Procrastinating: Taxation as Percent of GDP

Couldn't find a good data source for government expenditure as percent of GDP and don't have time to compile the statistics myself, World Bank only went back to 95 which doesn't show what I want to show and OECD only gave raw and not proportional expenditure.  So this is taxation data which is far messier.  Only thing I want to point out is that you can roughly eye-ball this to see that taxation becomes significantly flatter somewhere in the range of 30 - 50% of GDP but rises quite sharply before then.  It very rarely, and only briefly rises over 50% of GDP and that is in only a single case, Sweden.  There is no constant rise in government taxation as % of GDP as some would claim and the European countries flatten out without any sort of political movement comparable to the American right or the Tea Party.



Explanation for the graph since it didn't import well.  Taxation as percentage of GDP is on the Y axis and I couldn't get the labels to go on the X and don't have time to fiddle with it so the X axis is years past 1965.  Best I could do without spending too much time with it.

I couldn't get it to size well, your browser should be able to enlarge it easy enough.  Credit for data goes to OECD.

Last Chance

I probably wrote that last post too late.  If this New York Times story is correct, this is probably the final point where intervention can make a difference.  There's only a few hours left for governments to wake up and realize that the costs of the situation are already sunk and there's little to nothing to lose by intervention but real gains to be had, though gains that have been shrinking by the hour since the Arab League came out in favor of intervention.  This is probably too short a time frame for diplomacy so I'm predicting that those costs will start showing up in a few years.  I'm expecting an uptick in terrorists of Libyan origin, probably not on the scale of Afghanistan but enough that we will rue our dithering in due time.

Libyan Scenarios

I'm a little frustrated with the continued failure for action in Libya.  I see very little to be lost through intervention, and while the ains won't be enormous there is a possibility of real gains through intervention.  These are the scenarios I have in mind.

No internvention:

Qaddafi Wins

If we don't intervene and Qaddafi wins we end up with a slightly crazy dictator who doesn't like the west and already appears angry.  He may be too distracted with further unrest to focus on taking out his ire on the rest of the world.  However, it is not unlikely there will be a diaspora of former rebels seeking refuge abroad.  Like in Afghanistan it is not unlikely that since they will have little power to strike at Libya they will act as former anti-Afghani soldiers did and blame the west for their ills.  I expect this to be a very high risk scenario that will likely help to fuel terrorism for decades to come.

Rebels Win

If the rebels pull victory from the jaws of defeat, say through an unexpected tribal defection, they will give us little thanks for our dithering.  If a stable regime emerges it will probably be at best as hostile as Nasser was.  While I think the prospects for a stable government in Libya are low an unstable government can be just as dangerous.  I'd expect another quasi-failed state from this arrangement.  I also expect a quasi-failed state that blames the west for much of their ills do to the damage Qaddafi did in surpressing the rebels and that will be a major source of instability throughout the region, and a threat that may eventually require boots on the ground to suppress, like in Afghanistan, but one whose humiliation and anger is even fresher in memory and more hostile.

Intervention

Qaddafi Wins

If we intervene and Qaddafi wins he will be even angrier at the west and will no doubt attempt to sow instability and support terrorism. However, the rebels will continuge to plague him and they will know they can count on some western support.  They may blame our late intervention for their failures (and the longer we wait the more severe this will be) which could lead to problems for us but I believe they'd be more likely to continue to resist Qaddafi.  Particularly if we continue to give them covert support.  Qaddafi simply doesn't have enough in the way of resources to simultaneously suppress internal unrest and play a major role in causing unrest and damage outside his country.  I don't see this scenario as being significantly different from a Qaddafi winning with no intervention scenario so I don't see much risk here.

Rebels Win

In this case as long as our intervention hasn't taken a form where we claim to be the decisive factor, I see a potential for a significant warming of Muslim attitudes towards the west.  This would undermine accusations that the west does not care about those countries and potentially diffuse a lot of the anger fueling terrorism.  While I still doubt Libya will become a liberal democracy, and I think state failure will continue to be a real option, it will be a scenario where if intervention becomes necessary the population won't feel a powerful grievance against the United States, making this scenario far less costly.


These are basically the four general scenarios I see happening.  There is a huge amount of variation in which one depending on what the details are, I don't know enough about Libya to say, but I think at this point, with both the rebels and the Arab League supporting a no fly zone, intervention is a clearly dominant long term strategy.  I understand the dithering, there's always a status quo bias that makes people think that not doing anything is equivalent to not making a choice, but this is bullshit when the power to intervene is clearly present and everyone knows this.  So by dithering, like it or not, we're making a choice and we'll suffer the consequences for it.  And they will be negative. 

