Uneasily Bemused

Growth, trade balance, and tax policy

2012-08-21T15:48:00.001-07:00

Kevin Drum wonders how we can reduce trade deficits to increase growth, especially in a world where everyone else is trying to do the same thing. The simple answer is that we can't and almost certainly shouldn't try.

The US has been running a trade deficit for almost forty years now, leading to our enduring status as The World's Largest Debtor nation. That status only tells half the story. That debt doesn't reflect money we have to repay, in the normal sense of the word. It reflects the fact that foreign entities own more American assets than we own overseas assets. Some of those assets are bonds that require repayment, but others are factories or real estate with overseas owners. And while it's true that foreigners own more assets in the US than we own overseas, our foreign assets are also enormous. They're so large, in fact, that while we're a debtor nation, we earn more from our foreign assets than foreign owners earn from our domestic ones, a situation that has persisted for many years.

Why is this the case? It turns out that investments in the US are safer than similar investments abroad. As a result, investors are willing to accept lower returns. As long as other countries are rich enough to invest here and our assets are viewed as safe, the dollar will be stronger than our trade balance would suggest, and our trade balance will suffer as a result.

It's a form of Resource Curse, where investment safety inflates the value of our currency and makes other economic sectors less competitive, but the conditions that make investments safe are, in fact, good things. We don't want to get rid of them.

As Dean Baker concludes in the article Kevin referenced, we need to stimulate the economy through government spending. We can't borrow indefinitely to support that, so we should raise taxes. That's not what we'll actually do, of course. We'll keep lowering taxes on the rich, hoping that they'll stop hoarding money and invest it instead. They won't do so, because they'll see how poor everyone else is and conclude that there's not much profit to be made.

2011-12-13T23:33:00.000-08:00

From today's Chronicle, three stories. The first covers the Occupy effort to disrupt port activities. The second talks about the disconnect between the Occupy movement and blacks. The third is a column by Chip Johnson, talking about how Occupy is doing it all wrong, because they're being disruptive.

The three articles share a common theme: Occupy protests are too disruptive. Disruptive activity hurts people and detracts from the message. If the protesters would behave themselves and not get in the way of people living their lives, they'd be more effective.

Buried in the second article, however, is the following passage:

"Why don't people come out here and Occupy about the violence in our neighborhood?" said Adams, a 44-year-old project manager at a substance-abuse clinic. Every Saturday, she and other members of her church stand on street corners and hold signs asking people to "Stop the Violence."

A search for Charlene Adams on sfgate showed up nothing prior to the article about Occupy. A search for "Stop the Violence" also came up empty.

The article about how blacks feel disconnected from the Occupy movement is right on many points. Black communities have been in crisis for a long time, and no one has reacted. No one started an Occupy movement on their behalf. No one took over downtown Oakland in protest of inner city violence. Protests against injustice that take place only when injustice personally affects the protesters do show moral weakness.

But all three articles miss a fundamental point. The Occupy protests have been successful at getting their point across precisely because they have been disruptive, because they didn't take place on sidewalks, on weekends, out of the view and out of the way of the powerful. The Occupy movement should champion the neighborhoods of Oakland, but if they do so in the neighborhoods of Oakland--rather than downtown--if they do so on the weekends when it doesn't interfere with business, the Chronicle will ignore it, just as they've ignored Ms. Adams' weekend protests against violence.

the narrowest result

2011-11-09T08:13:00.000-08:00

Some Senators have introduced a resolution to reverse Citizens United. They draw their amendment as narrowly as possible, because everything else is hunky-dory. The Citizens United decision is the root cause of all our problems.

it's not about objectivity

2011-11-03T14:47:00.000-07:00

David Atkins complains about the behavior of Politico, reporting on the Cain and Perry camps as if it weren't part of the story, and says

The myth of objectivity in journalism can't die a fast enough death.

