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What does Eau de Nil mean?

Noted early twentieth century cultural signifier Eau de Nil wends it way from Flaubert in Egypt to Hitchcock to a fresh moment in the sun thanks to a cool president’s new portrait:

The term first entered our chromatic lexicon in the late nineteenth century, just as Egyptomania was hitting its peak. While in the British Isles talk of “the East” referred primarily to India, France had a particularly strong affinity for Egypt—due in part to Napoleon’s brief 1798 attempts at colonization and the influence of the savants. “If you were French,” Wall writes, “the east was Egypt, a place at the very limit of the European imagination … Egypt was the orient, a country of the mind, a grand theatre of sensuality, despotism, slavery, polygamy, cruelty, mystery and terror.” This Egypt of the mind had little reality outside the poetry of Keats and Shelley; the paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Emile Bernard, and André Duterte (whose painting of the ruined temple at Thebes may have been the basis for “Oxymandias”); and the oddly popular theories of the occultist Helena Blavatsky and her follower, the “wickedest man in the world,” Aleister Crowley. For the French, Egypt as a concept was far more exciting than Egypt as an actual place. (Though not to Flaubert; to him, Egypt was where he bedded nubile young women after watching them dance the popular striptease, “the bee.”)

Image: the great portrait by Kehinde Wiley

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Budget Deficit: Disappearing

If you read Paul Krugman, and you really should read Paul Krugman, this will come as exactly no news at all to you. But it’s a good thing Republicans have found some fake scandals to spike their poutrage, becuase the thing they’ve been screaming about for the last three years is going away:

according to the Congressional Budget Office, the debt disaster that has obsessed the political class for the last three years is pretty much solved, at least for the next 10 years or so.

The last time the CBO estimated our future deficits was February– just four short months ago. Back then, the CBO thought deficits were falling and health-care costs were slowing. Today, the CBO thinks deficits are falling even faster and health-care costs are slowing by even more.

Here’s the short version: Washington’s most powerful budget nerds have cut their prediction for 2013 deficits by more than $200 billion. They’ve cut their projections for our deficits over the next decade by more than $600 billion. Add it all up and our 10-year deficits are looking downright manageable. Following are the highlights.

Charts and graphs at the link, but you get the picture. Jees, these people.

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Bill o’ Goods

Coming due to a waning superpower near you. To the Doghouse for your elucidification:

Medicare–it provides less than half the medical expenses of its beneficiaries, the elderly and the disabled–is13% of the Federal budget. Total Medicare spending in 2009 was $484 billion. In 2009 the total interest on the National Debt attributable to military spending was $390 billion. That’s the interest we pay on all things military (including VA costs and military pensions) for having acted, since 1946, as though it were perpetually 1944.

Our ten Nimitz-class supercarriers represent a $450 billion collection of holes in the ocean in construction costs alone; they’re scheduled to be replaced by 2040 by an equal number of Gerald Ford-class hulks at twice the cost, assuming you believe 2005 estimates, which you shouldn’t. That’s construction costs. Not development, nor maintenance, nor upgrades, attendant fleet, staffing, planes, aviation fuel, or the cost someone will eventually bear to do something with the twin reactors when we don’t need ’em anymore. That’s our supercarrier Navy. No one else in the world has any. Their role is to intimidate tenth-rate military powers, since we haven’t figured out how to invade any on the ground.

Which is distinct from figuring out why we need to invade any, since that answer is either too amorphous to pin down, or too brutally self-reflective to ever see the light of newsprint.

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Expense of the Environment

It’s an interesting concept, especially as we’ve all but stopped letting the costs of war preclude us from war-making, but how much should protecting the environment cost us? In money and competitiveness, the issue is contentious, rife with conflicts, false promises and disinformation. But, let no one tell you that Republican officeholders at every level stand for anything but rolling back regulations and agencies charged with protecting the environment. While there was hardly ever any doubt about this, now there is not even a pose.

The budget approved by the legislature, led by Republicans for the first time in a century, eliminates the program as part of roughly $23 million in environmental program cuts that would chop more than 150 positions. All told, the department’s budget would be cut by 12 percent, more than double the cuts proposed by Gov. Bev Perdue, a Democrat.

