Your Federal tax dollars at work.
I was gratified to hear Alan Greenspan's testimony to Congress yesterday in which he called for cuts to Social Security spending as the most critical element of a deficit-elimination process. This is the only sensible approach to a problem which will presently balloon entirely out of control--spending on the elderly (Social Security and Medicare combined) already amounts to more than one-third of the total federal budget, and matters will only get dramatically worse from here as the Baby Boomers retire and health care costs continue to spiral out of control. Luckily I have devised a solution to both problems, which--posturing by the Democrats notwithstanding--has plenty to make everyone happy.

But, in order to present it in a credible and comprehensive manner, a few numbers would be in order. These will also serve to allow me to confirm for myself that the plan works before dispensing a bunch of facile platitudes on the subject which sound pretty as long as they're kept to generalities. Facts are good and are our friends. We'll leave the facile platitudes to the politicians, since they are almost universally incapable of doing any justice to any problem of even moderate complexity, which the current situation certainly is.

Remember the annual muted hooplah surrounding the release of the President's budget proposal? I saw a bunch of stock shots of a guy pushing a hand truck with stacks of budget documents on them, each one shrinkwrapped individually and about the thickness of four telephone books, and said to myself "Gotta have it." Yes, accountants can be such dorks sometimes, but the whole notion of having that many actual numbers to run my fingers through and see just how bad things really are--as measured with numbers, not volume of rhetoric--presents a really exciting opportunity to see what all this budget deficit fuss is all about and how it can be fixed. So I found myself wishing I could have my own copy, not just the fat cat members of congress, none of whom naturally read it anyway.

It occurred to me about that time that as a taxpaying citizen of a free republic, I by all rights should have a copy of the budget, at least if I wanted one, which I did. So I wandered off to the Office of Management and Budget website to commence making inquiries.

I already knew I could download much, or most, or theoretically all of it, from OMB's FY 2005 Budget page. But the ability to do so is rather theoretical, since in addition to the obviously named Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2005 (which itself contains some 33 chapters, each of which can be downloaded individually); there's also some supporting documents such as Analytical Perspectives, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2005; a whole fascinating collection of Historical Tables, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2005; and an Appendix which contains a further 35 chapters. And other stuff too. For some of it it isn't immediately obvious what overlaps with what, if in fact it does at all. It's a little overwhelming to try to look at online, even though it is in fact all there.

So the accountant in me decided that the thing to do was to get one of those really pretty shrinkwrapped bound hard copies all the cool kids in Washington are toting around these days. Hard copies are just so much easier to work with. So I followed OMB's link to the Government Printing Office's page to buy these very documents, and found out that sure enough they are available to buy for any schmo who wants one, provided that schmo has $250 he doesn't mind parting with to get his own pristinely geeky hard copy of the US budget and its various supporting documents. Which I don't, in fact, have, living as I do on a budget where American Express doesn't grant the same sort of consideration for deficit spending that Congress enjoys.

So, being cheap, I ordered the CD-ROM which contains all the budget documents and costs just twenty bucks. Which, yes, gets me right back where I started, having only electronic copies I'd have to print myself (just like the internet version), but at least I wouldn't have to download seventy-odd individual files, create a little file directory system for them, get bored and give up halfway through, etc. But it's here that things got funky.

First of all, twenty bucks is a bargain compared to the $250 they're asking for on the hard copy, but--again--for taxpaying citizens of a free republic, the feds ought to practically force everyone to take one of these, just so we can all play the role of informed voter debating from the facts. Instead they sell them, charging what seems to me kind of a steep price for a CD containing nothing but data which is in the public domain. I can buy fifty blank CD-ROMs from Office Depot for about $15, and churn out fifty copies of whatever is on that disc in the matter of a few hours. An additional two dollars each (let's be generous) for jewel case and printed liner notes, assuming these are inlcuded, plus fifty cents to mail the final product, and the government's actual cost is about $4 apiece, including labor. Perhaps the other sixteen dollars I paid is my gift to reduce the Federal debt and should be included on my IRS Schedule A as a charitable contribution. I could buy a disc from the thieving RIAA for less. Note to potential IRS inquisitors: I will not include any such thing on my Schedule A, the information on which really is entirely legitimate and painfully honest.

Next problem is that every clown in the country who cobbles together a weblog for his own amusement probably went through some of the same process I did, and these CDs must have sold like hotcakes because I ordered my copy only one day after it was released, and ten days later got a postcard informing me that my budget document was out of stock and should be available in another four to six weeks. Hmph. Given the modest difficulty of burning a disc and mailing it, I'm struggling to comprehend the possibility of facing a month and a half delay. Which, after all, represents a delay in receiving a one-year document which is nearly 12% of that year. I hope it's still relevant by the time I get it.

Adding insult to injury, I discovered today that GPO then proceeded to charge my credit card twice for the same order that I still haven't received. Grr.

So, the short form of all this is that while I have developed a scheme to save the country from the sure economic ruin which our present inertial course will eventuate in, I don't yet have the numbers to do fact-checking and so forth. So you'll all have to wait. But it's coming, eventually, just like my alleged CD-ROM is.

And, since you've all been dying to know, we come finally to discuss John Kerry.
I've been watching the Democratic primaries with mixed feelings, which response is hard to avoid with such a bunch of vitriol, puerile taunting, demagoguing, and generally behaving poorly being broadcast with such alarming constancy by the news networks. I've been pulling for John Edwards as the best of the electable bunch (I have a lot of respect for Joe Lieberman, but primary races for either party tend to be really ugly affairs which reward campaign behavior which isn't Joe's strong suit). I don't think I agree with John Edwards on many things, and I know I didn't agree with Howard Dean on some things (Iraq, his current economic policy) though I agreed with him on others (gun owners' rights, and the fiscal moderation and discipline he demonstrated while he actually governed). I have no idea whether John Kerry and I agree on anything, because I have concluded that John Kerry believes in nothing. Except, naturally, for his desire to beat George Bush and propel himself to power. Which I don't agree with.

If you look up at the top left corner of this page you'll see my own little political axiom, which at its simplest is that all politicians are basically venal. I'm sure Howard Dean had more than a little fancy for the Oval Office, and I disagree wholly with his take on the Iraq war, but I believe him when he says he believes these things. And there's no doubt that what George Bush says is more than a little colored by the fact that he'd rather keep his job than lose it, but there's little doubt that what he represents as his core beliefs are genuine.

But I think John Kerry is the very worst sort of politician in this regard, one who is actuated solely by his venality, and is devoid of any real beliefs of his own. His rather tortured attempts to change his story and expain away his votes on the Iraq war resolution suggest that nothing he says or votes can be taken at anything like face value. It's worth noting that he voted against the 1991 Iraq war, despite its having UN approval, though he now explains that that was so President Bush 41could build more domestic support for the effort. And he voted for the current war, which he now says he opposed, and which war can be blamed on George Bush and Halliburton. (Come on. He's on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He's privy to all the intelligence the President reads, both during the Clinton administration's Operation Desert Fox and in the run-up to the current war. Saying that he only supported the war because of faulty intelligence--so it's not his fault and he can't be blamed for it--but then condemning George Bush for doing the same is absurd, and any thinking person knows it. I'm frankly insulted he expects that to fly, and more than a little appalled that so far, in fact, it is.)

And he voted for the Patriot Act, which in fact he co-authored, and which he now virulently opposes for, essentially, its "chilling effect." Tip to astute listeners: the supposed chilling effect, which you will hear cited as a basis for opposing all manner of Republican legislation, is only cited in the face of an utter absence of real and specific problems with the policy being criticised, and it means that not only have no actual abuses surfaced, that it's difficult even for educated critics to even imagine specifically what might go wrong.

Kerry voted for the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, making regime change for Iraq the official position of the United States, though evidently not with any real seriousness of purpose, according to what he's been saying lately about how wrong it was for us to actually depose him. And, every Democrat's pal, Bill Clinton, signed this bill calling for regime change, so why all the Democratic angst when it comes time to actually do it? The same liberals who always wore FREE TIBET t-shirts in high school should have loved our kicking of a murderous oppressive tyrant from power, though in fact they were the loudest to oppose it for some reason.

Lest I digress into an analysis of the state of American Liberalism, which is perhaps a subject worthy of some attention but which would take us rather too far afield, let us return to John Kerry. I started to notice his yea on the Iraq war becoming but Bush assembled a "fraudulent coalition" and I didn't expect George Bush to fuck it up as badly as he did once Dean's consistently strident opposition to the war had made him (Dean) the temporary front-runner. Which vulgarity, in that Rolling Stone article, was an especially nice touch for the man who would be leader of the free world, as it nicely encapsulated not only that the way he actually votes shouldn't be held against him, but that he was also too angry to talk about it without having his grammar explode. Yale-educated three-term United States Senators have fully sufficient savvy and self-awareness to avoid any accidental embarassing choices of diction, and I haven't heard Kerry dropping F bombs on Tim Russert and Brit Hume, so I can only attribute this particular choice of language as a carefully considered maneuver to position himself favorably in whatever particular idiom he thinks the readers of Rolling Stone should view him in order for him to garner the support of another subsection of a demographic. Taken together, I must confess that I just don't buy it. He's faking it, and he doesn't even have the decency to be convincing about it.