But it's never been about objectivity. It's been about the appearance of objectivity. It's always been OK (and unavoidable) to have political views, as long as you can claim that you don't.

handing out free money

2011-10-22T21:26:00.000-07:00

Atrios periodically suggests handing out free money. As he's pointed out, free money gets handed out all the time. Since January 2008, about $2T has been handed out. It could have done a lot of good if it had been given to those who needed it.

Thank you, James Madison

2011-10-21T14:18:00.000-07:00

Our son has difficulty reading. Two years ago, my wife found out about NIMAC, a national center for distributing textbooks in electronic form to print-challenged students (the blind, dyslexics, etc.). NIMAC was created as a result of IDEA 2004, to facilitate student access to texts. Two years later, we're still trying to get access, even though our son's eligibility for the materials has never been questioned.

The story is a common one to anyone who has ever tried to navigate an unfamiliar bureaucracy: many paths followed to dead-ends, months spent getting a particular authorization only to find that it was the wrong one, months wasted getting authorizations from uncooperative or semi-cooperative third-parties that turned out to be irrelevant, etc.

The particulars of the story aren't that important, but as the process dragged on, it became clear that the process was designed more to deny access than to facilitate it. The rules are arcane, the documentation hurdles substantial. Even when a student gets access to materials, downloads require the active participation of a public official (at least that's how it appears to us now; we think we're close, but we haven't yet been successful).

"Why," we asked ourselves, "would you create a program to help students, then make it so difficult to use that it would deny services for years?" Why even bother?

It turns out we can thank James Madison and the other authors of our Constitution. The Constitution doesn't merely tell the government to promote invention and creation. It prescribes how to do so:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

IDEA required publishers to provide their texts in electronic form, free of charge, but such a requirement creates constitutional problems. In the words of a friend of ours, 'If the government mandates “free” anything, the courts won’t uphold it without a showing of significant need and also a significant administrative check on unauthorized access.' In order to comply with the Constitution, the government has to make access difficult.

It's only two years. And counting. Thanks, Mr. Madison.

Update: I misunderstood the point my friend was making and then misinterpreted what I read. The Congress isn't required to give exclusivity, but apparently courts have interpreted such a grant as the creation of property, after which an act which reduces it is a "taking." The government might be able to limit the original exclusivity, but it's easier to make access to federal funds contingent on providing access, then making barriers to access so high that almost no one can qualify, and those that do, don't do so quickly.

monetary vs fiscal policy

2011-10-20T10:47:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman and Brad Delong are talking about how to get the economy running again, but they're economists so they immediately start talking about models, expectations, interest rates, etc. I'm not an economist (even after reading several textbooks), so that doesn't do much for me. Models necessarily abstract the real world, and while they can teach us a great deal by doing so, they leave a lot out. And sometimes, what they leave out is as important as what they tell us.

When Krugman and Delong say we're in a liquidity trap, they talk about models, graphs, equilibrium points, and other mathematical concepts. They rarely talk about what a liquidity trap means in terms of individual actors. If low interest rates can't stimulate the economy, it means that 1) the low interest rates don't affect consumption, and 2) low interest rates don't affect investment. In the first case, that probably means that the low interest rates we see in bond markets aren't, in fact, getting passed through to consumers. In the second case, it may mean that businesses aren't seeing low interest rates, or it may mean that even with low-interest loans, businesses aren't seeing opportunities for profitable investments.

So, what do consumer interest rates look like? Mortgage rates are low, but the housing market is so soft that investing in a house looks like a risky proposition, even with a low interest rate. People may refinance and reduce their expenses, but low rates don't appear to be creating new home owners and driving new construction. Credit card rates, on the other hand, aren't anywhere near zero. We aren't even close to a lower bound there. Low interest rates at the Fed and T-Bill level may not be doing anything to stimulate consumer demand.

I'm too lazy and unskilled to figure out the interest loans a typical business might face, but there's ample evidence that even with low interest rates, businesses don't see many investment opportunities. Businesses sitting on record piles of cash don't need loans. They have money to spend. They must not see anything worth spending it on.