The legislative budget also would shift some operations to the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which is led by a Republican commissioner, a move some fear would change the focus from environmental protection to business enhancement.

That’s in North Carolina, but it is everywhere the same. Democrats get elected promising to enact new regulations and fund alternatives; Republicans get elected promising to rein in regulations and lavish spending on boondoggles. Eye; beholder. I especially like this:

“I don’t want to destroy anything,” said state Sen. Don East, a Surry County Republican and an environmental budget writer. “I just don’t think these very stringent environmental rules that we are living under are going to do what the environmentalists say they do.”

How could they? I believe he doesn’t want to do any harm to anything, including taking any power away from anybody to release anything anywhere. You know, the little guy. Sorry, dude. That’s not a choice anymore. Now you have to actually make choices. Oh: you are.




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More from Less

Nice catch from Klein via Yglesias:

Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell University, is one of the more innovative tax thinkers I know. In particular, I’ve always been partial to his proposal for a progressive consumption tax (pdf). So I ran the plan by him, as well. “The progressive budget proposal is of course an enormous improvement over the bizarre Ryan budget,” he said, “which for all its chest thumping about facing up to the hard choices, does nothing — absolutely nothing — to reduce long-run deficits.” But like Gale and Burman, Frank wanted to see more simplification and reform. In particular, he wanted more attention given to what we tax with an eye toward two-fers: raising more money off of things we want less of. “When we enter congested roadways, or buy heavy vehicles, or drink to excess, or emit CO2 into the air, we impose costs on others,” he says. “Taxing such activities kills two birds with one stone: It generates much needed revenue, and it curtails activities that cause more harm than good. Because these taxes make the economic pie bigger, it makes no sense to object that we can’t afford them.” He recommended this piece (pdf) for more on those ideas.

Emphases from the link. But the key: raising more money off of things we want less of. The whole idea of a two-fer has only yet manifested itself in the heads and hearts of those who want to keep their tax money and penalize the poor, children and the elderly by teaching them some kind of lesson.

But Frank’s is the real way to get to the things that matter, one that also has many corollaries, among them: make sure more people finish school and can go to college, wherever they are from, so that they can get jobs and spend a long productive life of at least intermittent happiness paying taxes. Hello?

Banning certain kids from college is stupid. Not taxing the externalities of energy production, ditto.

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Rappers, Deficits

This is a hilarious headline, but I think it, and the accompanying photo, should go with the story below. Insert witty segue along the lines of ‘Lesbians, Dwarves Clash over New Tax Laws’.

Because along those very lines, we have this new Deficit Commission, charged with, seemingly, suggesting the most craven ideas coming out of Talk Radio available. For  a good overview of the leaked fail work of the new DefCom, Kevin Drum, via TPM:

To put this more succinctly: any serious long-term deficit plan will spend about 1% of its time on the discretionary budget, 1% on Social Security, and 98% on healthcare. Any proposal that doesn’t maintain approximately that ratio shouldn’t be considered serious. The Simpson-Bowles plan, conversely, goes into loving detail about cuts to the discretionary budget and Social Security but turns suddenly vague and cramped when it gets to Medicare. That’s not serious.

There are other reasons the Simpson-Bowles plan isn’t serious. Capping revenue at 21% of GDP, for example. The plain fact is that over the next few decades Social Security will need a little more money and healthcare will need a lot more. That will be true even if we implement the greatest healthcare cost containment plan in the world. Pretending that we can nonetheless cap revenues at 2000 levels isn’t serious.

Check the rest, plus the nice chart, and share with your friends, because remember: Thanksgiving’s just around the corner.

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While We’re At It

The competition was intense, but the best opinion essay in the NYT this week goes to Bob Herbert:

Simply stated, we cannot continue sending service members into combat for three tours, four tours, five tours and more without paying a horrendous price in terms of the psychological well-being of the troops and their families, and the overall readiness of the armed forces to protect the nation.

