Gaming the Debt Limit Constitutional Option Scenario

Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner was apparently discussing the debt limit with somebody today, and insisted upon reading the text of the least glamorous part of the most glorious part of the U.S. Constitution, namely Amendment XIV, Section 4. Specifically:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law ... shall not be questioned.

This sounds a lot like it means something like a statutory debt limit is invalid. Now, sure, we can quibble about whether it means exactly that, but it's a plausible argument that it means that. This is a strategy that's gaining traction among liberals, including pundits and Senators; if the Administration is considering using this option, just declaring that the debt limit doesn't exist so Republicans trying to use it as leverage can eff off, it's kind of a big deal. So, let's consider the various ramifications of using this tactic.

I did call it, didn't I?

Jonathan Chait has a piece today arguing that Obama's press conference yesterday was his imitation of Harry Truman's "give 'em hell" spiel. I would just like to say that I called it, writing back on November 3rd, 2010:

So make it clear, let's all come together to solve problems. Hope that Republicans agree to play on his terrain. And expect that they won't, and when they don't...

Give 'em hell, Barry!

My argument was that Obama should start out sounding like Clinton, wanting to work together with Republicans to find sensible, centrist policies to help the country, but anticipate that Republicans wouldn't work with him, and once they didn't, start sounding like Truman, castigating them for doing nothing and favoring the rich. And, uh, that's what happened.

+1 to me, +1 to Obama.

Nitpicking

I just happened to read a post on Fangraphs about the usefulness of the standard AVG/OBP/SLG "triple-slash" as a descriptive metric even in an age where there are all sorts of fancy offensive-evaluation metrics (the article mentions wOBA and wRC+ in particular, both Fangraphs creations which I'm not getting into here). In the course of doing so he mentions that, since AVG and SLG have the same denominator, you can subtract them and get something mathematically meaningful, in this case extra bases per at-bat (though he says extra bases per hit, which is wrong). This number is denoted ISO, short for "isolated power" and which I always pronounce as "iso-pop" in my head, for some obscure reason. Anyway, the point of this little blog post here is that ISO strikes me as a very strange way to go about measuring a player's pure power. Here's an example: suppose we have two players, one with a batting-average of .350 and a slugging percentage of .500, and another who's hitting just .220 but slugging .370. They both have an ISO of .150, but which one has more power? I'd say the guy with the abysmal average. Why? Because while the high-average guy is averaging 10 bases per 7 hits, or 1.43 bases per hit, the low-average guy is averaging 1.68 bases per hit. That's more raw power. ISO has the unfortunate quality that, while trying to isolate power, it is simultaneously including a bonus for the skill of not getting out, or at least of getting hits. You can subtract, but dividing makes more sense.

It's Not About Speech

The Supreme Court, by the tediously usual 5-4 majority, has just struck down a matching-funds campaign finance law in Arizona. The idea seems to be that a) we've already established that using money to disseminate political advertisements is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment; b) we've already established that the government cannot appreciably restrict that speech, i.e. enact contribution or spending limits; c) giving matching funds to the opposition is a dis-incentive for someone with lots of money to spend it on political advertising; therefore d) matching funds count as censorship. Oh my god I can't believe how wrong this is.

Tough Pars

Nate Silver writes (actually, tweets, but it is a form of writing, after all!):

Obama has a lot of pars on a tough course. Certainly could be much worse. But very few birdies.

This is part of an argument with Matt Yglesias structured around the difference between Andrew Cuomo's ability to exert effort and reap praise in the simple-majority NY Senate versus Obama's apparently more low-key leadership in the filibustered US Senate. They're sort of arguing over whether Obama has any particularly challenging and credit-worthy accomplishments that seem as much like an act of leadership as Cuomo's. I think it's actually a very apt metaphor. Roughly speaking, Nate's saying that Obama's playing the U.S. Open.

2016

Oh yeah, that's right. It's never too early.

Okay, maybe it's too early. Still, this seems as good a time as any to start speculating about the 2016 Presidential election. The main thing to say is just that, as of right now, you'd kind of have to say that Andrew Cuomo is the distinct front-runner for the Democratic nomination. I still think it's Hillary's if she wants it, but also that she won't want it. Cuomo was probably already the front-runner, being the popular governor of a very large, very big-deal state, having a big-ticket name, etc., but I think the gay marriage thing (which he seems to deserve a whole hell of a lot of credit for) strengthens his position even more. By 2016 I think being on the proper side of the gay marriage issue will be an asset nationally.