Intervention of course is no certain success, I'm sure our statesmen would prefer to take a wait and see approach to find out who wins, but I don't see this as mattering.  What additional harm do we really think Qaddafi will do if he wins?  He's still going to hate us after what has happened, and he'll be in a stronger position to make this known.  If we intervene he'll be more motivated to act, but his resource situation will be greatly weakened.  At this point, win or lose, coming out in favor of the rebels and intervening is simply less costly in the long run.  Intervention may help our long term relations with the Muslim world, non-intervention will only inflame existing negative perceptions.  I don't see what we gain by not doing anything an the costs of intervention aren't that steep.

Of course, there is the risk that we'll allow our intervention to escalate.  This I'm strongly opposed to.  Intervention and Qaddafi winning anyways is an acceptable outcome.  There's no reason to put boots on the ground and this should be made clear from the start of any intervention.  While there's a certain logic to warfare that calls for escalating commitments, I believe the lack of a clear ally or established obligations will prevent this scenario.

Libya: To Intervene or Not to Intervene?

I've been mulling this over in my head for the last week, most of my initial doubts based on the Iraq war have been dispelled.  The key change for me is that the Arab League has endorsed a no fly zone and that reports on the rebels in Libya have started calling for support, something they hadn't done initially. 

So I now tentatively feel that the right thing to do is to intervene, but with some caveats.  The biggest caveat is that before we need to go in we need to accept the limits of our influence.  We can't remake Libyan politics and toppling Qaddafi or putting another specific group in power isn't our goal.

What we should do is try to make this a fair fight, and be upfront about it.  Liberating Libya is up to the Libyans, our role is just to make it a fair fight.  Right now, Qaddafi has control of the air force, tanks, and other advantages that go with being able to buy arms for decades.  What we can do is eliminate this advantage and make this a straight up ground war.

But that should be the limits of our influence, and it should be publicly stated.  Toppling Qaddafi is something that will be done by forces on the ground and how things turn out will be their victory, not ours. 

I believe taking this position will serve the dual purpose of adding legitimacy to any new regime and reducing anti-western radicalism that has become so pervasive due to our Middle Eastern policies.  Taking credit for toppling the regime wouldn't do this it would just play into the narrative of western imperialism.

There are two risks to this strategy, even if it works.  The first is that Qaddafi will stay in power and be even more disruptive than in the past.  This I'm not to worried about.  He was a pest before and didn't topple the international system, we can live with him being a pest again.

The second risk is that the Libyan rebels aren't organized so we don't know what we'll be dealing with if they succeed.  This is a huge risk, and what I do know (which isn't much) about Libyan politics is that they're still divided by tribe and other ascriptive identities that make any form of democracy more difficult and less stable.  This can't be ignored.  However, if they do win, if not now say in another revolt in a few decades, and we didn't intervene this will be a major new source of resentment in a region of the world we're already not very popular.  Libya has also already proven to be a large source of insurgents in Iraq.  Things are already bad there from our perspective, while they can get worse I think this is balanced by how much better things can get.  I believe this concern, while real, has slightly greater upsides than downsides so ultimately argues in favor of intervention, if only by a hair.

Aside from these risks, my main concern is that if we do intervene the hawks will win out and drag us further into this than we should go.  This is my biggest concern.  I think limited intervention has a low enough risk and a high enough pay off to be worth it.  What we have to recognize is that there's a risk, if we lose this hand we have to cut our losses and not get drawn further in.  If we let ourselves get drawn into making this our fight rather than simply playing a supporting role the balance changes and intervention is far too expensive.  This worries me since hawkishness is always popular so there's a real chance that if we do intervene at all, we won't be able to stop the momentum from dragging us in.

On the whole, while I have doubts, I think we should intervene provided we can make a number of up front caveats to help us from getting drawn in further and to communicate to the Libyans, and the Arab world in general, that we still see this as their fight, we're only lending a small helping hand.  Making this distinction is what I see as the critical element however, I'm opposed to any intervention where we try to take any credit for toppling Qaddafi, this isn't our role, it's not in our power, and it would be a massive strategic and diplomatic mistake to do so.

I'd also like a UN resolution supporting intervention, it seems time to call an emergency assembly.  If the other Arab nations will push for it, it seems like it has a real chance of happening.  China and Russia may grumble, but neither likely wants to alienate the rest of the Middle East so I think they'd abstain if it came to a vote.  It's worth the gamble.

Energy Efficiency and Jevons Paradox

Just read an article in the NY Times on how energy efficiency can lead to increased energy usage.  I've heard the argument before, and there's definitely some truth to it.  The article contains links to some of the evidence for this.

The perspective given in this article leads right into one of the major themes of this blog.  Things aren't simple, can't be considered as isolated effects, and attention has to be paid to their contingent nature.  In this particular case that contingency is the fact that more effective measures such as a gas tax are made cheaper by increases in energy efficiency.  It could be true that:

While there’s no doubt that fuel-efficient cars burn less gasoline per mile, the lower cost at the pump tends to encourage extra driving. There’s also an indirect rebound effect as drivers use the money they save on gasoline to buy other things that produce greenhouse emissions, like new electronic gadgets or vacation trips on fuel-burning planes.