So what? My problem with all this is that John Kerry is just Bill Clinton, devoid of charm and probably less likely to philander. His every policy focus-group tested, governing according to the latest opinion tracking polls, and always choosing what's momentarily most advantageous--not for the nation, but most advantageous to John Kerry's gaining and continuing in power. This habit was obvious and annoying, though slightly amusing, during the Clinton administration, when the economy was booming and the nation was generally at peace. Matters are rather more serious now, and as a consequence we don't have the luxury of playing silly posturing games with our policies or indulging leaders who just want to make everyone like them so they'll be re-elected. Because the easiest and most dangerous policy which Kerry will end up selling us before this is over is that we're not really even at war anymore.

The reason he'll sell this, and why I fear a dangerous number of Americans might buy it, is because it offers the easy path. It's much easier to say, and for a listener to hear, we're not really at war anymore, than to listen to George Bush say that we're at war; it will be long and difficult; there will be setbacks and men will die; and sacrifice will be needed from all of us. Which, if you've been listening, is pretty much what George Bush has been saying all along. It's the hard path, and it makes even a great wartime leader vulnerable in peacetime. It's why no less a leader than Winston Churchill himself was voted promptly out of office in the first election after the danger was past. No one wants to hear about sacrifice and toil and endurance, or vote for someone who offers nothing but.

None of which has anything whatever to do with whether we're really at war right now. We are. The absence of major attacks in the US since 9/11/2001 is significant and gratifying, but it does not mean our enemy has been beaten or has given up. For all the comparisons the Iraq war draws to Vietnam, I maintain that the overall War on Terror is much more like World War II than Vietnam, for it is fundamentally an existential conflict against a deranged enemy who will stop at nothing to see us wiped off the very face of the earth. Hitler and Hirohito had their armies and navies of hundreds of thousands of men to try to accomplish this; all the terrorists need is one major breach in nonproliferation security and they may be able to develop or acquire a nuclear weapon. Or, possibly worse, an enhanced strain of smallpox. Either one would be at least two orders of magnitude more deadly than 9/11 was, and would have the potential to cause the utter economic collapse of our civilization. That's what we're up against here, and it's every bit that serious.

This is not a game. I don't care exactly about the Nigerian yellowcake, or whether Saddam had actually tricked us into thinking he still had weapons he had really destroyed (which, really, does seem incredible). I really don't care whether "Mission Accomplished" was an arrogantly premature celebration of a victory not yet achieved, or was really meant just for the crew of one carrier who had served admirably and honorably. I really don't care whether George Bush's dental records prove he was at a meeting in Alabama for the ANG in the '60s, and whether the one meeting he missed was optional or supposedly mandatory. All that kind of quibbling is silly kid's stuff, and the fact that the Democrats are obsessed with it all shows just how profoundly unserious they are about winning this war, or even recognizing and admitting that it is a war and not just an elaborate law enforcement excercise. Right now we don't have the luxury of indulging silly politicians who want to pretend that the war is over, and we won, and we can all come home and disarm and celebrate the new Peace Dividend. Because right now that sort of thinking from the elected leaders in our highest offices has the ability to get an unseemly large number of us killed.

I can only say that I wish more Democrats still had the spirit of John F Kennedy, not John F Kerry, as we prosecute this long and shadowy war.

"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." John F Kennedy, Inaugural address, 1/20/1961.

Since I'm on this little science kick of late, here are a couple other things you might have missed.
NASA, rather disappointingly, has decided to forego the final scheduled shuttle mission to service the aging Hubble Space Telescope, which was to have taken place next year. Evidently, NASA chief Sean O'Keefe has considered all the input from Hubble supporters as to its ongoing value, and the assessment of risk inherent in the mission from the astronauts' office, and has concluded that on balance it's not worth saving.

If you've never seen the famous Hubble Deep Field photograph, you should go check it out before even proceeding with the rest of this discussion. The Deep Field is a view nearly all the way to the end of the visible universe, in an average slice of sky near the Big Dipper which is no wider than the apparent size of a pencil eraser held at arm's length. And, for context, you might consider this comparison between the best ground-based photograph of the colliding galaxies NGC 4038/4039 and an image of the same from Hubble.

O'Keefe's decision is disappointing, of course, given all that Hubble has allowed us to learn over the past decade. With a fresh set of batteries, new gyroscopes for pointing and a new camera, HST could continue producing effective scientific research for another decade. Hubble never was expected to last forever, of course, but its replacement--formerly known simply as the Next Generation Space Telescope, now the James Webb Space Telescope--won't be ready for launch until 2011 at the soonest. And, as the new space telescope project will cost an unholy fortune, and with NASA now pinching pennies so as to enable the moon base and Mars shot (both discussed here previously), it is far from certain that the Webb Telescope will ever actually see first light. I can readily see a scenario, with the inimitable logic of government, where NASA is told on the one hand that this new Webb Telescope is far too expensive, what with us preparing to go to Mars and all, while HST is still operating; and on the other hand, that upgrading Hubble is an expensive and unaffordable luxury what with the Webb Telescope coming shortly online and all. It's possible we could talk ourselves into a situation where we are without any space telescope operating at visible light wavelengths at all, just a Mars program. And as excited as I am about the Mars program, orbiting telescopes allow some really fantastic science to be done and are just indispensable.

This decision to allow HST to kind of wither on the vine is also somewhat controversial, as a couple of NASA engineers have leaked an anonymous report to CNN arguing that a Hubble service mission is no riskier than any of the remaining 40 scheduled Shuttle missions required to complete the ISS. O'Keefe has asked for a second opinion, which he no doubt hopes will affirm his original decision (otherwise he's in no less an ambiguous situation than he's in now). There's been something of an outcry among interested members of the public, which I guess I'm contributing to here, even among non-scientists impressed by the fantastic images gleaned from HST over the years. The website SaveTheHubble.org claims over 18,000 signatures on their online petition to Congress and NASA not to scrap the telescope. Check it out and add your own if you'd like.

In happier news, as we expected, JPL has announced that the Spirit rover is back in business. Evidently its computers had some sort of Windows 95-era memory management issue, and Bill Gates was able to talk them through how to fix it. With two healthy rovers scrounging on Mars, we should be getting some exciting results from the missions.

First of all, a hearty congratulations to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for its success at landing a second rover, Opportunity, on the surface of Mars and sending back pictures.
As I wrote below when Spirit landed safely, putting a remote controlled craft on Mars is exceedingly difficult, and it's fantastic (and, no matter how excellent JPL's team, probably a little surprising) that both of them were successful landings. Kudos; and kudos again.

But, after an exciting initial splash and the return of some tantalizing data, the rover Spirit has encountered some problems. On Wednesday the communications signal was lost and all data transfer stopped. This naturally jeopardizes the rest of the mission and I'm sure JPL's engineers are working furiously to correct the problem and to do so as quickly as possible; the solar panels providing power to Spirit are only rated for a three month operating lifetime in the dusty, sandy Martian environment.

This kind of problem, while serious, is not uncommon. The entirely successful Galileo mission to Jupiter (and the Galileo Extended Mission to examine the four largest Jovian moons) was virtually dead on arrival at the giant planet when its high-gain antenna wouldn't unfurl. The initial plan had been to collect data just as fast as the spacecraft's sensors could, then use the high-gain antenna to transmit this data to earth in near real time (the data would pass through a buffer first, with the occasional buffer overrun captured on a backup tape recorder). Switching to the low-gain antenna would be like canceling your cable modem account and going back to a 2400-baud dialup modem, and I actually remember what using those was like.

The solution, which sounds simple but required extensive reprogramming and a significant change to the mission plan, was to capture all collected data directly to the tape recorder. This required the mission team to be much more selective about which data to collect, since the tape recorder's data capacity was not unlimited, and required huge blocks of time between close approaches for transmitting the contents of the tape recorder back to earth via the pokey low-gain antenna. It all worked brilliantly, and as the spacecraft lasted four times longer than anyone had expected, they eventually were able to collect all their data after all.

JPL announced yesterday that they had established some level of communication with Spirit, and had stopped the onboard computer from continuing to spontaneously reboot (probably calling Bill Gates at home on the weekend for tech support, or something similar). I figure since the spacecraft isn't totally non-responsive, it will be a matter of a few days until we have another successful mission-from-the-fire recovery story to talk about.

But all this brings us to President Bush's recently promulgated goal to send men to Mars, and the general skepticism which greeted the announcement. The main points were to (1) return to the moon; (2) establish a permanent presence there (the fabled moon base); (3) complete, then abandon in place, the International Space Station by 2008; and (4) use all the knowledge and technology developed in steps 1-3 to launch a manned expedition to Mars. Let's jump to the end and work our way backwards through these steps.

Why bother going to Mars at all? I wrote previously about a couple of the exciting prospects for life (or fossil remnants thereof) on the red planet. Let's stipulate that there are scientifically compelling reasons to explore the planet, and just consider whether it is better to do this with men or with remote control craft such as Spirit and Opportunity. The two main arguments I hear from the robots-only crowd are that sending human explorers is (1) too dangerous; and/or (2) that it adds complexity and cost to the mission which is not offset by a commensurate gain in expected return of scientific data.