The advantage of fiscal over monetary policy in times like this is that fiscal policy acts directly, without having to go through intermediaries that have to be profitable. Unlike a business, the government can spend money without worrying about whether the investment will be profitable. When demand is slack, it can even do so without worrying about driving out private activity. Unlike a bank, the government can give money to consumers without worrying about whether they can pay it back, and it can do a much better job of making sure that the funds it injects go to those who will spend it.

revolutions, movements, and anarchists

2011-10-10T14:34:00.000-07:00

"How can you have protests without specific agendas?" ask many in the punditocracy, even those who sympathize with the protesters, but they miss the point. It is too soon to prescribe solutions. It is too soon to make demands.

Electoral politics and legislative policy are the endgame of social and democratic engagement, not the opening or the mid-game. They are how you secure gains achieved by an inspired population, not how you inspire a population. Before you can make demands, you must have the power to demand. Before you can prescribe legislation, you must have a constituency. Before you can pull a lever and move the world, you must have a place to stand.

In asking for an agenda, most pundits and leaders are not looking to empower the protesters, but to undermine and defeat them. They seek demands and policies not to address or enact the policies, but to marginalize and fracture the protests. They seek specific policies because specific policies can be attacked, because by attacking the proposed solutions, they can deny the grievances.

Elites always demand "constructive" criticism and protest, but that is merely a mechanism to deflect the criticism and silence the protest. You do not and should not need to know how to right an injustice or fix a policy to object to the injustice or point out that the policy has failed, any more than you should need to know how to cure a disease to go to a doctor and describe your symptoms.

Silly, Matt

2011-04-04T14:48:00.000-07:00

Why would a politician vote to reduce his job prospects?

2010-08-04T13:30:00.000-07:00

Atrios noted something:

A big problem with economists is that they do a bit of sleight of hand with policy analysis. First they'll come up with some policy change which, IN THEORY GIVEN APPROPRIATE REDISTRIBUTION OF BENEFITS, can be Pareto Improving, that is make everyone as well or better off without making things worse for anyone. That is, because the policy change increases the size of the pie - makes per capita gdp higher - there's more to go around. But the next step, the actual redistribution, of course does not happen so GDP enhancing policies might give Bill Gates an extra billion bucks while leaving the rest of us with $500 million less.

It's worse than that actually. On the one hand, an economist will argue that a policy (say free trade) is beneficial because it increases overall wealth. When people point out that the benefits aren't uniform and that some people will be hurt, they will say that such problems are best addressed through other mechanisms, such as transfer payments. That's nice in theory, but if the proposed policy (in this case transfer payments) is a dead letter, it's irrelevant.

What takes the argument from inane to pernicious is the fact that the same argument used to promote the policy in question is used to oppose addressing the problems it causes. Free trade is good because it's pareto improving. Transfer payments are not (at least not as long as your utility function is constant with income). Economists or politicians or policy wonks who believe in pareto improvement will end up opposing the remedies they originally put forward. To them, the remedies are useful arguments, but they aren't good ideas and shouldn't really be carried out.

It only takes a few players like that to secure majorities for the policy change and against addressing its flaws.

average vs average

2009-06-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

Atrios points out that Sotomayor is neither rich nor average. Indeed, it seems like just yesterday that we learned $20k-$30K medical bills sent lots of people into bankruptcy.

we must not waste our precious bodily fluids

2009-04-24T10:32:00.000-07:00

As Paul Krugman points out, the people in government working on today's problems wouldn't really be distracted by trials or investigations into torture. In the same paper, Roger Cohen whines that everyone got it wrong, so there's no point in dwelling on the past. Krugman is, of course, as right as Cohen is wrong. It should be remarkable to see words like

The press failed... Scrutiny gave way to acquiescence. Words were spun in feckless patterns.

opposite a column written by someone who did not fail, who did not fail to scrutinize, who did not spin words in feckless patterns, but it's so common, it's trite. Somewhere in the Village rulebook, there's a provision that requires such counterpoint, and requires that the one who writes of a world that didn't exist to be treated as serious, while the one who describes the world as it was is derided as destructive of the normal order.

