The House GOP has unveiled a a new housing plan. Among the provisions are these:

1. A $5,000 tax credit for people who refinance their homes. This is designed to help people who are in trouble making their monthly mortgage payments.

2. A $15,000 credit for homebuyers who put more than 5 percent down. This gives homebuyers an incentive to put some skin in the game when they purchase a home.

3. Extends the real estate capital gains tax exemption not just to primary residences, but to investment properties as well. “If you invest in your neighborhood,” said Rep. Kevin Brady, “then we’ll invest in you.”

Writing in the Corner, Jerry Taylor slams this proposal.

[H]ow about this — an end to federal subsidies for home ownership. Market actors have overinvested in housing. The macroeconomy will not recover until that money is transferred out of housing and into other, more productive economic sectors. Plans to retard that necessary shift in investment will slow economic recovery and produce a less efficient economy as a consequence.

I know that there is plenty of political capital to be gained by providing handouts to middle-class homeowners and little political capital in removing the same. But a political party that ostensibly stands for free markets and limited government should not be in the business of underwriting or subsidizing private investments in anything unless we can find some plausible market failure in need of correction (and perhaps not even then).

Matthew Yglesias concurs with Taylor:

Preferential subsidies for investment in housing lead people to, on average, consume more housing and less stuff-that-isn’t-housing than they otherwise would. In other words, bigger houses instead of fancier clothes. This, in turn, has a substantial negative impact on the economy. Larger houses cost more to heat and cool, and larger houses lead to longer commutes. We shouldn’t stop people from buying big houses if that’s what they want to do, but it’s quite harmful to be specifically encouraging them to invest their resources in this way quite independently from the financial crisis.

You’ll get no debate from me on this. I’d also add, for myself, that homeownership, especially for younger people at the start of their careers, can actively be a bad thing. Not only are we encouraging people to spend too much on housing when they could be spending it on other things, but that rootedness of homeownership limits people’s flexibility in adjusting to more localized economic downturns. If you’re renting, and times are tough, you can make a deal with your landlord or just move into a place with cheaper rent when your lease is up. If you find a new job in a different city, it’s a lot easier to handle a couple of months of lease payments or to find someone to sublet than it is to try to sell a house at the same time you’re starting out in a new job in a new community. Owning a house can actively be an economic burden for people, especially in times of economic distress like we’re seeing now.

I have no problem with homeownership. If someone wants to buy a house, more power to them. But I fail to see why we need to subsidize that choice.

Writing for The New Yorker, Atul Gawande has a powerful, depressing piece on the horrible effects of solitary confinement in prisons. I won’t excerpt that part, because it’s worth reading in full. But here’s a very troubling piece worth highlighting:

I spoke to a state-prison commissioner who wished to remain unidentified. He was a veteran of the system, having been either a prison warden or a commissioner in several states across the country for more than twenty years. He has publicly defended the use of long-term isolation everywhere that he has worked. Nonetheless, he said, he would remove most prisoners from long-term isolation units if he could and provide programming for the mental illnesses that many of them have.

“Prolonged isolation is not going to serve anyone’s best interest,” he told me. He still thought that prisons needed the option of isolation. “A bad violation should, I think, land you there for about ninety days, but it should not go beyond that.”

He is apparently not alone among prison officials. Over the years, he has come to know commissioners in nearly every state in the country. “I believe that today you’ll probably find that two-thirds or three-fourths of the heads of correctional agencies will largely share the position that I articulated with you,” he said.

Commissioners are not powerless. They could eliminate prolonged isolation with the stroke of a pen. So, I asked, why haven’t they? He told me what happened when he tried to move just one prisoner out of isolation. Legislators called for him to be fired and threatened to withhold basic funding. Corrections officers called members of the crime victim’s family and told them that he’d gone soft on crime. Hostile stories appeared in the tabloids. It is pointless for commissioners to act unilaterally, he said, without a change in public opinion.

I won’t hold my breath for that. Nearly everything about America’s culture treats revenge and unjust punishment as proper virtues.

(link via Ross Douthat)

Over at Big Head Press, the website is publishing their comics a little bit at a time (a great ploy to keep me coming back!). Right now my current obsession over at the site is the kick-ass comic Odysseus the Rebel by Steven Grant and Scott Bieser. Grant and Bieser are offering up an excellent retelling of the Odyssey, and Grant’s take on the character of Odysseus is at once modern, ancient, and ultimately compelling. Read the whole thing–well, at least all of what’s been published so far. I keep checking back every other day to see what’s going on next.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mark Shiffman makes the rather bold philosophic claim that reason demands the existence of a creator.

Science necessarily recognizes that there is order in the universe. It can offer explanations of why the universe has the kind of order it has. It can never explain why there is any order at all.

[...]

Creation is an answer to the question why there is order. Is it a rational explanation? Yes. It is the only rational explanation.

What shape would a rational answer to this question have to take? If there is a cause of the order of the universe, it cannot be explained in terms of the order of the universe. It is cause that shapes effect, not the other way around. This means that the cause of the order of the universe cannot be confined to or circumscribed by the principles that order the universe.

[...]