The first of these, that it's too dangerous to risk human lives in this way, can be dispensed with swiftly. The tragedies of Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia notwithstanding, fear of loss is a poor reason to prevent pioneers from attempting to explore new terrain or develop new technologies. Lewis and Clark could have been killed by Indians or eaten by bears. The Wright brothers could have accidentally climbed to fifty feet and then flipped into a nosedive in the treacherous Kitty Hawk winds. But they, like modern astronauts, were volunteers for their particular missions, not ordered into harm's way against their will. The pioneer's personal safety is a poor excuse for society collectively to deny him permission to risk his own life in the advancement of human knowledge. The balance between personal risk and the mission's potential rewards is best evaluated by the pioneer himself, who will bear that personal risk. We would today scarcely credit Thomas Jefferson for forbidding the Lewis and Clark expedition, leaving the Pacific Northwest shrouded in continued mystery, for fear of the explorer’s safety.

The second is a bit tricky. There is no doubt that it adds cost and complexity to the mission, as food, water, and oxygen are all heavy and require much more fuel, and hence a much bigger and more expensive spacecraft, to carry them. And, while a robotic mission has only a few critical systems requiring redundant backups, a manned mission has many more critical systems which require triple-redundant backups. What, scientifically, do we gain from this?

A couple of things. Primarily, the mission gains massively in flexibility. A robotic mission has the ability to deeply explore one or two questions in a very narrow territorial area. But if one of those answers comes back with a negative answer, but a tantalizing possibility which begs of answering just a slightly different question, the robotic mission is over. NASA has to design a new spacecraft (2 years), build it (2 more years) and launch it (2 years flight time) before an answer can be had. And if that second answer demands a similar tangential inquiry, the six-year process begins anew.

A manned mission, with its larger, more complex (and, yes, expensive) facilities, could easily be equipped to handle a wide range of expected tangential inquiries by the crew. The results won’t necessarily be any better than would eventually be obtained robotically, but they will be available much faster. A human crew also has the ability to sample a much wider area, allowing qualified conclusions to be established much more decisively than after a more narrow sample (which would otherwise require a second follow up robotic mission six years hence). The extra cost involved greatly accelerates the whole learning process. We’re still, with the current rover missions, trying to answer the same fundamental questions as we were with the Viking missions in the 1970s—whether there is now, or once was, microbial life on Mars. Had the Viking mission been a well-equipped manned laboratory we would have had the answers to today’s questions thirty years ago. And if we land a manned lab on Mars today, we can immediately answer the questions we’d otherwise still be designing narrow-purpose spacecraft to answer in 2040.

The complexity of the spacecraft itself will also be somewhat offset by the improved ability of a human crew to land safely on the surface. The 20-minute lag of communications sent at light speed makes direct remote control of the landing impossible, so robotic craft have all their landing maneuvers preprogrammed. These programmed command sequences are not always successful, when presented with anything the least unexpected (ask the European Space Agency’s Beagle 2 team, or JPL’s Mars Polar Lander team, about this element).

Manned missions can’t replace robotic missions, and they don’t need to. The two are ideal complements to each other. There are places wholly impractical for manned missions (Europa, for example, with Jupiter's intense radiation so nearby). And for detailed global mapping, an unmanned orbiter can't be improved upon by sending humans along. And as a first inquiry, to see whether a planet is even interesting enough to study so intently, a cheap unmanned probe is superior. Both approaches to exploration have their merits and their place.

Now, moving backwards to the first three elements of George Bush’s Mars plan. It’s plain that a great big, Saturn V style of launch craft is probably not the best choice to go to Mars. We haven’t made anything nearly the size of the Saturn V (the Apollo launcher) in 30 years, and the Space Shuttle’s launcher is nowhere near as powerful. The Saturn V itself is not sufficiently powerful, nor does it have enough fuel capacity, to go directly to Mars anyway. And the type of craft, containing something of a laboratory, is far too heavy to launch with any rocket we have now or have ever built.

Payload weight presents a big problem in launches. For every pound of payload weight launched from earth, something like ¾ pound of fuel is required to elevate it to orbit (to say nothing of actually pushing it to Mars; this just escapes earth’s gravity). Rather perversely, this ¾ pound of fuel itself adds to the takeoff weight, requiring ¾ of its weight again in additional fuel (so ¾ of ¾ pound, or 0.5625 pound) just to lift the initial fuel amount, and so forth. While this calculation iterates infinitely (a third iteration requires ¾ of ¾ of ¾, or 0.421875 pound, etc), the resultant fuel increase at each iteration tapers off toward zero pretty quickly. To be all mathematically precise for a moment, this is known as a converging geometric series, so that as the limit of the number of iterations of this approaches infinity, the amount of additional fuel required for each iteration approaches the infinitely small (essentially zero). For a circumstance requiring ¾ pound of additional fuel per pound of payload, this ends up requiring approximately 1/(1-¾)=4 pounds of fuel per extra pound of payload all told. All this is approximate and just to illustrate the math concept involved; the actual numbers vary considerably depending on the precise type of fuel used, all of which have unique values for specific thrust and exhaust velocity and so forth. If you'd like to expand on the particulars for me, an email would be welcome.

So the idea of launching from a moon base makes some sense. The moon’s gravity is about 1/6 that of earth’s; if ¾ pound of fuel is required in the first iteration in the example above to lift one pound of payload to earth orbit, only 1/6 this amount (1/6 x ¾, or 1/8 pound) is required in the first iteration for a launch from the moon, so the total amount of fuel required per pound of payload to reach orbit from the moon is 1/(1-0.125)=1.14 pounds. Instead of requiring four pounds of fuel per pound of payload, only 1.14 pounds of fuel is required to launch a pound of payload from the moon. This eliminates the need for huge external fuel tanks like the shuttle uses, and enables a two-stage rocket (rather than a three-stage), further reducing the cost. And it may be more politically feasible to launch a fission-powered spacecraft (powering the trans-Mars trip, not the launch itself) from the moon than from earth, making the whole mission an even more efficient package.

The only problem with all this is the cost and expense involved in a moon base, and the lack of a really good reason to have one except for the Mars launch. It might be interesting to do it, just to practice our moon launch methodology with modern equipment, since the last time we were there we were still using vacuum tubes and slide rules; there are likely some scientific justifications for such a permanent presence there (if we can justify a permanent south pole base on the scientific merits, why not on the moon?). It just doesn’t seem all that compelling somehow. And part of the reason is the (rightly) much-maligned International Space Station.

I’ve kind of hated the ISS since its inception back in the 1990s, when funding was “found” for it in favor of funding the Superconducting Super Collider, which had the potential to advance fundamental physics knowledge in dramatic ways. The ISS is a money sinkhole, basically an artificially created purpose for NASA and its Russian partners. It’s an excuse to keep the aging shuttle fleet flying when they (let’s be frank) really aren’t doing much anymore apart from the occasional dramatic and valuable repair of a Hubble Telescope that couldn’t be done with cheap, disposable Delta rockets. It’s scientifically pointless. And yet…

The only reason to have it at all that makes any sense is as an assembly and docking point to launch a manned Mars mission. That’s been the one point that makes the whole project forgivable, in my opinion. There just has to be someone on that project team quietly scheming for when he can casually announce his station’s fitness for a jumping off point to Mars. From the ISS the orbit reaching fuel considerations above are manageable, because no matter how big the end product spacecraft is, it can be brought up to space in tiny parts, assembled at the ISS, and then launched on its way with whatever its final stage propulsion system would be, not a high-thrust low-efficiency takeoff stage. It seems a great and a cheap (compared at least to a moon base) solution, and frankly is so close to being ready (compared, again, to this proposed moon base) that I don’t see the point in going to the moon at all. Not, at least, if the main justification for it is to save launch weight for the eventual Mars mission.

I assume George Bush has people much smarter than I am advising him on this. I only hope they like the moon base because it is the technically best solution, not because of its ability to absorb all the money which can be thrown at it. I’m excited about the notion of a Mars mission, but I remain skeptical about this business of the moon base. We shall see.

A successful Mars landing!
The brilliant folks at Jet Propulsion Laboratory smoothly landed a new six-wheeled roverbot, Spirit, on the surface of Mars at 11:35 PM EST last night. JPL has previously executed such sensational missiona as the Voyager mission to the outer planets; the first ever Mars landings (Viking 1 & 2); and Galileo, which finally allowed us to conclude that that planet's icy moon Europa likely has a subsurface liquid ocean which may possibly harbor life; and many, many other successful missions.