Anyway, that's my first thought. I'm going to spend a bit of time in the near future gaming out what the political landscape might look like as we approach 2015 or so, and what the nomination contests might shape up like. More detailed speculation coming later.

Political Prejudice

Gallup gives us the following chart of people's unwillingness to vote for Presidential candidates from various demographic groups:

Obviously what we see here is that something in the 5-10% range of Americans are just generally bigoted, unwilling to vote for people in such mainstream demographics as women, baptists (?), and Jews. But then there are three categories that make people who are not just prejudiced in principle get squirmy: Mormons, queers, and atheists. I'd bet that Muslims would manage to make even atheists look acceptable, and Gallup presumably didn't bother polling that question 'cause the result would be depressing.

Quite honestly, I understand what it is about Mormons or atheists that people object to. Hell, I'd be mildly uncomfortable voting for a Mormon, though if it was Harry Reid vs. Sarah Palin I'd do it in a heartbeat. Religion is a matter of individual belief, and the individual beliefs that constitute a religion or the lack thereof often intersect with matters of public policy. I don't honestly think it's totally unreasonable to prefer that your President have a non-wacky religious orientation. Now, I think it's a little depressing that people are much more okay with a Mormon (and Mormonism, lest we forget, is really, really wacky) than someone who is not religious, given how many perfectly decent people are not religious. But hey, this is America, and if I'm not used to the fact that people just hate atheists here, well, I should be. (And I am.)

But honestly, what the hell is wrong with the people who wouldn't vote for a gay person? Like, okay, I realize that a lot of people find gayness icky, but any given gay person will be gay whether or not they are President. You're not increasing Total Gayness in the world by electing one of them. Now, the 32% figure who are willing to say they wouldn't consider voting for a gay person is probably basically just the unreconstructed homophobes, who believe for religious reasons that gay people are Horrible Wicked Sinners who live to defy and mock god with their unnatural, icky lifestyle. And to some extent those are just crazy people, the equivalent of the people who fifty years ago were sufficiently unreconstructed racists that they would have admitted they wouldn't vote for a black guy for President. Probably in another fifty years this stat will have changed, just as the anti-black prejudice has diminished over time.

But honestly, there is no conceivable way in which being gay would change someone's approach to being U.S. President. It's just totally irrelevant. It's kind of ridiculous that we're still countenancing this kind of attitude in the year 2011.

Everybody's Covered

I just heard ESPN announcer Chris Berman say something like the following in the closing stretches of today's US Open coverage: "If you look behind 16 there's both a chapel and a temple, so everybody's covered." Strikingly, to me at least, he said that while the cameras were on Y.E. Yang. Now, I don't know what Yang's religious inclinations are, but his being Asian I think it's rather possible that he's neither Christian nor Jewish. I just think it's kind of weird to make a sweeping statement like that. Over 60% of the world is neither Christian nor Jewish, and with golf increasingly becoming a global game with championship players who aren't Western European in ethnic origin there are probably a lot of non-Judeo-Christians in this field. Hell, Tiger Woods is a Buddhist if anything.

Anyway, not a big deal, but it struck me as kind of odd.

Five?!?

Apparently Major League Baseball is strongly considering changing the structure of the baseball season such that five teams would make the playoffs. This would be accomplished either by adding a second wild card or by, more radically, eliminating divisions and just letting the five teams with the best records in each league make the playoffs. I am strongly, strongly opposed. You just can't do this, it seems to me. Through history, the major league playoffs have featured two, four, and currently eight teams. There's a pattern here: these are all powers of two. This is very logical, because it is actually impossible to do a bracketed tournament with any number of competitors except a power of two without doing something Weird. I assume that in this case the particular Weirdness that they would invoke would be making the two "worst" teams in each league, either the two wild-cards or the two teams with the worst records among the five, play a head-to-head elimination match before the bracketed tournament begins. That's just awful, it strikes me. It's contrived and it's silly. It creates a whole new section of the baseball season: you'd have the regular season for about 180 days, then this new middle round for four-ish days, and then the real playoffs for a few weeks. Never mind the fact that this would push the end of the season all the way into mid-November, and it's been getting pretty silly already. It would just be inelegant.