But I digress. I was supposed to be discussing the wasting of precious bodily fluids.

Who would be distracted, who would be mired in the past and unable to move forward by serious investigations and prosecutions of those who committed crimes and blackened our national soul over the past eight years? Not those on the hard left, not those trying to solve the problems of today, not those who were right. The Cohens, the Hannitys, the Becks, and Limbaughs of the world, however, would be forced to explain and defend themselves endlessly. Democratic fellow travelers, those who enabled and abetted the crimes of Bush administration, would be put on the defensive. The punditocracy who cheered them on and rationalized them would be forced to confront time and again how empty and (yes) feckless they were and continue to be.

In short, those who would be distracted and forced to waste their precious bodily fluids are exactly those who, lacking backbone and any semblance of moral fiber, shouldn't be contributing to discussions about the future, anyway. That investigations and prosecutions would distract them and waste their energy is a feature, not a bug.

those in authority should always feel safe

2009-03-25T15:08:00.000-07:00

Several blogs have noted the new Supreme Case in the war on everyone. Most of us feel revulsion over the facts of the case, but apparently not everyone. From the NYT article:

Judge Michael Daly Hawkins, dissenting, said the case was in some ways “a close call...”

“Do we really want to encourage cases,” Professor Arum asked, “where students and parents are seeking monetary damages against educators in such school-specific matters where reasonable people can disagree about what is appropriate under the circumstances?”

Of course not. The last thing we need are people in authority who have to worry about the consequences of their actions. Administrators shouldn't have to worry about either the effects of a search on its target or the possible future effects on themselves should they be sued. Phone companies shouldn't have to worry about the effects on the privacy of their customers if they allow the government to proceed with unlawful searches, and they certainly shouldn't have to worry about effects on their future bottom lines if they're assessed damages. Interrogators shouldn't have to worry about the pain they subject their subjects to, neither should they worry that they'll be held accountable. Police shouldn't have to worry about the health of those they shoot or tase, and shouldn't fear prosecution if their actions kill someone.

No one in authority should ever have to worry about the consequences of their actions. Such concerns are only for the little people. What's the point of having a position of authority if your use of power can be questioned? Where's the fun in that?

Standing up for workers' rights

2009-03-12T13:56:00.000-07:00

The US Chamber of Commerce President has our backs:

"You've got to go up and tell them what will happen [if the bill passes], that no one is going to add a single job in the United States," Chamber president Thomas Donahue told the assembled. "Will I put a job here where it'll get unionized in an illegal way? No, I'll put it somewhere else."

He loves workers so much that rather than see them deprived of the right to a secret ballot, he'll ship their jobs overseas, where workers' right to work without representation is properly respected.

corporate taxes and overall progressivity

2009-01-06T11:24:00.001-08:00

In case you haven't seen this yet, the CBO has released a report showing that our tax system is, in fact, progressive.

This analysis rests on Table 1, where one sub-table assigns an "Effective Corporate Income Tax Rate" for each income group, by assigning all such corporate taxes proportionally to non-wage income. Since higher income groups have more non-wage income, they bear a disproportionate share of such taxes (40% of the entire tax burden for the top 0.01%).

That assignment only makes sense if you assume the economy to be uncompetitive. In an uncompetitive economy, a lower corporate tax would translate immediately into profits. In a competitive one, it seems that income tax is a corporate cost like any other, and that lowering the cost would lower prices, increase revenue, increase labor demand (and therefore wages), etc. I'm not sure how much of the tax should be assigned to each group (I can make a naive case that if 10% of corporate revenue is profit, 10% of the taxes should be assigned to owners, but don't have much confidence in it), but it's unreasonable to assign all of it to owners.