Even for an outfit which has enjoyed such success in the past, Mars is sort of the Bermuda Triangle of the solar system, and landing a craft on the surface is notoriously difficult; even successfully entering orbit has proven an elusive goal in the past. The European Space Agency unfortunately seems to have lost their Mars lander, Beagle 2, which was supposed to land on the surface on Christmas day (though, more happily, that mission's parent ship Mars Explorer has entered orbit around Mars, and is conducting burns to lower itself to its operational orbit over the next week). The apparent loss of Beagle 2 follows some costly and embarrassing failures in the late 1990s by JPL themselves, such as Mars Climate Observer, and the infamous Mars Polar Lander, which reportedly crashed upon landing because the JPL team was inputting metric figures into its computer, while the Lockheed subcontractor had programmed the computer to figure in English units, and the craft basically lost track of where it was. All this is not to mention the really notorious, billion-dollar Mars Observer mission, launched in 1992 and lost in 1993.

Why to mention all these past failures? Certainly not to rub it in; JPL is one of the finest teams in the aerospace industry. Only to illustrate how really, profoundly difficult it is to do what they just accomplished. Certainly not for want of trying, this is the first successful Mars landing since the very photogenic and popular Pathfinder/Sojourner mission which touched down on July 4, 1997, which itself had been the first landing since Viking. Yesterday's success is tremendously exciting, and the mission's ongoing progress can be followed at the JPL home page.

This is significant also because Mars is probably the second most exciting venue for solar system exploration right now, after the aforementioned tantalizing Europa possibilities. There are two ongoing and very illuminating orbiter missions: Mars Global Surveyor (which has taken high resolution photographs of the entire surface of Mars, yielding topographical knowledge simlilar to what we know about remote regions of Earth) and 2001 Mars Odyssey (largely intended to replace the lost Mars Climate Observer mentioned earlier). These have shown visual indications that Mars is currently possessed of some amounts of water, possibly sometimes in liquid form, though recent findings have not been encouraging to those believe Mars was once warm, water-covered, and basically Earthlike. The more water that is there now, the likelier that native Martian bacterial life forms may exist or may have existed; the past presence of liquid oceans would have made possible even more complex life forms in the past, which may be detectable in Mars's fossil record.

Remember the excitement in 1996 when Bill Clinton announced that NASA had found proof of past life on Mars based on analysis of structures found in a Martian meteorite? Those were suggestive, but the original analysis of that particular rock is now generally accepted as inconclusive at best. Spirit should be able to yield additional information on whether we should ultimately expect to find evidence of past native Martian life. I'll be watching their results eagerly.

Naturally though, this was the best news of all today.
Nothing happened. And I can spend my day watching football and not, as surely bin Laden would prefer, watching the 24/7 news coverage of the latest atrocity perpetrated in the name of Islam's Greater Good. A Times Square filled with literally 1,000,000 drunk infidel hedonists, in the city which seems to be a preferred target anyway, on a day of some symbolic significance, must surely have presented itself as a terribly desireable target for our enemies. That they did not strike cannot be attributed to their sudden change of heart, or a preference for lower-profile operations; they didn't hit us there because they couldn't. They're too busy hiding in caves in Afghanistan, getting shot at by the 82nd Airborne; or conducting Palestinian-style small operations in Iraq.

It's important to be realistic in assessing what they're doing to us in Iraq. A soldier losing his life in combat is tragic, and represents the very worst thing imaginable for the soldier's family. But we're killing and arresting dozens of insurgents a month over there, in a battle front far from our home shores instead of in our own backyards. That we have heavily armed and exquisitely trained young men trading casualties and captures with our enemies, even at 1:1, is clearly better than the 3000:19 casualty ratio among civilians in our first city on 9/11.

A realistic assessment of affairs must produce the conclusion that things now are neither quite as bad, nor quite as good, as they could be. I hope to God our military can extinguish armed insurgency in Iraq soon and end the slow but accumulating loss of life there. But recall that in Vietnam we were losing 500 soldiers killed every week at the peak of casualties. As tragic as our individual casualties are in the present conflict, numerically they don't compare, even if the ephemeral nature of our enemies seems superficially similar.

The sooner we as a nation earn the reputation of having stomach for a hard fight, the sooner tinpot psychos will be disabused of the notion they can produce our capitulation by inflicting a few casualties. I'm hopeful that the Howard Deans of the nation don't manufacture enough distaste for the war simply by their incessant comparisons to Vietnam to cause our nation to actually capitulate, run our soldiers home for their own safety, thereby proving to bin Laden once again the lessons we taught in Beirut and Mogadishu.

Happy Football Day!
Any day spent watching nine hours of football is probably a good one. The Rose Bowl, after more hype than I can recall seeing for a bowl matchup in recent years, was anti-climactic. Being an Ohio State man myself, I had to repress the dirty revulsion I felt from actually pulling for Michigan against the unsufferably arrogant "Men of Troy," as they style themselves these days. Go Blue, roll those Trojans. Only the fourth time ever I've cheered for Michigan in a game against some even greater evil, and Michigan has rewarded me by losing three of those. Maybe I should become a Michigan fan full time, which clearly would sabotage their program and drop them precipitously to the ignominious level of Northwestern. The only good thing about today's Rose Bowl was that seeing Michigan humbled does act as its own reward.

The Orange Bowl, surprisingly, was good. In a game I had exactly zero interest in watching, I found myself glued to the game for most of the last three quarters. After we were subjected to Jessica Simpson during the typical cartoonishly overwrought Orange Bowl Halftime Show (motto: "Just Like a Circus, But Our Clowns Aren't Funny"), Florida State lost on a watered-down version of Wide Right III, or whatever number they're up to by now. Poor Xavier Betia; he reminds me a little bit of Matt Frantz in 1986 but without the triumphant return a year later [/obscure football reference]. Betia hooked Wide Left the kick at the buzzer which would have beaten Miami in the 2002 regular season, and missed Wide Right today (though not at the buzzer). I'm surprised Bowden can find anyone to kick for him anymore, since the most memorable accomplishments of Florida State kickers end up immortalized in names like Wide Right III and end in the deportation of Polish kickers for drug use. And, speaking of unsufferable arrogance, it would have been nice to see Miami taken down another notch, though Florida State hardly projects the image of demure gentlemanly sportsmanship themselves, so I would probably have been disappointed with either possilbe outcome of the game.

Now the really important game is tomorrow night's Fiesta Bowl. We Buckeyes await eagerly, of course, clarification of whether Kansas State's all-world quarterback Ell "Aspiring to be Kobe Bryant" Roberson is--ahem--available to play, or whether he's in jail on a sexual assault charge. I wonder if a booster paying a quarterback's bail constitutes an improper benefit under NCAA rules; probably they would prefer to be silent on the "propriety" of such a sordid transaction. But, as I understand it, Roberson was doing whatever he was doing with this woman at 4:30 AM, while the team rules call for an 11 PM curfew. Should such a flagrant disregard of team rules be overlooked for the star quarterback? I'm pretty sure if a second-string offensive guard was guilty of such an infraction of team rules, he'd be benched for the coming game by most head coaches. Kansas State has an unwanted opportunity to show everyone how serious they are about discipline, and the obsolescant notion of rules applying to everyone.

Maybe they could sidestep the issue by saying that he wasn't out past curfew, he was just up really early and on his way to church when this thing mysteriously just happened to him. At least, from Ohio State's perspective, he seems to have his attention, shall we say, divided.

Go Buckeyes!

More good news for America, and, incidentally, George Bush.
Final third quarter GDP figures were released today, showing a fantastically high 8.2% growth in GDP for the period. Let this be a lesson for anyone who would say, as I've heard often, that this president's (don't speak his name, it burns!) economic policies have resulted in the loss of 2.2 million jobs, the worst performance since Herbert Hoover, giving us incidentally the worst economy since the Great Depression.

It is true that Bush economic policy has not been entirely quite what I'd like to see. The deficit, pardonable at first while we got the War on Terror kicked off and decided we needed to whack Saddam, has ballooned to proportions which give pause for concern. But, Daschle & Co take note, there are only a few ways to actually cause a recession or massive loss of jobs by virtue of economic policy. There are only two levers by which the economy can be controlled: fiscal policy and monetary policy. The president has essentially no influence over the latter, which leaves us to consider how Daschle's claim could possibly be true with the President only recommending, not actually enacting, fiscal policy (which enacting is, after all, what Congress does for a living when it's not busy perpetuating its own existence).

So how could Fiscal policy produce a recession or massive loss of jobs?

1. It could be restrictive at the wrong time.
2. It could be neutral when matters plainly suggest loosening is in order, or loosen only a little when a lot is in order.
3. There are some really subtle and long term issues with currency valuation, which depends upon many other things on fiscal policy.
4. The size of the deficit has some theoretical long run impact on long term interest rates, which may nudge GDP (and hence job growth) in the wrong direction.
5. Protectionism, not strictly an element of fiscal policy, is generally not good for the economy on balance.
6. The tax code itself can, by its sheer complexity and the cost of ensuring compliance with its myriad byzantine provisions, reduce GDP.

Those are about it. Anything else from the fiscal policy side, which you're welcome to suggest, essentially has only fringe influence on the actual behavior of the economy. Let's briefly review our fiscal policy performance against the above items:

1. Being restrictive at the wrong time is bad for the economy. It basically means taking more money away from people just when the economy is getting into trouble and is headed for recession anyway. Restrictive fiscal policy relies either on increasing taxes or cutting government spending, neither of which has happened during the current administration.

