured by an “iron triangle” of farm interests, shippers and voluntary organisations, with plenty of help from Congress. Rules state that most food aid must be bought from American farmers and processed in America. At least half must then be carried on American-flag ships. With competition severely curbed, ocean shipping eats up 16% of the budget for the largest food-aid programme, Food for Peace.

Under a system called “monetisation”, charities and non-governmental outfits get a cut from non-emergency aid (which represents about 30% of Food for Peace). Voluntary outfits receive American produce, sell it on local markets abroad and then use the proceeds for good works. On average this “inherently inefficient” system wastes 25 cents of every dollar of taxpayers’ money sent, according to the Government Accountability Office. And the food supplied often floods fragile markets, hurting local farmers it is meant to help.

The White House proposed big changes in its recent budget plan, but these fall short of an end to rules tying aid to American interests. About $1.4 billion in Food for Peace money would move into US Agency for International Development (USAID) accounts that operate under more flexible rules, allowing for local procurement or for funds to be sent directly to the hungry through vouchers or even mobile-phone transfers. That could cut delivery times by as much as 11-14 weeks, says USAID, and at the same time save enough money to feed 4m more children each year.

Monetisation within Food for Peace would be scrapped. In a sop to domestic farmers, at least 55% of funds would still be used for the purchase and transport of American produce. A shift towards high-nutrition foods, such as enriched peanut butter or biscuits, will require fewer shipments for the same amount of calories. Grumpy shippers will get $25m in transitional aid to help them adjust.

Now Congress must decide what to do. USAID’s head, Rajiv Shah, is optimistic that the reformers will win this argument, pointing to a fiscal environment in which every dollar must be made to count. Modern food aid is part of the fight against extreme ideologies, he adds: America needs intelligent ways to help in global trouble-spots, as in Syria now.

But this would not be America if congressional turf fights did not loom, pitting farm-committee members against colleagues who oversee foreign affairs. Reforms have failed before; one can only hope that it will not happen again.

WHEN the push for more gun control began shortly after the Newtown shootings last December, the focus fell on three areas: assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and background checks. But the enthusiasm for new gun laws quickly faded, and it became obvious that efforts to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines would not win enough votes to pass. So gun-control advocates were left to pursue an expansion of the background-check system. In the end, even that was too ambitious. Last week a compromise effort to require background checks on private sales at gun shows and online failed in the Senate.

There is some debate over whether any of this mattered. "Assault weapons" are ill-defined, such that very similar weapons would fall inside and outside a so-called "ban". A killer like Adam Lanza, who used his mother's legally-obtained guns, may have simply used different weapons had a ban been in place at the time of his shooting. A ban on high-capacity magazines might have been more effective. Opponents note that it takes just a couple of seconds to change magazines, but that was enough time to allow some children to escape Lanza's mayhem, and to stop Jared Loughner from killing more people. Still, as with guns in general, there are so many high-capacity magazines out there now that a ban may not do much good.

Some saw similar futility in the failed effort to expand background checks. Jacob Sullum cites a 2004 survey of prison inmates and notes, "Three sources accounted for almost nine out of 10 crime guns: 'friends or family' (40 percent), 'the street' (38 percent), and theft (10 percent)." Neither the current nor the proposed background-check requirements apply to such acquisitions. Even at gun shows, which account for a small proportion of sales, "licensed retailers are the primary source of firearms...later used in crime", according to Daniel Webster and Jon Vernick of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. Those retailers are already covered under current background-check requirements.

But the bill would have also covered private sales on the web, which seems to be the Wild West of gun commerce. And while the survey cited by Mr Sullum is interesting, it does not indicate how those guns got onto the street or into the hands of friends and family willing to sell or lend to would-be criminals. Mr Webster says his research "has shown that failure to require background checks for firearms sales by private gun owners is associated with significantly higher levels of guns diverted to criminals both in-state and out of state." Of course, requiring background checks for all private sales goes beyond the failed bill, and Mr Webster favours regulation beyond even that. Citing a study that examined the association between state gun-sales regulations and the diversion of guns to criminals, he and Mr Vernick conclude

Strong regulation and oversight of licensed gun dealers—defined as having a state law that required state or local licensing of retail firearm sellers, mandatory record keeping by those sellers, law enforcement access to records for inspection, regular inspections of gun dealers, and mandated reporting of theft of loss of firearms—was associated with 64% less diversion of guns to criminals by in-state gun dealers. Regulation of private handgun sales and discretionary permit-to-purchase (PTP) licensing were each independently associated with lower levels of diversion of guns sold by in-state dealers. The finding on private sales regulations is consistent with the results of a systematic observational study of gun sales at gun shows that found anonymous undocumented firearms sales to be ubiquitous and illegal "straw man" sales more than six times as common in states that do not regulate private sales compared with California that does regulate such sales...

