Prospect.org

We can stop a plot.  Get a group of would-be terrorists meeting with each other and our agents can infiltrate it. Get them meeting in Yemen and we can send in the drones. Let North Korea threaten the South and we can threaten them, completely plausibly, with obliteration. Scale is our friend—we know how to detect enemies who go to scale, and we detect so well in these post-9-11 years that it doesn’t take much to go to scale.

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Since New York Times columnist David Brooks is the very model of the sentient conservative, his acknowledgements of social reality are often more than just personal—they signal that a particular state of affairs has become incontestable to all but the epistemically shuttered. Writing today on President Obama’s new budget, Brooks applauds the president for proposing to reduce Social Security and Medicare payments, and wishes he’d boost spending on discretionary spending programs that might stem the collapse of working- (and much of middle-) class America. Conservatives generally—over to you, Charles Murray—now acknowledge that the American working class, very much including the white working class, is imploding, citing the decline in marriage rates and out-of-wedlock births. They note as well that incomes and labor force participation are tanking, too. But they usually resist the idea that there’s a causal link between the lack of economic opportunity and the decline in the number of “marriageable males” that is the key to the disappearance of stable nuclear families and relationships. (This argument was first propounded by the great social democratic sociologist William Julius Wilson when he analyzed the decline of the two-parent household in the African-American inner city many decades ago.)

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Last fall, California voters were confronted with two major and hotly-contested ballot measures—Governor Jerry Brown’s proposal (Proposition 30) to raise taxes on the rich to end the state’s chronic budget shortfalls, and a conservative initiative (Proposition 32) which would have curtailed unions’ ability to spend their treasuries on political campaigns. Proposition 30 passed and Proposition 32 was soundly defeated, but they had to overcome a joint, well-funded campaign by rightwing interests to prevail.

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If the sequester had come to California 25 years ago, its effect would have been catastrophic. Today, its effects are decidedly less draconian. Nonetheless, California has a considerably less robust economy than that of the late '80s, and the sequester will cool off the state’s already tepid recovery.

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America’s most futuristic governor seems borne back ceaselessly into the past these days. As he shows me around his office on a crisp winter morning, California Governor Jerry Brown points out not just the desk that his father, Edmund “Pat” Brown, used during his own term as governor from 1959 to 1967 but also photos of his grandparents and his great-grandfather, who came to California in the gold rush years. “He knew John Sutter,” Brown says. The only two governors in the past half-century who were native Californians, he points out, were he and his father.

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Cristina Romer, Berkeley economics professor and the former head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, passed judgment on the merits of raising the minimum wage in Saturday’s New York Times, and in the process made clear why she wasn’t a member of the president’s de facto council of political advisers. She argued, as some mainstream economists do, that the merits of a heightened minimum wage were slight—that it may, for instance, raise prices, offsetting the gain to low-wage workers. The better solution, she argues, is to raise the earned income tax credit (EITC)—the government’s payment to the working poor—and to support universal pre-K education. “Why settle for half-measures,” she concludes (by which she means raising the minimum wage), “when such truly first-rate policies [by which she means the EITC and pre-K schooling] are well understood and ready to go?”

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