2. Being neutral means relying only on automatic stabilizers for economic stimulus; or for tax receipts and spending to give opposing influences (both are presently stimulative). These automatic stabilizers refer to the tendency of tax receipts to automatically drop in a recession (fewer working people paying taxes); and the tendency of government spending to automatically increase in a recession (more welfare and other transfer payments to those same people now out of work). This is an acceptable response to a mild recession caused by the normal process of the business cycle (a recession caused by high interest rates, themselves a monetary policy response to check inflation in a high-GDP-growth environment). In a recession caused by the bursting of an asset bubble (such as our recent, post-Nasdaq collapse recession, or the decade long funk in Japan after the bursting of their real estate bubble) neutral fiscal policy relying on automatic stabilizers will not prove adequate. We've had three rounds of tax cuts, and are in no danger of accidentally having employed restrictive or neutral fiscal policy.

3. Let's leave aside discussion of what's really causing our currency to decline lately, and whether that's George Bush's fault; that's a complex discussion but it's not relevant to what we're considering here. Massive currency devaluation, which we've had a mild form of lately, tends to be beneficial to the economy in the short run as our exports become more affordable to foreigners, and they tend then to buy more of them. At the same time, foreign goods become more expensive to import into this country, so more Americans buy American goods. So the short run consequence of our recent currency trends would be to increase GDP and create jobs, not the opposite. In the longer run, a cheap currency tends to decrease foreign investment in US capital markets, making the cost of capital higher for US firms, which tends to result primarily in compromising worker productivity levels, not GDP or employment directly. [Yes, I'm aware that productivity will indirectly influence both GDP growth and employment. But all this is a change in the opposite direction from what we're experiencing now so it's not really relevant.]

4. A big deficit will, over time, tend to crowd out private investors and may result in long term interest rates being higher than they otherwise would be. All the estimates I've read credit this influence with being real but minimal, on the order of one-third to one-half of one percent (0.33% to 0.50%) higher interest rates. This element tends to be very slightly restrictive (most normal recessions come from the Fed increasing interest rates more like 3% to 4%) but is dwarfed by the fiscal stimulus which the deficit itself represents. I'd rather see a balanced budget, but it's simply not responsible to be running a surplus during a significant recession.

5. The steel tariffs were bad, and anyone who's read this space before knows I despised them. I'm glad they've been rescinded, and they were the one fiscal policy George Bush has embraced which was unquestionably bad for the economy. But the cost to the American workforce was estimated, even by opponents of the tariffs, at "only" about 30,000 jobs. For anyone looking to blame the whole 2.2 million jobs lost on President Bush, they will have to come up with more than just this one misguided instance of protectionism.

6. The tax code should be fundamentally reformed along the lines of what Ronald Reagan supervised in the early 1980s: cut all marginal rates, close as many loopholes as possible, and simplify the tax code. I've perused a copy of the actual IRS code (not the little instruction books or publications they give you, but the actual law), and it runs to literally 10,000 pages. The money a company spends on lawyers and CPAs to guide them through this maze is certainly better than running afoul of the law, but a simpler tax code would allow businesses (especially small businesses) to rechannel this money to be spent on higher wages to workers, newer machinery, more advertising, and generally growing the business instead of paying what is essentially a surcharge on tax compliance. Paul O'Neill spent his time as Treasury Secretary advocating tax reform instead of paying attention to current economic issues, and this rightly cost him his job; but tax reform shouldn't be abandoned just because it's not the single absolutely highest priority.

So what did cause this current recession, and why did we really lose these 2.2 million jobs? An asset bubble burst before George Bush came to office. There was a massive terrorist attack which cost the economy many billions of dollars directly. And a group of very bad men was identified who needed killing halfway around the world, which has contributed to a high deficit (though not directly affecting economic output). Anyone who would blame all this on George Bush clearly is angling for selfish political advantage, and has demonstrated themselves as being utterly immune to facts.

A shout out to the Bread Villain and the Puppetmaster: how France helped us without really trying.
Sheesh. I get slammed at work for a couple weeks and all hell breaks loose while I'm away, and for a change the news is good.

Saddam's capture: Really good news.
Kadafi's newfound desire to be our pal: Really, really good news.

Kadafi, evidently concerned whether Libya or Syria (both current members of the Axis of Evil Junior Varsity) would get the big promotion now that the head rat in Iraq has been nabbed, decided to eliminate his nation from the running for the coveted #3 position when the new Axis of Evil rankings come out next year. It would be really extraordinary for Kadafi, who's been mostly (though not entirely) below our radar lately, to be pulling our leg on this one, just to provoke us by embarking upon the very path just concluded by Saddam; his intent seems genuine and legitimate from where I sit.

Why the sudden change of heart? And why would this be potentially even better news than Saddam's capture?

It's not likely that the scales have suddenly just fallen from Kadafi's eyes, rendering visible the wrongness of his prior sponsorship of terrorism, pursuit of WMD, and export of weapons and weapons technology. Likelier that the reputation of the United States among Arab nations has already undergone a dramatic shift, which may be a manifestation of that elusive "reaction of the Arab Street." Likely the French have actually helped us here, though certainly not intentionally, by shouting their shrill and repetitive condemnations of our president as a cowboy and the US as a rogue nation.

The French inability to cow us into submission before their evidently awesome moral superiority and aversion to violence, despite their confident assurances to their departed pal Saddam and their best efforts to do so, have likely gotten the attention of other nasty regimes around the world. Not all of them are necessarily properly afraid yet, but they should have noticed by now that only the Brits have any real ability to influence us once we get an idea into our cowboy heads, and that they're on our side anyway in most of these dustups so far. And they should certainly have noticed that the idea infiltrating our cowboy mentality these days is to go take the fight to our enemies, whomever we perceive them to be.

The French have done us a great service in making clear just how uncontrollable we are these days, even when self-proclaimed "great powers" do their utmost to dissuade us. So, I give here a heartfelt and genuine thank you to the pusillanimous de Villepain and his puppetmaster Chirac. You've both been quite helpful despite your intentions to the contrary.

American policy is once again to carry a big stick, and Libya has agreed to mend its erstwhile wayward ways as a direct result of this. Even Dean should be aware that the war he so despised has just greatly reinforced our ability to negotiate peace on favorable terms with the Arab world. Negotiations with, say, Iran which are not backed up by credible threat of force amount merely to asking really nicely for the mullahs to give up on their nuclear programs just because they're such swell pals of the US and lovers of democracy. It should be obvious that approach won't actually work.

[Yes, I'm aware that the Iranians are actually Persian, not Arab, strictly speaking. Let it go; I was on a roll.]

Update: As usual, Stephen den Beste over at USS Clueless has a couple of insightful posts on this matter.

Maybe I'll have to stop referring to Tom Daschle as The Ghoul.
Daschle is becoming something of an unlikely hero of mine of late, as he attempts (with some success) to block some of the more egregious legislative efforts of the Republican Congress. And I say this as a Republican myself.

The aptly named Omnibus Spending Bill (a bill sweeping all manner of truly offensive local pork under the rug known as miscellany) passed the House Monday, supposedly providing for the continued financial operations of government but also including such essentials as changes to media ownership rules, overtime pay rules, and yet another extension of unemployment benefits. Daschle & Co blocked the bill's passage and let the Senate get out of town without voting on it till at least their January return to business, and hopefully not then either without some modification. The bill contains $7.5B for 7,000 "earmark" local projects. This bill, pork and all, increases Federal spending by "only" 3%, a much smaller increase than in recent years, but it's still faster than inflation has been.

This does seem to me to be a strong case for the line item veto. And not the watered down, legislatively enacted "allowance" that Congress unconstitutionally extended to the President in 1995 (later overturned by the Supreme Court), but a genuine Constitutional provision for one to allow individual items to be struck down so bills which are overall beneficial can be passed. I assume there's at least some good somewhere in the bill.

Nothing better illustrates the perverse political calculus involved leading me to support Daschle than the unemployment extension issue. I wanted the bill blocked temporarily to encourage some cleanup to a bill all too laden with wasteful spending. Daschle blocked it because it didn't contain enough wasteful spending in the form of more free money for the unemployed. Now unemployment benefits relate peculiarly to actual unemployment insofar as there is a marked tendency for anyone receiving benefits to continue not finding a job and to continue receiving benefits. According to the Wall Street Journal, (link for subscribers only) most recipients of unemployment benefits don't actually find a job until the final week before their benefits run out. Another extension, while charitably generous, would keep more people unemployed longer and into an election year to boot (perhaps an estimated 0.3% increase to the unemployment rate according the the Journal article cited above). Not to accuse Daschle of wanting to artificially create unemployment to hurt George Bush's re-election bid or anything, but I'd like to see Bush re-elected by presiding over a sound economic recovery and a budget which doesn't include all manner of Congressional pork intended simply to buy votes for incumbents.