You Can't Escape Government

Various people have been writing posts about Gurgaon, a section of India which has managed to achieve extremely rapid economic growth despite having essentially no provision of public services. The obvious lesson to draw, taking it at face value or shallower, is that libertarianism and/or a kind of quasi-anarchism works just great, and so, not surprisingly, various liberal writers have gone about deconstructing that conclusion. But ultimately I think the point here is very little about economics and more about fundamental misunderstanding of political theory. Kevin Drum writes:

Basically, Gurgaon has turned into something from a dystopian science fiction novel: an archipelago of self-contained corporate mini-cities that provide their own power, water, sewage, transit, postal service, schools, medical care, and security force.

Because of that word "corporate," we assume that this is a kind of stateless world, that there is no government. But that's simply untrue. To see why, consider the following question: what is government?

Gingrich Fallout

That's Nate Silver's graphical overview of the 2012 Republican Presidential field. I'm reminded of it because of the implosion of Newt Gingrich, and want to use a similar kind of schematic to discuss what I think the impact of that implosion might be. Basically I argue that there are three major types of Republican Presidential candidates right now (actually four, but the fourth isn't all that major), and that the shape of the Republican field depends very much on which of these three categories end up coalescing around a single candidate.

Reyes or Wright?

I recently heard a rumor that the Mets are considering trying to trade David Wright instead of Jose Reyes if, as seems likely, they are forced to get rid of someone to rather drastically cut their payroll. I don't want to see either of these players moved, but I have to say that I think this would make a lot of sense. Wright is owed $15 million next year, and if Reyes is even slightly in the mood to give the Mets a home-team discount on his free-agent deal I think it's unlikely he'd be making more than that next year. Moving Wright would give Daniel Murphy a home, since third base is his natural position and appears to be his best one. From a defensive point of view, Murphy at third might be an upgrade over Wright, and Murphy-Reyes-Tejada-Davis is pretty clearly an upgrade over Wright-Tejada-Murphy-Davis.

Then there's the offensive component: would the lineup rather have Reyes or Wright in it? Historically David Wright's been the better offensive player, hitting .302/.382/.512 with an average of 27 home runs, 42 doubles, and 23 steals per 162 games, while Reyes hits just .288/.338/.437 with an average of 12 homers, 15 triples, 35 doubles, and 58 steals per 162. But over the last three years, or, that is, since the Mets build Citi Field, Wright has hit just .286/.367/.468 while averaging just 22 home runs and 164 strikeouts per 162 games. At Shea Stadium David Wright hit .318/.403/.555 and Reyes hit .297/.343/.447, but at Citi Field Wright has managed just .288/.382/.472 while Reyes is putting up a .322/.375/.500 line at the Mets' new home. This all makes sense: Citi Field was built for Jose Reyes. The bizarre right-field wall, which removed Wright's favorite home-run spot from Shea, provides lots of acreage in which for Jose to hit his triples. This year, his first year (so far!) fully healthy at Citi Field, he's on pace to hit about 25 triples, which is very close to a 99-year record. They've all been hit at home. In fact, at Citi Field Reyes has 8 triples against just 7 doubles, so the majority of the time he gets in-play extra-base hits at home they're for three bases.

Through 2008, David Wright hit .300 and managed at least 25 home runs for all four of his full big-league seasons. He consistently hit for power and average, which made him one of the best offensive players in the game. Since 2009, he's had one year when he hit .300, barely, but managed only 10 home runs. Then he had a year when he slugged 29 home runs, but hit just .283, a new career low. Now, in 2011, he's on pace for just 18 home runs (given his injury) and hitting just .226. There's a considerable case to be made that Citi Field is slowly ruining David Wright. It's not an iron-clad case; after all, he's been dealing with the concussion from '09 and the back injury of '11 for the past few years, so who knows what's really causing it. But it makes some sense that taking away his favorite power zone might make him less able to do what he always used to do.

To reiterate, I do not want the Mets to let go of either David Wright or Jose Reyes. I think they ought to both spend their entire careers in New York and go into the Hall of Fame as the two best Mets position players ever. But if the Wilpons' financial quagmire is going to force them to let go of one of their two star players, I think the choice is clear. David Wright is a very good power hitter, historically, but there are other very good power hitters out there and Wright appears to struggle at the Mets' new ballpark. Jose Reyes, on the other hand, is clearly the best leadoff hitter in the game today, and one of the best-hitting shortstops, and simply thrives at Citi Field. Also, he's a lot more fun to watch, and since the Mets have already literally built around him, they might as well build around him, you know?