If we want to give an account of what may be responsible for the orderliness of the universe, the cause (if cause is the right word) will unavoidably have some of the features of the God that Jews, Christians and Muslims believe in as the Creator. It is reason that tells us so.

This is, of course, just another variation on the themes that Thomas Aquinas first played back in the 13th century, and suffers from the same logical flaws.

The primary flaw with this notion of “transcendent order” is that the same argument that Shiffman demands must apply to an orderly universe applies equally to a creator god, if not more so. After all, a creator god would also have to be composed of some sort of order, n’est-ce pas? And if there is order caused in some sort of god, then that god cannot have caused that order–by Shiffman’s own argument.

Now, it appears that Shiffman wants to avoid this conundrum by arguing that God is eternal and timeless. He argues:

Thus, reason tells us that the only way to explain why there is order at all in the universe is to appeal to something that transcends that order. It transcends the confines of all finite limits and all oppositions. It transcends the opposition between changing and unchanging, between unity and multiplicity, between simple and complex. It transcends the requirement that everything that exists be caused by something other than itself.

It follows from his logic, then, that we can avoid the need for creation should we find reason to assume that the universe itself is timeless and eternal. Fortunately, our current models of the universe assume just that. According to our current understanding of physics, all of the matter and energy in the universe always existed. Prior to the Big Bang, all of the matter and energy in the universe were compressed into a singularity–a state of being which has no time, and therefore no requirement for causality. Time itself is a function of the thermodynamic order which did not begin until the moment of the Big Bang.

Accordingly, to solve Shiffman’s problem with the creation of order, we don’t have to make up some sort of creator whose existence also demands explanation. The fact is that as far as we can tell, the matter and energy universe has always existed–it simply changed form as a consequence of the Big Bang.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
– Theodore Roosevelt

One thing that current pop culture sadly lacks is an antonym for the phrase “jumping the shark.” After all, if “jumping the shark” is the point from which a television show goes from good to crazy/bad/stupid, surely there must be an opposite. That is, there should be a phrase to describe when a show goes from “interesting premise and characters” to “holy shit, this is really f-ing good!”

In honor of tonight’s episode of Dollhouse, I’d like to nominate the phrase “reciting poetry on the phone” as that phrase. For example:

You know, “Man on the Street” is the episode where Dollhouse really recited poetry over the phone.

Yeah, it was that good.

(My initial impressions of Dollhouse can be found here.

As some of you may have heard, the people at AIG have been getting very large bonus compensation, which some people feel they do not deserve.  Some in Congress are calling for a bill that will take those bonuses away by taxing them out of existence.

Some people, however, are pointing out that Congress may not be able to do that, as it might be a bill of attainder.

For those who aren’t in the know, a bill of attainder is essentially a conviction by statute.  Congress can’t pass a law saying a person (or corporation) is guilty of a wrongdoing and punishing them.  This limitation, along with the ban on ex post facto laws, is part of the strict limits on Congress to act only prospectively.  So while a shareholder derivative suit to recover the bonuses might be an acceptable act of the US government as shareholder, Congress cannot make itself judge & jury in trying to get AIG to behave as it wants.

If the idea of using this obscure rule to block the “tax” bill seems far fetched, you should know that the matter has been litigated in the recent past.  Eugene Volokh reports that an electric company successfully blocked enforcement of a New York law ordering them to refund money to customers related to a power outage.  The court concluded that if the state wanted to force Con Ed to refund money, it should sue in the courts, or let customers sue privately.  But a statute to remedy a past wrong by punishing the blameworthy party is blatantly unconstitutional.

Glenn Greenwald points out that, much to my dismay, the Obama Administration isn’t doing much to distinguish itself from the Bush Administration in the civil liberties field when it comes to terror suspects.

After many years of anger and complaint and outrage directed at the Bush administration for its civil liberties assaults and executive power abuses, the last thing most people want to do is conclude that the Obama administration is continuing the core of that extremism. That was why the flurry of executive orders in the first week produced such praise: those who are devoted to civil liberties were, from the start, eager to believe that things would be different, and most want to do everything but conclude that the only improvements that will be made by Obama will be cosmetic ones.

But it’s becoming increasingly difficult for honest commentators to do anything else but conclude that. After all, these are the exact policies which, when embraced by Bush, produced such intense protest over the last eight years. Nobody is complaining because the Obama administration is acting too slowly in renouncing these policies. The opposite is true: they are rushing to actively embrace them. And while there are still opportunities to meaningfully depart from the extremism of the last eight years, the evidence appears more and more compelling that, at least in these areas, there is little or no intent on the part of the Obama administration to do so.

I’m equally disturbed by the trends of the Obama Administration, but admit with some sadness that I’m not too surprised. Rare indeed is the politician willing to give up power.

Dahlia Lithwick has a simply must-read article on the fallacy of relying on eyewitness identification in our Justice System.

Describe the last person who served you a coffee. What if I helped refresh your memory? Showed you some photos of local baristas? Pulled together a helpful lineup? Cheered exuberantly when you picked the “right” one? Now imagine that instead of identifying the person who made your venti latte last week, we had just worked together to nail a robber or a rapist. Imagine how good we would feel. Now imagine what would happen if we were wrong.

Read it all.