This gets at the crux of the debate over gun control. Background checks are fine, but more background checks are better, and even stricter regulations are better than that at preventing guns from getting into the hands of criminals. As my colleague has stated, the gun control that is most effective is no guns at all. Honest gun-control advocates will admit that the bill that failed last week was merely a first step towards more regulation. Sure it was weak and flawed, but as Barack Obama said, it represented "progress".

The question asked and answered by the National Rifle Association and those in its thrall was, "Progress towards what?" They know that the endgame for gun-control advocates is not expanding background checks to private sales at gun shows and online. They too saw the bill as the start of a longer-term attempt to place greater restrictions on guns in America. And that's why they vehemently opposed a sensible measure with minimal impact.

(Photo credit: AFP)

BOTH liberals and conservatives are up in arms about the Obama administration’s treatment of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the wounded but surviving Boston Marathon-bombing suspect. Some on the left have decried the administration's use of the “public safety” exception to the Miranda rule in order to question Mr Tsarnaev on Sunday. Some on the right lament that he isn’t being interrogated as an “enemy combatant”.

Let’s look at the more feeble of these critiques first. A few days before the White House announced that it would conduct Mr Tsarnaev’s trial entirely in the civilian justice system, Fox reported that top Republican senators were urging Barack Obama to question him under the “law of war”:

“The events we have seen over the past few days in Boston were an attempt to kill American citizens and terrorize a major American city,” Sens. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina; John McCain, Arizona; and Kelly Ayotte, New Hampshire, said. “The suspect, based upon his actions, clearly is a good candidate for enemy combatant status. We do not want this suspect to remain silent.”

The senators added, “We remain under threat from radical Islam and we hope the Obama administration will seriously consider the enemy combatant option.” Republicans have had a penchant for non sequiturs recently, but this is a particularly craven example. Despite holding extremist Islamic beliefs, there is no evidence that the suspect has any connection to Islamic terrorist cells. Some are suspicious about Mr Tsarnaev’s older brother’s visit to Russia in 2012, but 26-year-old Tamerlan, who died in a firefight with police officers, reportedly spent most of his time sleeping during his stay. He had no known ties with any terrorist group, and the surviving suspect has disavowed any international connections. But even if there were evidence that Tamerlan radicalised during that trip to Russia, there is nary a shred of evidence that he or his younger brother are associated with al-Qaeda, the Taliban or its allies—the only possible circumstance under which one can legally be held as an enemy combatant.

Moreover, since Mr Tsarnaev became an American citizen last year, the law is quite clear that he cannot be tried before a military commission. And there is little reason to want such an outcome. As Emily Bazelon of Slate notes, 

The federal courts can and will sort this out, as they have many times since 9/11. Almost 500 times, to be exact—that’s the number of convictions for terrorism crimes since the attacks on the World Trade Centers. The number of convictions before military commissions, on the other hand, is just seven.

Mr Obama properly rebuffed calls to declare Mr Tsarnaev an enemy combatant, but he has exploited, with considerable latitude, a loophole that permits certain suspects to be questioned before receiving the familiar admonitions Mr Tsarnaev heard in his hospital-room interrogation on Monday. The “public safety exception” provides that an interrogation may proceed without the Miranda warnings when the authorities seek immediate information to prevent imminent harm to the public. In the case New York v Quarles (1984), the Supreme Court held that an apprehended rape suspect’s statement “the gun is over there” in response to a police officer’s query was admissible as evidence—despite being obtained before the suspect had been read his rights—because the gun posed an exigent threat to public safety.