By assigning all the costs of corporate taxes to owners, the report is implicitly arguing that the economy is uncompetitive, and that raising corporate taxes would only affect the rich. This may be the first time I've heard conservatives make that argument.

the rule of law

2007-01-16T09:47:00.000-08:00

Digby has written extensively lately of the Administration's expansive view of executive power and disdain for both the Congress and the American people, and how those views suggest they will ignore any attempt by Congress to constrain their behavior. There's almost nothing in the record of this Administration that would contradict that view.

At the root of the problem is the fact that while Congress makes laws and the Supreme Court interprets them, the President has sole executive power. Everyone in the Federal government who would actually enforce a law or a judgement works for the President, and after six years of this administration, there's almost no one left in a position of authority who hasn't been tested for either ideological purity or extraordinary compliance.

If, as appears possible, we're on the verge of a Constitutional collision between branches of historic proportion, it might be time to ask ourselves what limits this Administration does perceive. If it can ignore Congressional authority over its ability to wage war or to conduct domestic surveillance without warrants, for example, what else can it ignore? If it can ignore the courts on treatment of prisoners, what else can it ignore? What are the limits of an executive unconstrained by concern for public opinion, convinced that he is divinely inspired and led, supported by a cadre of like fanatics? Is the rule of law--any rule of law--protection against an executive convinced he serves a higher authority?

I've written before that I am less concerned with whether a politician follows the letter of the law than I am with who he serves. I prefer a personally corrupt politician who advances the public good to a paragon of personal virtue who destroys it. In this case, I'd certainly prefer a politician who respected our Constitution more and his own judgement less. Is that a contradiction? Perhaps, perhaps not.

In the end, our laws are only as good as the people we elect to enforce them. It's important to elect people with enough humility to realize that they are not us, they only represent us. Respect for law is one marker of that humility. Respect for the opinions of those who disagree with you is another.

If we elect people who lack that humility--and who have repeatedly demonstrated that lack--no body of law will protect us.

Mercy for our friends, vengeance for our enemies

2007-01-03T11:19:00.000-08:00

It has been amusing over the past few days to watch the same people who claim that executions are necessary for "closure," who cheered the hanging of Saddam Hussein and regretted only that it was not more thuggish than it actually was, eulogize President Ford for his wisdom in sparing the country a full accounting of Nixon's crimes.

Wednesday, Thursday

2006-12-07T13:46:00.000-08:00

Wednesday: ISG says US must engage diplomatically with Syria and Iran to avoid disaster in Iraq.

Thursday: Bush tells Iran and Syria what they must do to earn the privilege of saving us from disaster.

what's wrong with timetables, anyway?

2006-12-07T10:27:00.000-08:00

We've heard over and over that setting timetables would be a big mistake, that it would show a lack of resolve, embolden our enemies, etc. In most other situations, the inability to set a timetable shows the exact opposite: either that those presenting the plan aren't committed to it, or that the problem is not, in fact, understood. To say that we can't set a timetable is to say that we don't in fact have a reliable plan, that if our enemies knew even that much about our plans, they could disrupt them. It's an admission of weakness, not of strength.

The hilarious part of this (I laugh myself to sleep thinking about it every night) is that those who argue most strenuously against timetables invoke them regularly. How often have we heard that the next six months are the key? Don't such statements invoke a deadline, a timetable if you will, for dramatic improvement?

refreshed macs with dirty disks

2006-12-05T18:05:00.000-08:00

Jacqui relates the amusing story of someone purchased a refreshed mac, only to find the desktop covered with porn links. She's skeptical, and I can appreciate her caution in the face of a story that reeks of urban legend.

In my case, I didn't have a desktop full of porn, but something (presumably my disk) had not been cleaned. The test drive version of Office, for example, is convinced I'm Swedish. The shell is convinced my machine is called "bench3-3", a name I never typed in.