We as a nation seem to be profoundly unserious. While fighting an existential war we quibble and bitch over carrier deck landings and the real purpose of holiday visits to Iraq, applaud Al Gore when he says unblushingly that the current war is the "worst foreign policy mistake" in our nation's history, and applaud serious, flagrant untruths such as calling the present economy the worst since the Great Depression. I'm sure this last is just an exhumation of the very same theme we heard during the 1992 presidential election, and it's about as true now as it was then; but since it was successful in garnering an election victory, truth need not be considered. Which is fortunate for those who repeat the lie, since it is not remotely true.

Meanwhile, with the largest deficit in history (some of which, eg War on Terror, and in my opinion, the War in Iraq, is justified, yes), Congressmen insert unrelated pork items into bills totalling $7.5B and applaud their own restraint for, I guess, not frivolously spending even more than that; and enact horrible and uncontrollable Medicare expansions. All to buy votes, to sustain their own venality and love of power. I refuse to believe that in the midst of a war against an enemy bent on our utter extermination, the most pressing issue facing the United States today is whether to give free pills to senior citizens. It's disappointing, to say the least.

Call me crazy, but delaying this bill to allow unemployment benefit extensions to expire and encourage a rethinking of all those pork projects seems like a good start.

Today: a grownup returns to high school civics class, and is surprised by what he finds.
I recently completed a full reading of the Federalist Papers for the first time. It was the first time since high school I had cracked the cover of the book and my reaction to it was rather different than I recall the first time around.

America reveres its constitution, yet the men who wrote it would surely be astounded by the strength of today’s federal government and the comparative weakness of the states. This sentence, essayed a few years ago in a British newspaper (The Economist) surprised me a bit. I had always had a fond, though not particularly educated, admiration for the genius of the Founders, and I was surprised to consider that this whole thing had played out much differently from how they would have (mistakenly?) expected. This lit a match under the Jules Goldberg contraption which is my memory, and ultimately got me to thinking about the semester of US Government class in high school, during which we were required to read certain numbers of The Federalist Papers. It was the fall of 1988, Ronald Reagan had served our nation for eight mostly glorious years, and in spite of the general snarkiness fondly directed at our illustrious leader by many of my classmates, I had escaped the strenuously clever cynicism embraced by many my age and unironically considered myself lucky and proud to be an American.

At the time I had only limited understanding of how the federal government worked; sure, I knew the three branches, checks and balances and all that, and wrote a really compelling paper urging abandonment of the Electoral College in favor of the direct popular election of the president, as all high school students seem obliged to advocate at some point, but most of the nuances were completely lost on me. I nonetheless had a rather touching belief that what we as a people were about was right, and that our seemingly eternal system of government was the very best which the genius of man could conceivably produce. In comparison to the systems of government labored under by those in the USSR, China, East Germany, and even much of Europe in 1988, I was not altogether without basis in believing this.

So I was handed a dog-eared paperback copy of The Federalist Papers. The subject was broached with some introductory remarks from our instructor which seemed to last longer than could be believed, but from which all I absorbed was that the Papers were a plain-English explanation of how the Founding Fathers (thus were they still called in the halcyon days before political correctness) meant for the new Constitutional government to work, stripped of all the 18th-Century legalese of the Constitution itself. The papers had been written in opposition to a group collectively known as the Anti-Federalists, who had urged rejection of the Constitution.

This may have been bland oversimplification, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t paying attention and that was all I gleaned from the introductory remarks. I already knew the Constitution represents an inspired form of government and was written by men of rare elemental genius; I didn’t know who these Anti-Federalists were but they sounded like assholes. They sounded to me like those Southern Rebs of a later era, intent on gratuitously wrecking everything for the rest of us, for sake of advancing their own selfish interests. And I was sure that this book, written after all by the guy on the ten-dollar bill, spoke the truth and advocated a form of government which could scarcely be improved.

But I didn’t want to read it. I was never terribly serious in high school about, well, classes or anything, and I recall harboring an aversion to completing the assignment for some reason. Which response was typical for me, and not particular to the reading assignment. No matter how much truth was contained in that book, I had little interest in reading a “plain-English” commentary on the subject written in 18th-Century prose, which was indistinguishable to me at the time from the King James Bible or Shakespeare. I was pretty sure I had all the truth I needed already, and didn’t want to sink the work into it to get any more.

Yeah. I was a pain in the ass in high school. If you’re wondering how I ever graduated with an attitude like this, you’re not alone.

So I kind of schlepped through the assignment, skimming through what we were to read and ignoring what we were to skim, bluffed my way through whatever exams or papers were required, and generally didn’t take much away from the whole experience, except that we were lucky Alexander Hamilton had been on our side and hadn’t been a Communist or something; and that upon my supposedly closer examination, the Anti-Federalists were still assholes.

Fifteen humbling years later, I found myself engaged in an online discussion with a gentleman over the real causes why the Federal government had become so much more powerful than the Founders would have expected, prompted by that throwaway remark mentioned earlier from The Economist. I’ve become a rather mild form of one of those states’ rights wackos: I believe the Federal government is rather too big and much too powerful for our collective good, but I don’t spend my free time scanning the horizon for black UN helicopters or refusing to drink fluoridated water or any other such silly nonsense. I was explaining my personal theory that virtually all our troubles along these lines can be traced to the sixteenth amendment, due to the power this allows of conditional appropriations, and that while repeal of this amendment is too radical a notion to be likely, it would result in a relationship between the States and Federal governments much more consistent with what the Federalists had wanted.

This gentleman surprised me by saying that it was the Federalists’ fault we were in this particular mess; the Anti-Federalists had objected to the original Constitution because it did too little to protect individual and states’ rights and did not contain effective checks upon the Federal government. Far from being crazed wackos, the Anti-Federalists had actually been right all along—the proposed Constitution sowed the seeds for its own eventual demise, and, once ratified, really did lead to a preposterously powerful national government. This whole notion slapped my ignorant little high school paradigm right between the eyes, and I realized that if I were to have any self-respect as a commentator on this particular subject, or if I could have the slightest pretense to holding an informed opinion, I’d have to look into this in some detail.

I’ve never read much direct political philosophy. I flatter myself I’m a practical analyst, not a philosopher, and most of my reading has been in economics and most of my arguing has been over economic policy. I’d always taken for granted that the system basically works, and never questioned how or why, and only debated what was best to be done within the system itself. That suddenly seemed rather a superficial conclusion to have reached with having conducted no real analysis whatever.

So I reached for my copy of The Federalist Papers, which I had bought (partially, perhaps, out of guilt for my treatment of it in high school) ten years ago yet had never opened, and began to read. I discovered delightedly that it’s not quite as textually dense as the King James Bible—though it’s close. But offsetting that happy discovery was the fact that it’s 600 pages long and it ended up taking me three months to plod through it all.

It was an eye-opening and profitable experience. The first thing that strikes the modern reader was just how dire the situation was when the Constitution was written. Everyone knows the Articles of Confederation were bad, but it’s rather lost on most of us today just how bad.

The entire Federal government in 1787 consisted of a unicameral legislature. That was it. It had some theoretically unlimited (but highly theoretical) abilities to levy troops and taxes, but no ability to enforce its levies. And it was to levy these not directly from the populace as a whole, but from the various state governments, which then had to take positive steps to comply with the Federal government’s requests. Or to partially comply. Or to drag their feet in interminable debate about which states are paying their fair share or more than, and whether to comply fully, partially, or not at all. Eventually. An modern analogy which comes to mind is the highly political debate in the US Congress which periodically surfaces about contributing troops to UN peacekeeping efforts, or even to paying UN dues; and the outcome to these discussions under the Articles of Confederation was about as timely and reliable as this modern analogue.

With the credit and survivability of the early Union seriously in doubt, there were at least some voices which advocated complete dissolution of the Union in favor of thirteen individual republics bound by nothing stronger than a NATO-style defensive alliance, or a series of bilateral defensive alliances, or even three or four miniature nations, comprised of the regional confederacy of several states. As preposterous as these ideas sound to the modern reader, discoursing on the dangers of such an approach occupied the first thirteen papers, suggesting that this outcome was not entirely out of the question even then (though the authors suggested this was a recent and outlandish notion).

So, having fought a rugged war for independence and struggled along under the ineffective Articles for some time, the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 passed this proposed constitution, with the stipulation that it would take effect if conventions in three-fourths of the states approved it. It’s not entirely clear what would have become of any minority of states which rejected ratification, should three-fourths have passed it. So with seven states having already ratified it, in 1788-89 James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay wrote a series of essays encouraging adoption, which appeared in various New York newspapers during the debates in that state whether to support ratification.

With this as a backdrop, the three authors first discussed whether it would be advantageous even to sustain the Union (papers 1-13 argued that it would be); whether the current government was up to the task (14-22 argued that it was not); and then addressed more or less particular complaints which had been heard during the debates and which had appeared in newspapers and pamphlets over the remaining 63 articles.

The general tenor of the arguments directed against the Anti-Federalists is, indeed, an argument for stronger federal institutions. That was slightly disheartening, and seemed at the outset to suggest that my Anti-Federalist correspondent had perhaps been correct. But there’s more to it than that suggests.