In the New Republic Jeffrey Rosen complains that the Obama administration has “stretche[d] the idea of imminence beyond recognition” by extending it to open-ended interrogations of suspected terrorists. Ms Bazelon warns that although it might seem odd to care too deeply about the rights of a man who apparently killed, maimed and terrorised an entire city, the Obama administration is setting a dangerous precedent for future abuse—"when [the authorities] can make their own rules, sometime, somewhere, they inevitably will." Finally, Freddie DeBoer looks back to similar cases of domestic terrorism and notices a pattern:

Timothy McVeigh: killed 168 people. Injured over 800 more. Was motivated by political convictions. He was arrested, Mirandized, charged, appointed with legal counsel, and tried in a civilian court. Ted Kaczynski: killed three people. Injured 23 more. Was motivated by political convictions. He was arrested, Mirandized, charged, appointed with legal counsel, and processed through a civilian court. Eric Rudolph: killed two people. Injured at least 150 more. Was motivated by political convictions. He was arrested, Mirandized, charged, appointed with legal counsel, and processed through a civilian court.

If you recognize that the results of these legal cases were consonant with our system of jurisprudence and with justice, you cannot ask for a separate status for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev without supporting legal discrimination based on ethnicity and religion.

Mr DeBoer is right that there is little to distinguish the Boston Marathon bomber’s case from those of the Unabomber, the Oklahoma City bomber or the man who detonated a bomb at the summer Olympics in Atlanta. Each case featured ideologically motivated assailants attacking civilians with powerful explosives, and each posed a grave threat to the general public. Why was the public-safety exclusion not invoked in these earlier instances of domestic terrorism? The move could have been amply justified in any of them.

Whatever the reason authorities demurred at those moments, there is little doubt of the importance of invoking the exclusion in the aftermath of the Boston bombings. The Tsarnaev brothers were loose in an American city with an arsenal of weapons and bombs in their possession. They shot back at authorities and claimed an additional victim (Sean Collier, an MIT police officer) while running from the police. There was profound, immediate fear that another bomb could have been set to explode in another locale. Despite the historical precedents, the FBI would have been remiss had it not questioned Mr Tsarnaev on Sunday night about further possible threats to the public safety.

(Photo credit: AFP)

OVER the next few days, a clearer picture is likely to emerge of the motivations and possible connections of the two Tsarnaev brothers. Given that Dzhokhar, the younger of the brothers who was apprehended on Friday night, is in a “serious” rather than a critical condition, he may well face some interrogation quite soon and it is quite possible that he will want to talk about what drove him and Tamerlan to terrorism. But for now, all we have is guesswork based on their background, an initial trawl through their social media footprint and press interviews with relatives, friends and acquaintances.

It seems probable that there was some vaguely jihadist motivation behind their actions. Although neither brother appeared to be especially religious, Tamerlan apparently became more so in recent years, asking his middle-class, Christian American wife to convert. Tamerlan also seems to have become more alienated from his adopted society. While Dzhokhar was socially quite gregarious and was doing well academically, Tamerlan, although a talented boxer, drifted and complained of having no real friends and not understanding Americans. Inevitably, their Russian Caucasus background and the close proximity of their birthplace to Chechnya, with its traumatic post-Soviet history of violence and terrorism, make possible some connection to the cause of Chechen independence. However, Chechen terrorism has been focused on their Russian “oppressors” and it is hard to see how attacking runners in the Boston Marathon in anyway fits that pattern.

It is just as likely that Tamerlan, turning more to religion and becoming more hostile towards American society generally, self-radicalised on the internet where there is a multitude of jihadist websites providing both inspiration and practical instruction in bomb-building and other terrorist techniques (the pressure-cooker bombs used in Boston were of a design frequently used by jihadists in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere). Whether he received any further help from al-Qaeda operatives or their ilk is not apparent yet, nor whether he might have left America to receive any more direct training. If so, that will soon emerge, but for now it seems unlikely, as is the possibility of anyone else “running” the two brothers. The chances are that the radicalised and disgruntled brother drew Dzhokhar into a world of virtual jihadism and revenge fantasies, pushing him into becoming an accomplice.

It is impossible to say at present on what spectrum between, say, Lee Boyd Malvo (the younger apprentice of John Allen Muhammad, the Washington sniper) and Faisal Shahzad (the Pakistani-American who tried to bomb Times Square) Tamerlan and Dzhokhar should be placed or whether they should be seen as domestic or international terrorists (or some combination of the two). What can be said with greater confidence is that there will be more such attacks from disaffected individuals: identifying them and stopping them before they strike is almost impossible without maintaining levels of security that would be intolerable in a free society. The best hope is that society is resilient in the face of such threats and that eventually such acts simply go out of fashion.

(Photo credit: AFP)