Baseball isn’t really an exciting game, except for a few select moments. What it is, especially late in the season, is a suspenseful game. To an invested viewer, the wait between pitches becomes excruciating, and each pitch represents an individual battle. If you’re ahead, every ball feels like a tiptoe closer to the ledge. If you’re behind, every out represents your finite number of chances slipping away. Moneyball uses your standard cinematic tricks to pump up the suspense behind its in-game moments (slow motion! backstories! cherrypicking the most exciting moments!), but in doing so gives the average viewer an experience closer to that which a die-hard fan has than any scene from a real game ever could.

- Eliminate mortgage interest deductions.
- Eliminate corporate healthcare deduction.

In principle, I agree with both of these ideas. You’re right that these deductions introduce market distortions; they are also regressive, especially the mortgage interest deduction. However, I feel that an instant end to either would cause some extremely unpleasant short-term disruptions to the housing market and health care markets, and I’d be careful categorizing these as bugfixes. If I had made an investment in a house based on current tax law, I’d be pretty upset if that law suddenly changed. That goes double for health care; I really really don’t want to shop for insurance as an individual. The incidence of these deductions means that they have a large base of support among middle-class and wealthy Americans, making their repeal a giant political undertaking.

The best path forward I see is to cap each of these deductions. This will undercut the regressive nature of the deductions, and allow for a natural phase-in mechanism, as inflation pushes the real value of the cap lower. Note that Obama has proposed this for mortgage interest, and a similar scheme is currently law as part of the Affordable Care Act.

- Abolish payroll taxes and shift that all into income tax.
- Reduce social security by making it means tested.

From a social justice angle angle, I agree that these are good changes. I’m not sure that I would actually implement them though; one of the most important components of these programs is that they’re baked into the American social contract at this point, which may explain their remarkable resiliency. I feel that program’s political sustainability is as important as its fiscal stability, and I think that having Social Security apply broadly to all Americans is a good way to ensure it has the support of the vast majority of Americans.

- Reduce social security by raising the threshold age.

Disagree on this point. Studies have shown that longevity is correlated with income, and as such this would be a deeply regressive cut.

- Reduce military spending.

Totally agree on this point, though I think that free riding by American allies is an important reason for the “as much as N other countries combined” stats. As such, hopefully cuts would ensure a more multilateral foreign policy where a number of other countries that generally support American foreign policy share more of the costs.

How you want it to be

The problem is, our current situation is out of equilibrium. The financial crisis caused two major shifts. On the supply side, there was a large amount of deleveraging (shifting from debt-backed consumption to savings). This shifted the supply of loanable funds outwards, decreasing the equilibrium rate of return. In addition, the evaporation of a large amount of demand means that firms now perceive a lower rate of return on new capital expenditures; why invest in new factories and equipment if nobody wants to buy the additional output you produce? As a result, the demand curve based on rate of return contracted, also decreasing the equilibrium point.

Bad News Bears

As Paul Krugman and others have argued, this puts the equilibrium interest rate below zero, but interest rates don’t go below zero, so we have a gulf between the amount of usable savings and the amount of demanded money. As a result, we can pump a lot more demand in the form of deficit spending into the economy before interest rates start to rise and private investment starts to be crowded out.

The current CBA implements a (soft) overall salary cap, in addition to a maximum per-player salary. Because the maximum salary is set below the value the best players provide (which it has to, to be meaningful), multiple teams are willing to bid the max salary for a player like Lebron or Carmelo. This effectively removes salary as a potential point of competition, leading to a dysfunctional labor market. With salary off the table, teams are forced to compete on other issues, such as quality of teammates (Heat), or allure of playing for a hometown team (Knicks). As a result, the owners are competing on metrics they have no control over, as they have voluntarily taken away any employer’s best method of obtaining leverage over their employees. In retrospect, player movements that we’ve seen in the past few years seem inevitable.

The Fundamental Attribution Error is a social science concept which states that when studying a situation, we tend to attribute actions people take to the individual personalities, rather than to the situations people find themselves in. It seems to me that blaming the players, rather than the system they operate within, is yet another example of it.

Update: Andrew found an Actual Sports Journalist making the same point

The core of the PPCA is three interdependent components: tough regulations for health insurance providers, an individual mandate, and subsidies to lower-income individuals. By conceding that the regulations have to stay, Republicans are essentially conceding the
entire framework of the bill.

As Paul Krugman has pointed out, PPCA is a balancing act. If you aren’t going to repeal the new regulations, there’s no way insurers will allow the repeal of the mandate. If the mandate is repealed but the regulations are left, many people won’t buy insurance at all, and will wait until they get sick to buy
coverage. This will drive the insurers out of business. So, unless Republicans are looking to go to war with the business community, they’ll keep the mandate intact.

At this point, Republicans have already conceded two-thirds of the structure of the bill. The one component we haven’t discussed yet is the subsidies, and how to pay for them, but last time Republicans were unopposed in power, they weren’t able to make a dent in spending on
social safety net programs. The best they were able to do is keep spending the same and shift the funding burden from taxes to deficit spending. Doing this to PPCA would be unhealthy (see also: the squandering of the Clinton surplus), but wouldn’t come remotely close to undermining the bill as a whole. As far as I can tell, once a Republican concedes the new regulations, they concede 90% of PPCA is here to stay.

I’m starting a count of what I’ll call the “Cornyn bluffers”, the Republicans that bluster about repealing health care reform while implicitly admitting that they will, at most, tinker around the edges. John Cornyn was the charter member of this coalition, and Matalin joined last night. Who will be next?