Equal Pay Day passed us by with few fireworks here in Berkeley (though lord knows our friends in Oakland got enough of those on Sunday), which surprised me because it also seemed like one of those juicy red meat... er... blue meat issues for the left. Regardless of the merits, concern over the gender pay gap ought to be entirely palatable to moderates and even right-of-center women. But what of those pesky merits? Well, I'm of two minds. The cold-hearted-bastard economist in me appreciated the way Reason Magazine diffused some of the alarmism of the equal pay debate. Yes, on...

Today, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to uphold the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. Read about it here, and please use the "Comments" section to offer your thoughts and analysis....

Doing some research for a professor here on the minimum wage, I ran across this graph of the inflation-adjusted value of the U.S. minimum wage (which is a fairly common sight nowadays) plus the effective hourly bonus from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) added on. This was the first time I had ever seen such a statistic. Since the the organization presenting the chart, the Employment Policies Institute, is hardly non-partisan, I took the numbers with a grain of salt (case in point: they use the value of the EITC for an earner with two or more kids, which...

Wow. You know your war is going poorly when Henry Kissinger loses faith. But not everyone is ready to give up on Iraq. Several public officials are pushing for one last influx of troops to try stymieing the violence in Baghdad. But the numbers being thrown around -- 20,000 or so -- seem so pathetically small that the military analysts who dubbed it the "Go Big" option must still be giggling at their Pentagon desks. How tragic, then, that Iraq's answer to Jon Stewart, who will surely mock this plan, died in an apparent execution-style murder.

Is the answer a reinstatement of the draft? Charles Rangel, D-NY, seems to think so. Even though Democrats will leave the draft off the legislative agenda next year, pulling off the kind of massive reinforcements necessary to make a final push actually, you know, work would require more troops than we have available in our current all-volunteer force (AVF). Several studies have argued that the military is better off under AVF. That's plausible as far as it goes. But a temporary use of the draft to change the momentum of the conflict in Iraq would likely deliver geo-political dividends many times over, to say nothing of saving American and Iraqi lives in the long run. It also makes strategic sense, in that a draft frees up the military's specialized, professional resources from running routine patrols so that they may be redeployed to the areas where the insurgency is most active.

There's also a convincing liberal case for conscription, best made by Mickey Kaus, that sees the draft as key in engendering civic equality between Americans of different socio-economic backgrounds. He approvingly retells the story of PT109 -- John F. Kennedy's naval command in World War II -- whose crew ran the gambit from blue collar workers to Ivy League students. Today's military, he argues, bears no resemblance to that of the time when all strata of society felt called to sacrifice. If liberalism is concerned with equal human dignity, Kaus argues that the country needs common civic institutions that thread through class divisions. The military, under the draft, would be the backbone of this vision.

Of course, Kaus' idea is not politically feasible in the slightest. But since Americans are clearly so torn between keeping our troops in harm's way and conceding defeat in Iraq, I wonder how much slack they'd cut a public official bold enough to back the draft. Though I imagine a serious politician would have to place limits on the logistics (say, let it run for a maximum of three years), I'm not sure that it would be the career killer it's been before in the post-Vietnam era.

Few people question that after 2000, voter confidence in the integrity of American elections is a smidgen shaky. At one level, then, any amount of policy movement on this issue is helpful, whether from the Democrats or the GOP. At another level, though, it's striking just how much the GOP's proposed voter ID laws, like this one just struck down in Missouri and this one being proposed in Congress, so completely miss the mark of addressing voter concern.

Now, voter disenfranchisement is no doubt a grave worry among many. Here's the rub, though: they're troubled that too many people are being disenfranchised, not too few. Remember, even if you don't show ID, your name is still on a registration list at each precinct. To illegally vote, then, you'd have to a) know the name of someone registered, b) know which precinct they were assigned to, and c) hope that you arrived at the precinct to vote before they do. When was the last time you heard of widespread voter complaints of false identity? At the very least, more pressing short-term electoral problems exist, not the least of which are security concerns over compromised electronic voting machines.

Stronger voter ID laws may be a logical compliment to the GOP immigration platform, but the effect is so marginal that it's hard to interpret them as much more than election year red herring.

Speaking of money in politics, the Sacramento Bee has an informative graphic spread today on the 3 major gubernatorial candidates, their war chest, and the sources of their funding. Interesting how Angelides is not far behind Arnold in the proportion of his funding from entertainment interests. It's also useful in that it illustrates the argument that self-funded candidates are less beholden to special interests (although notice how even millionaires like Schwarzenegger and Angelides are only willing to self-fund at most 20% of their respective campaigns).

Today, the California Nurses Association began collecting signatures to place a "clean elections" proposition on the November ballot. Were the initiative only about publicly-funding the campaigns of candidates without deep-pocketed friends, it might actually do the state some good; but instead, it tacks on even more stringent contribution limits to all candidates, whether they opt-in to the campaign finance scheme or not. Far from encouraging more grassroots candidates, the CNA's proposal would lead to even more of the very candidates they seek to avoid: millionaires.