So while this singular tragedy at the largest army base in the world draws a great amount of attention, not all of it appropriate, the underlying conditions that created it just keep rolling along. Six Hundred Eighty Billion. What does obscene mean?

Plus, Herbert’s last word is always our first.

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Running up the Score

According to Kaplan, after Robert Gates was confirmed as George W. Bush’s defense secretary in late 2006, he went around giving speeches about the reforms his successor should embrace to undertake necessary changes at the Pentagon – everything from weapons procurement to the rampant practice of hiring civilian contractors. Who knew his successor would be him.

It is important to remember that every defense dollar spent to over-insure against a remote or diminishing risk – or, in effect, to “run up the score” in a capability where the United States is already dominant – is a dollar not available to take care of our people, reset the force, win the wars we are in, and improve capabilities in areas where we are underinvested and potentially vulnerable.  That is a risk I will not take.

That’s from Gates’ press briefing yesterday on the 2010 defense budget. Read the list; it’s ambitious, and there will be a non-trivial amount of push back in Congress, where the bloated defense budget looks the way it looks for a reason. Look forward to all manner of scary talk about how vulnerable we will be, should we decide to throttle back on spending 10X+ more on defense (an abstract noun which has almost entirely force-projected itself beyond meaning) than the rest of the world combined.

Alas, out-sized military spending is one of the great barriers to reconfigured budgetary priorities. This is equal opposite to the so-called La Vie en Vert, and vulnerable to all manner of country-destroying rhetoric (how I hate irony so); this is the planning-for-an-eventuality we use to scare ourselves into conjure a future we wouldn’t want for anybody’s children but in which we are damned but to invest lavishly. If it is not reined in, military spending – like corrections – has the potential to eventually zero-out the budget. Then it becomes a game of what-kind-of-country-do-you-want, where an occupied (?) solar power is imagined vs. a country of free patriots under complete lockdown. All generally self-fulfilling, you might say. I guess we could say this about many things, but we’ve been reluctant to begin down the road Gates is on, though everything that is talked about and become generally recognizable as a sustainable future depends on specifically this.

At least when/if we get to planning-for-an-eventuality to conjure a different future, we’ll be used to it.

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Running up the Score

According to Kaplan, after Robert Gates was confirmed as George W. Bush’s defense secretary in late 2006, he went around giving speeches about the reforms his successor should embrace to undertake necessary changes at the Pentagon – everything from weapons procurement to the rampant practice of hiring civilian contractors. Who knew his successor would be him.

It is important to remember that every defense dollar spent to over-insure against a remote or diminishing risk – or, in effect, to “run up the score” in a capability where the United States is already dominant – is a dollar not available to take care of our people, reset the force, win the wars we are in, and improve capabilities in areas where we are underinvested and potentially vulnerable.  That is a risk I will not take.

That’s from Gates’ press briefing yesterday on the 2010 defense budget. Read the list; it’s ambitious, and there will be a non-trivial amount of push back in Congress, where the bloated defense budget looks the way it looks for a reason. Look forward to all manner of scary talk about how vulnerable we will be, should we decide to throttle back on spending 10X+ more on defense (an abstract noun which has almost entirely force-projected itself beyond meaning) than the rest of the world combined.

Alas, out-sized military spending is one of the great barriers to reconfigured budgetary priorities. This is equal opposite to the so-called La Vie en Vert, and vulnerable to all manner of country-destroying rhetoric (how I hate irony so); this is the planning-for-an-eventuality we use to scare ourselves into conjure a future we wouldn’t want for anybody’s children but in which we are damned but to invest lavishly. If it is not reined in, military spending – like corrections – has the potential to eventually zero-out the budget. Then it becomes a game of what-kind-of-country-do-you-want, where an occupied (?) solar power is imagined vs. a country of free patriots under complete lockdown. All generally self-fulfilling, you might say. I guess we could say this about many things, but we’ve been reluctant to begin down the road Gates is on, though everything that is talked about and become generally recognizable as a sustainable future depends on specifically this.

At least when/if we get to planning-for-an-eventuality to conjure a different future, we’ll be used to it.