The big problem with this isn't that you might find annoying content on your desktop (though some such content is illegal, and even if you delete it, it might show up in a forensic search), but that returning a failed computer to apple might expose confidential information to whoever eventually gets the disk. This is particularly disturbing because when a customer returns a broken system, they may not have the opportunity to clear the disks themselves.

ethics and objectivity

2006-11-20T14:08:00.000-08:00

This bit in Joshua's post caught my eye:

What struck me about the exchange is that I had tied vapid and timid media coverage to Americans' often shocking ignorance about their own political system and said it was perhaps the greatest threat to our democracy. But while he agreed that there was a major problem with the public's political knowledge and participation, he flat-out refused to acknowledge that it had any connection to the rules by which he insisted he had to live.

That, I think, is the essential flaw at the heart of the ethic of objectivity. Ethics aren't merely standards of personal morality, they're rules that allow communities to work and flourish. They exist to support good outcomes. If the ethical code demands objectivity, prohibits those who enforce and maintain the code from caring about results (ie, Mark "I've never voted" Halperin), then the code itself becomes unmoored. Bad results get ignored because the ethicists themselves refuse to judge the outcomes; they merely observe.

This is not the norm in other spheres. Medical ethicists and legal ethicists care predominately about results and revise ethical codes when current codes fail. Judges are required to be objective, but legislatures exist to change the laws when the "objective" interpretation of the law leads to bad results. If the objective norm fails to keep the public well-informed, how can "objective" journalists respond? How can they prevent themselves from being gamed if they refuse to judge the outcomes of their actions?

npr vs lamont and the blogosphere

2006-07-26T19:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning, NPR ran a pair of remarkable reports about the Lieberman/Lamont campaign and the DLC, in which they managed to discuss the race in Connecticut without quoting anyone who supports Lamont, and the struggle between the netroots and the DLC without quoting anyone from the netroots.

The first was a report from David Welna, who reported on Clinton's campaign for Lieberman, characterized Lamont only as a "millionaire," quoted Lieberman supporters on the air characterizing Lamont supporters as a "screaming minority," and reduced the race to a single issue: the war on Iraq. There were no quotes or comments from Lamont supporters. It's hard to believe they declined to provide comments, but the only other conclusion is that no comments were sought.

The second, blending almost seamlessly with the first, was about the "debate between the left and center of the Democratic Party." It describes how the DLC is now battling the "netwired, left-wing populists working so hard to defeat Joe Lieberman." The DLC is allowed to characterize itself and tout its accomplishments, but the characterization of the "blogosphere" and the "activist base of the party," is left to Mara Liasson herself. The closest she comes to allowing the base to speak for themselves is to quote Democratic Party official Elaine Kaymark, someone who has "worked with both the DLC and anti-war Democrats."

Perhaps NPR has finally taken the advice of those who've said that journalists should abandon their pose of neutrality and speak with their own voice rather than merely presenting the views of both sides. On the other hand, only one side of the debate was silenced. The "centrists" were given ample time to make their case, only the populist, activist, left was excluded. Lieberman's supporters were allowed to make their case. Lamont's supporters were not.

the myth of the neutral net

2006-05-02T10:22:00.000-07:00

While I am sympathetic to the notion that The Net Should Be Neutral, I have a hard time seeing how the recent changes present existential threats to the Net As We Know It. The Net has never been neutral. It is hard to imagine how it could be.

Let's start from the most obvious point, the connection from a server to an ISP. Half the country still connects to the internet via dial-up lines. Since these connections are not always-on, systems behind those lines are not fully part of the Net.

People get around that by subscribing to hosting services. That's great, but hosting services price by the level of service. Anyone who's tried to run a website then had it get too popular (instapounded, atriated, fark'd, slashdot'd, etc.) knows that you have to pay more to reach a wider audience.