Almost 10 years ago, Jonathan Rauch wrote a prescient article in National Journal entitled "Campaign Finance - Blow It Up." "Probably no American public policy," he said, "is a more comprehensive failure than campaign finance law." Rauch argued that, no matter what, money would find its way into politics like water, and that any attempt to hold the flood back would not only be futile, but would also lead to perverse results, among them higher-premiums on rich, self-funded candidates and shadowy organizations only nominally independent from the campaigns they supported. His solution was an all-or-nothing approach: give all candidates the option to either raise unlimited amounts of cash from whomever they wished with full and rapid disclosure, letting voters, not bureaucrats, judge propriety, or be freed almost entirely from the burdens of fundraising by fully funding their campaigns with public money.

The powerful California Nurses Association embraced one half of Rauch's idea on Monday and abjectly disposed of the other, beginning a petition drive Tuesday to place a "clean elections" law on the November 2006 ballot. Their proposal, called the "Clean Elections Campaign Reform Act" (CECRA), is a combination of introducing "full" public campaign financing for statewide candidates (funded by an increase in the corporate tax rate) and drastically lowering contribution limits to non-participating candidates. You can view the full-text here.

Here's how it would work: if you wished to opt-in, you'd need to raise contributions of $5 in numbers ranging from 750 for an Assembly candidate to 25,000 for a gubernatorial hopeful. Once certified, your public funding would likewise depend on what office you sought, and whether you were competing in a primary or a General election. Gubernatorial candidates, for example, would receive $10 million for the primary and $15 million for the General. As a point of reference, both Phil Angelides and Steve Westly had spent about $6 million each through March 17, with much, much more in their respective coffers. Independent and non-participant expenditures used against you that exceed these initial figures will be matched by the state.

Meanwhile, the Act would lower individual contribution limits to $500 for legislative candidates and $1000 for statewide offices. Again, as a point of reference, the current limit for the Governorship stands at $20,000. Contributions by lobbyists and contractors would be banned, though I can't imagine that either wouldn't find some loophole to exploit

So what's the problem? Well, there are several...

First, as Greg Kato already mentioned in his previous post about a similar proposal in the Assembly, this system holds major party candidates to a different standard than third-party candidates and independents. The latter would have to raise twice the number of donations (50,000 for Governor) to qualify, and even then would only receive half the funds their Republican or Democratic rivals get for the same office. Any serious attempt to foster "clean" campaigns and greater electoral participation needs to set a level playing field for candidates. Treat everyone equally, period.

The second fatal flaw is the qualifying threshold. Twenty-five thousand donations for a gubernatorial candidate strikes me as a bit much for a system that's supposed to encourage grassroots democracy, to say nothing of the 50,000 donations you'd have to solicit if there's not a "D" or an "R" after your name. Ten thousand sounds more reasonable. Anything higher would be insurmountable without significant logistical funding on the candidate's part, counter-productive considering that the system aims to attract exactly those candidates without such funding.

Speaking of which, lowering the contribution caps to $1,000 for a gubernatorial candidate is just going to place a even bigger premium on self-funded candidates like, say, this one. Or this one. Or even this one. Maybe that's the idea that the nurses had in mind: since almost no one could raise sufficient cash to run for Governor off of $1000-maxed donations, the limits would effectively whittle down the types of candidates to two: publicly-financed and completely self-financed, a backdoor route to the Rauchian ideal. Now, some argue the rich aren't quite the threat to the Republic they may at first seem; after all, a millionaire is beholden to no one but herself. I would add: herself... and the source of her millions, and therein lies the dilemma. Few took pause at Steve Westly dipping into his eBay fortune to fund his own campaign, but what if he had made his windfall working for, say, Enron, or Halliburton? Plus, what of those candidates ideologically-opposed to campaign finance? Doesn't CECRA effectively declare, "Libertarians need not run (unless they're loaded)" ?

I should also mention that CECRA has ideas I like: matching the spending of non-participants, for example, and tying all the monetary thresholds and limits to inflation and registered voters; but the attempt to steer most candidates toward public financing by starving other funding options will backfire, I fear, and lead to a plutocratic nightmare. Let's end the legal quagmire of campaign finance once and for all. Give viable candidates the public funding they need to be competitive, and get out of the anti-democratic business of over-regulating electoral behavior. Let the voters decide the propriety, or lack thereof, of each candidate. This solution may lack the policy theatrics of categorizing money sources and enforcing contribution limits, but as any victim of quick sand will tell you, sometimes the struggle makes the problem worse, even fatal.

The Chinese growth miracle can’t last forever. But it may last long enough to slaughter some sacred cows about the relationship between democracy and economic growth.

President Bush has a spotty philosophy on government power: he thinks the Feds should wiretap your phones and inspect your airline luggage, but not control your Social Security benefits. Nevertheless, my bet is that this week, he's damn happy the Coast Guard controls port security.

Considering the stakes and the profound values at play, most abortion "debates" -- those hyped-up events between your college's pro-choice and the pro-life clubs -- are pretty insipid affairs. It's just the nature of the issue: you can only define "zygote" and "personhood" so many times before, eventually, you trip over your own repetitive arguments, and the audience once again fails to learn anything new.

So I was surprised by just how incisive this discussion in Slate has become, even more so because it's just between two avowed pro-choicers.

OK, so here's my quick, instant reaction to Bush's speech and Kaine's response... well, instant for me, since I missed the broadcast and had to stream it at a coffee shop. Hear that noise that sounds suspiciously like a cappuccino machine? That's Ernie succumbing to yuppie creep, $2.55 at a time.

Here's a (now-extinct) SAT analogy for you...

President Bush's open and public support of Fatah in the recent Palestinian elections is to Foreign Policy as _______________ is to Business.