However, it's also true that people have very real concerns about how a gas tax might impact the economy and the poor.  Increased fuel efficiency reduces these costs.  This changes people's cost calculations and can make possible political alignments that weren't possible before.*  Technological advances change the underlying systemic pressures and can impact policy outcomes in meaningful ways.  Analyzing things in isolation misses this, and while I think most well informed people realize there's more to it, this doesn't describe everyone engaged in political debate. 

I believe it's important to recognize, and be explicit about, these second order effects so that we don't have as many tiresome arguments about topics such as efficiency vs. a gas tax (not that I recall seeing this specific frame), as if these are separate strategies rather than complementary ones.  Probably too much to ask from a newspaper article with wordcount, as opposed to a blog where I can freely ramble on to my heart's content, but I see things presented so often in this basic oppositional structure that I couldn't help commenting on it.

Though I do feel that perhaps rather than ending

No matter what laws are enacted, people are going to find ways to use energy more efficiently — that’s the story of civilization. But don’t count on them using less energy, no matter how dirty their clothes get.

Perhaps something could have been added that spoke of the complementary nature of the preferred solution of a gas tax along with the inability of efficiency to achieve large economy wide energy savings on its own (though I'm agnostic about the washers mentioned in the last paragraph, gas taxes are more interesting to me).

*I will admit this doesn't seem to be happening in the US.  We seem to use the technical advances involved in making more efficient cars to simply make them bigger instead (which I think may be part of the explanation for the increased fatalities for small cars, it's not irrelevant the big ones are growing in size and number as well.  Part of this issue is timing, efficiency increases may create a window where a gas tax could be imposed without harm since people haven't adjusted their habits yet.  Given them time, and this will become more difficult.  This is purely theoretical in the case of the US auto industry where we haven't seen a move to more efficient vehicles since a good portion of the efficiency increases are wiped out by size.

Comparing American Slavery to Russian Serfdom

Another excellent post on the NY Times' Disunion blog, this one on comparing aspects of the Russian emancipation of the serfs to American emancipation of the slaves.  While there are certainly differences, I spent a lot of time back in my American politics class comparing eastern European emancipation to that in the US (and also trying to contrast the two with Brazil and the Hapsburg emancipation in Austria-Hungary) to point out numerous similarities.  Understanding all three of these cases helps us to understand each one individually better.

This is a bit off topic for the normal thrust of this blog, there just aren't all that many tie ins to modern times, but it's something worth reading to understand our history as Americans and to put it into the context of world history so I thought I'd point it out.  Especially since it's a light easy read.  Take a few minutes to look at it.

Through the Fox Looking Glass: Consolidation of Government Services and Government by Press Release

While I always feel that picking on a Fox News column is slightly unfair, this ties in with some other reading* I've been doing so I reacted to it rather strongly.

John Lott reacts somewhat hyperbolically to a new GAO report on the waste being caused by program duplication.  My readers probably know that this is an area of particular frustration for me and the major reason that I am often so pro-federal government.

John Lott of course isn't.  He points out that according to the GAO report up to $200 billion could be saved over the next decade (though I don't see that figure in the link presented and it seems like a high end estimate, but for arguments sake we'll assume it's correct).  So far, so good.

It's his explanation for the problem that I think can be best described as complete bullshit:

Call it "press release government." For politicians, the best way to be seen as being actively involved and to viewed as caring about a problem is to set up a new government program and then claim credit for it. It doesn't seem to matter if there are already 17 other programs that help people get nutritious food or 79 other programs to provide transportation for the disadvantaged, adding another program shows that the politician really cares... Creating new additional government programs spread across different government agencies also means that additional congressional committees can try claiming oversight...Thus, when there is a housing problem, congressmen and Senators from a range of different committees can claim legitimate reasons to run before the television cameras and hold committee hearings...Part of the problem is that once a program is adopted, it is there forever, and expenditures are assumed to continue along certain trends.

This is utter nonsense.  Does anyone really think that a Congresscritter cares if they are in front of the cameras for a new program to give young mothers money to buy their kids veggies or to claim they increased WIC funding by 20% so that mothers can buy their toddlers veggies?  It doesn't make any difference to them, they're still in front of the cameras and can make the same speeches and press releases, so this can't be a good explanation (there may be some truth to them liking being able to stand in front of real, physical stuff they built, but this isn't applicable to the stuff in the GAO report).  And since the poor don't vote in as large of numbers, according to Leighly and Nagler 2006 56.4% of the lowest quintile of eligible voters vs. 86.3% of the highest quintile it seems unlikely they are pursuing many of these anti-poverty programs for votes (while other programs have duplication these are the ones Lott mentions, and it is true they are rather more frequently duplicated) (also remember that many states deprive criminals of the right to vote, which make up a not insignificant portion of the lowest quintile and depending on survey method may be impacting these numbers since many people may mistakenly believe they are ineligible to vote due to the opacity of these laws which may impact 47 million Americans, as do immigrants who have not yet gained citizenship).