More subtly, the Net is not an amorphous blob of bandwidth. It's a series of point-to-point connections. The route from my system to cnn.com has at least 16 hops. It has 80 ms of latency. Yahoo.com has 10 hops and 20ms latency. If I do the same test from our family website, I see 13 hops and 75ms latency to cnn.com, and 11 hops and 80ms latency to yahoo.com. I suspect high-level ISPs already compete with one another to provide the lowest latency and highest bandwidth to the broadest area. The only way to eliminate such biases would be to eliminate competition between ISPs.

In truth, it gets more complicated than that. Some sites are geographically mirrored. Some aren't. Some are cached. Some push content out through dedicated content distribution networks so that the bulk of data is close to the client. All of these approaches require more expertise and money than casual internet users are able or willing to muster, and there's almost nothing that can be done to prevent them.

So if companies start differentiating between their customers, it's not as if they're destroying a level playing field. The field has never been level and won't be until bandwidth, storage, and computing are free.

Such practices may make things marginally worse, but they may also make them marginally better. Improving service today is expensive. If backbones commoditize service priorities, they should be less expensive than the approaches described above. If they're less expensive, they'll be available to a wider range of customers. Upgrading your web hosting service could include upgraded backbone service as part of the package.

I'm not a pollyanna about this (or much else, I guess), but on my potential end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scale, I'd have to give this no more than a 1% Abu Ghraib.

fighting for values

2006-01-29T14:07:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama says that Senators shouldn't attempt to filibuster, but should instead convince Americans that their values are at stake, that winning elections is the right way to win these battles, not procedural rules in the Senate. Unfortunately, procedural Senate moves are all we have today. Without those moves, there is no fight, only capitulation.

How can Democrats hope to convince Americans that their values are at stake if Democrats are unwilling to fight for those values? If Alito's nomination is a grave threat to values Democrats and American hold dear, how can Democrats not fight? If Democrats don't fight, only two conclusions can be drawn: either the battle was not important or Democrats can't be trusted with an important fight.

the alito hearings

2006-01-21T21:39:00.000-08:00

I'm not and probably never will be a politician, and my instincts on this are probably all wrong, but while knowledgable folk like Kevin look for lines of constitutional inquiry that might have been more effective for the Democrats, I can't help wondering why no one pressed him on his insistence that he had an obligation not to answer meaningful questions. At times he refused to answer on the basis that he couldn't do so without a specific case to evaluate through the judicial process. At times he refused to answer because answering might commit him to judging in a specific way in cases likely to come before the Court.

There are a couple problems with these answers.

First, they're not consistent. If every case is distinct and can only be judged after considering the particulars, expressing opinions on general constitutional principles cannot prejudge any particular case. Until justices go through the judicial process, they presumably don't know which constitutional principles apply and to what extent. Without reference to a particular case, expressing opinions on Constitutional principles is not prejudging and does not commit the judge.

Second, as many have noted, justices express opinions all the time. It's their job. Scalia, Thomas, Sutter, et al have expressed opinions on issues likely to come before the Court many times, and will continue to do so. Alito has done so as an appelate judge. Members of the Court have expressed opinions in speeches, books, and articles. Before he was a judge, Alito expressed opinions as a government lawyer. Yet somehow, we're all supposed to accept that expressing opinions in response to the questions of the judiciary committee would compromise his judicial objectivity. I would like to have heard Alito explain why expressing opinions in public, before the people he will spend the rest of his life judging, prior to becoming a judge, was different.

It's a line of questioning that might not have been easy to deflect. He might, for example, have had a hard time asserting that he can't answer questions and asserting that he can't explain why. I would have enjoyed listening to him explain why only the public has no right to know, or trying to claim that he does not, in fact, have opinions on controversial matters of great public import. I would have enjoyed hearing him explain how the judicial process insulates his future judgements on the Supreme Court from the opinions he's expressed before, but not from opinions he expresses before a Senate committee. I would have enjoyed hearing him explain how keeping the public ignorant of a judge's deeply held views is equivalent to a judge not having deeply held views.

It might not have changed the outcome, but it would have been more edifying than what we had.