It’s quite significant that the papers were written at a time when the entire history of the American Union comprised a period of tremendous weakness in the national government and a corresponding strength in the state governments; and that we read those papers today in a period where precisely the opposite is true. When Hamilton, especially, called for an energetic federal government, he did so relative to the striking ineptitude and helplessness of the federal government as it existed at the time. He urged that reason dictates that a government have powers adequate to execute their purposes, which itself seems unexceptional; he seemed to believe that the government needed to be as powerful as the Constitution proposed just in order to do those things expected of it by other sections of the Constitution.

But the Federalists were insistent that the proposed system was genuinely federal, not national. James Madison spent the entirety of paper 39 contrasting the characteristics of typical Federal, and typical National, governments, ultimately concluding that the proposed system had, well, a lot of both. Madison sums up the substance of the debate between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists smartly, by attributing the following amalgamation of arguments to the Anti-Federalists:

“But it was not sufficient,” say the adversaries of the proposed Constitution, “for the convention to adhere to the republican form. They ought, with equal care, to have preserved the FEDERAL form, which regards the Union as a CONFEDERACY of sovereign states; instead of which, they have framed a NATIONAL government, which regards the Union as a CONSOLIDATION of the States.” (Madison, Fed 39, emphasis in original)

He proceeded to show, over the balance of this paper, that the proposed government was of a mixed form, insofar as it guaranteed a republican form of government to the states: the states are sovereign within their own boundaries over certain administrative elements; the federal government is sovereign over certain other administrative elements within each state’s boundaries. This concept of dual sovereignty is the whole essence of Federalism.

The Constitution is to be founded on the assent and ratification of the people of America, given by deputies elected for the special purpose; (…) this assent and ratification is to be given by the people, not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong. It is to be the assent and ratification of the several States, derived from the supreme authority in each State, the authority of the people themselves. The act, therefore, establishing the Constitution, will not be a NATIONAL, but a FEDERAL act. (Ibid.)

In a further passage which could only be written before adoption of the 17th Amendment, which amendment provides for US Senators to be elected by the people at large, rather than state legislatures, Madison continues:

The House of Representatives will derive its powers from the people of America; and the people will be represented in the same proportion, and on the same principle, as they are in the legislature of a particular State. So far the government is NATIONAL, not FEDERAL. The Senate, on the other hand, will derive its powers from the States, as political and coequal societies; and these will be represented on the principle of equality in the Senate, as they now are in the existing Congress. So far the government is FEDERAL, not NATIONAL. (Ibid.)

This reliance on appointment of US Senators by the state legislatures is eye-opening for the modern American reader. The whole notion of relegating the appointment of Senators to a small legislative body instead of a popular vote seems so…undemocratic. This is addressed at some length in a later paper, and is a subject to which we shall return here as well.

Madison continues his argument to justify labeling the new government as mixed, neither quite national nor quite federal:

The executive power will be derived from a very compound source. The immediate election of the President is to be made by the States in their political characters. The votes allotted to them are in a compound ratio, which considers them partly as distinct and coequal societies, partly as unequal members of the same society. The eventual election, again, is to be made by that branch of the legislature which consists of the national representatives; but in this particular act they are to be thrown into the form of individual delegations, from so many distinct and coequal bodies politic. From this aspect of the government it appears to be of a mixed character, presenting at least as many FEDERAL as NATIONAL features.

If we try the Constitution by its last relation to the authority by which amendments are to be made, we find it neither wholly NATIONAL nor wholly FEDERAL. Were it wholly national, the supreme and ultimate authority would reside in the MAJORITY of the people of the Union; and this authority would be competent at all times, like that of a majority of every national society, to alter or abolish its established government. Were it wholly federal, on the other hand, the concurrence of each State in the Union would be essential to every alteration that would be binding on all. The mode provided by the plan of the convention is not founded on either of these principles. In requiring more than a majority, and particularly in computing the proportion by STATES, not by CITIZENS, it departs from the NATIONAL and advances towards the FEDERAL character; in rendering the concurrence of less than the whole number of States sufficient, it loses again the FEDERAL and partakes of the NATIONAL character. (Ibid.)

So how to reconcile the intent of the Founders to have produced a mixed government, and the observations of (among many others) The Economist and my Anti-Federalist correspondent that the Federal government has far, far more power than was ever intended in Philadelphia in 1787? Some participants in the Convention, including, as it turns out, Hamilton and Madison, had argued for a more nationalist government to begin with. But these notions were rejected, and the Convention finally approved a plan genuinely intended to ensure national security while preserving the substance, not just the form, of dual sovereignty. They intended it to be mixed, and it eventually became preponderantly unmixed nationalism. What happened?

It bears some consideration why the Founders believed the mixed government would retain some considerable permanence, and not be encroached on one side (oppression of the states by the Federal government) or the other (disregard of the Federal government by the states). Madison, again, writes:

Several important considerations have been touched in the course of these papers, which discountenance the supposition that the operation of the federal government will by degrees prove fatal to the State governments. The more I revolve the subject, the more fully I am persuaded that the balance is much more likely to be disturbed by the preponderancy of the last than of the first scale. (Madison, Fed 45)

This obviously proved wildly inaccurate. It’s clear that the actual practice, as embodied in the, shall we say, informally granted powers of the Federal government, have tended in precisely the opposite direction as anticipated—more power for the Federales, less power for the states. I don’t pretend to having my admiration for the Founders diminished by having stumbled upon such an error, but it is at this point one must recognize that while the practical system they put in place has worked rather well for some considerable time, some of their early judgments were entirely off the mark. Mistaken, indeed. I have a few notions how this has come to pass; but let’s consider Madison’s arguments: for this there is no better place to start than by examining paper 45, The Alleged Danger From the Powers of the Union to the State Governments Considered, fairly closely.

Madison begins paper 45 with the assertion that “HAVING shown that no one of the powers transferred to the federal government is unnecessary or improper, the next question to be considered is, whether the whole mass of them will be dangerous to the portion of authority left in the several States.” My purpose in this discussion is not to examine minutely all the arguments in favor of the Constitution, and I’m willing to grant at this point that most of the particular powers actually granted to the Federal government by the Constitution do, in fact, seem reasonable and consistent with its responsibilities; and that Madison, Hamilton, and Jay have presented a compelling enough justification for them in the papers which preceded number 45.

Madison continues in paper 45 by pointing to some historical analogies, which seem vaguely unsatisfying: the Achaean League, and the Lycian Confederacy, both of which had been discussed briefly in previous articles. The Achaean League was a federation of Greek city-states in the age of the early Roman Republic. The Lycian Confederacy was comprised of a number of city-state petty republics scattered throughout what is now Turkey, and was a few centuries after the dissolution of the Achaean League. Madison notes that

In the Achaean league it is probable that the federal head had a degree and species of power, which gave it a considerable likeness to the government framed by the convention. The Lycian Confederacy, as far as its principles and form are transmitted, must have borne a still greater analogy to it. Yet history does not inform us that either of them ever degenerated, or tended to degenerate, into one consolidated government. On the contrary, we know that the ruin of one of them proceeded from the incapacity of the federal authority to prevent the dissensions, and finally the disunion, of the subordinate authorities. (Madison, Fed 45)

It’s probably similar to the Convention’s planned government; and history doesn’t precisely say that either collapsed into nationalism. I may be looking at this too hard, but this probable similarity and absence of a known negative outcome isn’t an entirely compelling argument. But, returning to Madison:

The State governments may be regarded as constituent and essential parts of the federal government; whilst the latter is nowise essential to the operation or organization of the former. Without the intervention of the State legislatures, the President of the United States cannot be elected at all. They must in all cases have a great share in his appointment, and will, perhaps, in most cases, of themselves determine it. (Ibid)

This, presumably, refers to Article II, Section 1, which describes the term of the President and his manner of election: “Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress,” describing thusly the composition of the electoral college (emphasis added). The general process, including the reliance upon the state legislatures to determine some of the particulars of the election, has held up reasonably well, but has (especially recently) seen substantial encroachments upon this power by the Federal courts.

Not all this encroachment has been for the worse; states being obligated to drop Jim Crow laws designed to minimize black participation in the electoral process is itself an unalloyed good, for example. But Florida 2000 was of course a horrible mess, with the US Supreme Court ultimately deciding how matters would be conducted in what should have been primarily (according to Article II) a state matter. This was necessary, or even possible, only because of the bizarre activism of the State Supreme Court, in its attempt to rewrite rules after the election and subject different parts of the state to differing methods and standards for the recount. In both these instances, (Jim Crow and Florida) the Federal courts put paid to what was legitimately bogus state laws (or activist judicial interpretation of state laws, in the Florida case); the only unfortunate element to these Federal rulings is that by now all parties recognize that the Federal courts are unambiguously in charge of how elections are run, and the state legislatures are reduced to determining trivial administrative elements to the election (the form, but not the substance, of certification for example). So with respect to this particular argument of Madison’s, one potential factor tilting the relative power in favor of the state governments has been eliminated by (admittedly otherwise salutary) Federal judicial activism. Madison continues:

The Senate will be elected absolutely and exclusively by the State legislatures. (Ibid)

This no longer applies, since the 17th Amendment devolved this power to the people at large. While this amendment was intended to reduce the rampant corruption which dominated the process of appointing US Senators in the state legislatures, it did remove one of the most significant hurdles to Nationalism (as opposed to Federalism). Even in cases where the Federal Congress does not overstep its constitutional limits, it has tremendous power to bully state governments by way of conditional expenditures. These are, as the name implies, Federal expenditures on state matters, which are approved only as conditioned upon state legislatures “voluntarily” adopting a policy preferred by the Federal Congress. An excellent example of this was the 1974 adoption by the Congress of a Federal 55-MPH “suggested” speed limit. This speed limit was binding on Interstate highways, but not on State highways; however, states were—shall we say—encouraged to voluntarily adopt the 55-MPH limit on State highways as well, by Federal threat of withholding highway maintenance monies which would otherwise flow from Federal taxpayers and ultimately to the states. The puzzling logic of a Federal tax, partially paid by Ohioans, which would then only be refunded to Ohio for use on maintaining Ohio roads if the Ohio legislature adopted the Federal position, is an effective (though not legal) breach of the principle of dual sovereignty espoused by the Founders at the time of ratification of the Constitution.

As well intended as the 17th Amendment may have been in fighting corruption, it is hard to imagine conditional expenditures being used to thwart Federalist (dual sovereignty) principles by a US Senate elected and beholden directly to state legislatures. Using a financial end-around such as the highway-monies-for-speed-limits measure to strip state legislatures of their original portions of sovereignty would not likely have been approved by a body elected by those very state legislators whose power would thereby be denuded. And preventing this subtle usurpation of state power was entirely the principle behind having the Federal Senate appointed by State legislatures:

It is equally unnecessary to dilate on the appointment of senators by the State legislatures. Among the various modes which might have been devised for constituting this branch of the government, that which has been proposed by the convention is probably the most congenial with the public opinion. It is recommended by the double advantage of favoring a select appointment, and of giving to the State governments such an agency in the formation of the federal government as must secure the authority of the former, and may form a convenient link between the two systems. (Hamilton or Madison, Fed 62)

Adoption of the 17th Amendment therefore was intended to curb one evil (corruption), but decidedly allowed expansion of another (nationalism). And, sadly, with the perhaps unavoidable influence of big money in politics today, I am scarcely convinced that corruption has even been meaningfully reduced in the election of US Senators today despite adoption of the 17th Amendment.

But back to Madison:

Thus, each of the principal branches of the federal government will owe its existence more or less to the favor of the State governments, and must consequently feel a dependence, which is much more likely to beget a disposition too obsequious than too overbearing towards them. On the other side, the component parts of the State governments will in no instance be indebted for their appointment to the direct agency of the federal government, and very little, if at all, to the local influence of its members. (Madison, Fed 45)

Hm. We have seen that the Federal judiciary now is the final arbiter of how states run their own elections, including that for president; that the Federal Senate is no longer dependent for its existence on the actions of the state legislature; and nowhere in this paper is the third branch mentioned (the judiciary). Even in its original form, the judiciary was dependent on the states only insofar as the Federal Senate exercised its advice and consent responsibility in the confirmation of Federal judges, and the Senators were themselves appointed by the State legislatures. The increased activism by, and reverence for, the Supreme Court, coupled with the 17th Amendment, have rendered all Madison’s arguments based on structures null thus far.

He continues by observing that there will be more State officers (of all departments) than corresponding Federal officers. This is perhaps unexceptional but is also somewhat unconvincing; his main argument here seems to be that since more of any given individual’s friends and family will be officers of his state than will be Federal officers in his state, the average citizen will feel more loyalty to the State officers (and hence the State government) than the Federal opposites. This is all slightly dubious but not really enough for us to dawdle over this point, with so much still to cover.

Suddenly Madison wanders rapidly into the weeds with his next expectation which failed to pan out:

It is true, that the Confederacy is to possess, and may exercise, the power of collecting internal as well as external taxes throughout the States; but it is probable that this power will not be resorted to, except for supplemental purposes of revenue; that an option will then be given to the States to supply their quotas by previous collections of their own; and that the eventual collection, under the immediate authority of the Union, will generally be made by the officers, and according to the rules, appointed by the several States. Indeed it is extremely probable, that in other instances, particularly in the organization of the judicial power, the officers of the States will be clothed with the correspondent authority of the Union.

Should it happen, however, that separate collectors of internal revenue should be appointed under the federal government, the influence of the whole number would not bear a comparison with that of the multitude of State officers in the opposite scale. (Ibid)

This, clearly, is as untrue as the original assertion that the states were likelier to bully or ignore the Federal government than the opposite, and is almost laughably inaccurate to anyone who’s ever dealt with the IRS. What happened here?

Well, the IRS is a good place to start. The IRS wasn’t formed until after the 16th Amendment was ratified, which only in 1913 authorized the Federal Government to enact an unlimited tax to be levied upon citizens’ income. Prior to the ratification of that amendment, the Federal government relied primarily on excise taxes for revenue. Total Federal outlays in 1912, the year before the collection of unlimited income tax was permitted, amounted to $690 Million. Ten years later, that figure had swelled to $3.289 Billion, a fivefold increase (Office of Management and Budget, FY2002 Federal Budget.)

After WWII concluded and the economy demobilized from a war footing, by 1947 Federal outlays dropped to $34.496 Billion (14.7% of GDP); by 2002 these figures had ballooned to $2.011Trillion and 19.5% of GDP. (Office of Management and Budget, FY2004 Federal Budget.) Growth in Federal government spending clearly outpaces economic growth, and nothing fuels a massive temptation to spend like the ability to massively increase taxes. The income tax allows precisely that.

This massive uptick in Federal receipts and outlays means that a greater proportion of total economic activity involves the Federal government as a direct participant than is strictly necessary, giving the Federales a disproportionate amount of influence as to how that money is spent. The conditional appropriations example from earlier applies as an excellent example here as well; the Federal government has no real relevance to questions of certain expenditures like maintenance of Ohio highways. If Ohioans paid more State taxes commensurate with paying fewer Federal taxes, Ohio’s elected state Representatives could decide or not decide on its own whether the State’s highways needed maintenance, and also could decide on its own whether to adopt the “suggested” 55-MPH Federal speed limit on its own roads.

It therefore follows clearly that the actual preponderance of Federal power at the expense of the State governments, quite contrary of what the Founders predicted would happen, can thus also be partially attributed to the 16th and 17th Amendments, both ratified in 1913. Granting the Federal government tremendous new powers of taxation at the same time as removing the primary mechanism for State governments to directly check the ambitions of the Federal government has led to a highly nationalistic result which, frankly, should have been easy to anticipate.

Add to this the Union’s strength being forged in a grim Civil War, and the sense of nationhood developed during two World Wars this past century, and the conscious attempts made during the New Deal to increase the relevance and influence of the Federal government over citizens’ daily lives, and it becomes rather clearer how the spirit of Federalism has waned somewhat, and a sense of nationalism has replaced it. It is not a mere antique artifact of the period’s written English that, during the time of the Founders, the Union was referred to as “These United States,” implying a plural group acting together; while today, of course, we refer to “The United States,” a monolithic body. Telephones, the internet, and air travel all contribute to nationhood, but must we have an inexorable march toward nationalism and the permanent abandonment of Federalism?

Now the ongoing sparring between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists during 1787-89 can be cast in rather a different light. Upon a short bit of further reading while preparing this article, I uncovered the fact that Hamilton had participated in the 1787 convention, but had quit in frustration when it was clear that his arguments in favor of installing a constitutional monarch would be rejected. He ultimately signed the Convention’s findings and draft Constitution, despite disagreeing with the plan himself, and argued in the Federalist Papers for ratification primarily because the alternative to ratification was a continuance of the status quo under the Articles of Confederation, which he believed would be fatal for the nation. And Madison may have preferred a much more nationalistic government himself, calling at one point for the Federal Congress to have a negative (veto) over laws enacted by the various state legislatures.

Clearly from all this, it is superficial to refer simply to the beliefs or intents of “the Founders,” as if they had a monolithic and uniform strategy which they enacted in the face of public opposition. That Hamilton argued against his own original position because he then believed the alternative was truly in the nation’s interest speaks highly of his patriotism, back when such a label had an actual meaning and was not mainly used in the negative against one’s political opponents. And for me, the debate between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists has only been explored from one perspective thus far, that of an advocacy piece authored collectively by a small group of Federalists. I have acquired a two-volume set from the Library of America, The Debate on the Constitution, which contains pamphlets, newspaper articles, private letters, and Convention speeches both for and against the proposed Constitution. I have moved this to the top of the reading queue.

These few thoughts on The Federalist Papers only, after all, address one element of the matter. So much remains to be read, digested, and discussed.

It’s amazing what studying the source documents can do for one’s understanding of politics. I only wish modern politics could just occasionally consist of civilized discussion, even disagreement, on principles, relieving us of the sight of Senators themselves waving silly placards and demagoguing over whether to give or not give free pills to senior citizens. That the world’s most august deliberative body is reduced to such claptrap is perhaps the biggest shame of all.