That's the inside word from the Washington Post. To remove any possibility of misinterpretation, here is the exact quote from the paper:

"To cover the cost of the program, Sens. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) agreed to use a portion of the profits from mortgage financing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that had been set aside for low-income rental housing."

There you have it, redistributing money from low-income renters to banks that made bad mortgages. Where are the supporters of the free market?

Of course, there is still hope. Maybe this was just a trial balloon being floated by Dodd and Shelby. Maybe the Post got it wrong (it ihas been known to happen). But, if this is really the policy that Congress is going to pass, it is an extraordinarily cruel blow to low and moderate-income families.

--Dean Baker

Not too many lobbies can score all three candidates to their annual convention. AIPAC can and does.

AIPAC's #1 agenda item is Iran. No other issue comes close. It will expect the candidates to echo Bush's language at the Knesset. Will they do it, knowing how badly that language plays with the rest of the country?

I'll be following this closely. I hope Obama will tell AIPAC that he intends to pursue negotiations with Iran, for our sake and Israel's. That is what he has been saying these past few days and AIPAC, more than most, needs to hear it. If he tells them that, he could be booed like Speaker Pelosi was last year. It didn't hurt her; it wouldn't hurt him.

We'll see. In the meantime, the candidates can study AIPAC's new 2008 promotional video to see what goes over with that crowd.

And IF YOU CALL NOW, you get AIPAC's greatest hits, The John Hagee Video Series. Yes, JOHN HAGEE keynoting AIPAC last year. Start with RAPTURE NUMBER 1 which includes AIPAC delegates swooning "I love you. I love you" as Hagee bashes Democras and liberals and HITLER. It's a classic.

Also, THANK YOU, OH GREAT ONE. The inimitable JJESUS WALKS AT AIPAC . PART 2. with wonderful THANK YOU LADY GOING NUTS.

AND PART 3, I DANCE THE AIPAC HORA WITH MY TORAH.

These are classics. Don't miss a munute. Have alcohol or your favorite recreational drug nearby. You'll need them.

Indeed, "here we go again," with the Bush EPA weakening environmental rules on building power plants near national parks. The environment is a key issue for many Americans but you would never know it by how willingly the GOP genuflects before Old King Coal.

When I was the Republican senator from Rhode Island, I attended briefings for potential donors and watched party honchos brag about our cozy relationship with the coal interests. The bigwigs wanted donors to know that coal is an important brick in the foundation of the Republican Party.

This strategy of favoring coal interests over the air that sustains life on our planet may be bringing in campaign dollars but it contributed to Republican losses in 2006 (including a Rhode Island seat that will probably never be regained).

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Demos, a public advocacy organization, reports that the median student loan debt for students graduating from four-year public colleges and universities increased by an incredible 78 percent between 1993 and 2004. In 1993, less than half of college graduates left school in debt; in 2004, that percentage amounted to more than 58 percent. Demos reports that student debt has a long-term effect on household savings and wealth, with students who leave college in debt demonstrating median financial assets that are 28 percent lower than for students who did not graduate with debt. These disturbing numbers don't even tell the whole story--students are increasingly using their credit cards to finance their higher education, relying on their plastic to pay for not only living expenses and books, but also tuition.

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Anyone who has been following my posts in the past few days will have surmised that Unequal Democracy is a rather pessimistic book. But I've saved the most pessimistic finding for last. It concerns the ramifications of economic inequality for the workings of our political system. While Americans have a good deal of tolerance for economic inequality, that tolerance is predicated on the "national myth" that we enjoy "full civic equality despite material differences," as Michael Kinsley once put it. Cynics may doubt that "full civic equality" is a reality - but even they should be dismayed by the extent of inequality in the contemporary American political system.

I have measured the responsiveness of U.S. senators to the views of constituents with different incomes - distinguishing people in the bottom, middle, and top thirds of the national income distribution. The results show that senators' roll call votes are moderately strongly related to the views of middle-class constituents, and somewhat more strongly related to the views of affluent constituents. (The relative weight of affluent constituents is noticeably stronger for Republican senators than for Democratic senators.) What is most striking, however, is that there is no evidence of any discernible responsiveness to the preferences of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution. The views of tens of millions of people with nothing in common but their low incomes seem to be utterly ignored by their elected representatives. Insofar as they get what they want with respect to policy, it is only because their views happen to correspond with those of affluent and middle-class people - or, even more importantly, with the partisan and ideological impulses of the senators themselves.

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First let me say I'm glad to be back after an extended absence caused by the fact that I broke my right wrist. My thanks to John Kerry and M.J. Rosenberg for hitting back at President Bush's outrageous "appeasement" remarks in Israel, and John McCain's "me too" response to the whole affair.

I want to address a different McCain issue -- his "vision" of a stable, democratic Iraq in which most U.S. combat troops have been withdrawn, by 2013! How's that for a profile in courage?

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John McCain's wingman, Mark Salter, has been credited with turning McCain's life into literature and making a pile of dough off of their book collaborations. As one commentator put it, "I sometimes joke that John McCain is really Mark Salter."

Salter was naturally drawn to a reexamination of McCain's "martial heritage," as the senator put it in Meridian. The son of a World War II and Korea veteran, Salter grew up playing with toy soldiers and reading Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos comic books.

Over the last couple of weeks, Salter returned to the land of fantasy and wrote a speech which McCain delivered yesterday. By using the rhetorical device of imagining what the fifth year of a McCain presidency would be like, Salter avoided any of the pesky "fact-checking" that has bedeviled him in the past and avoided any mention of the current problems of the Republican Party.

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If I did not know better I would think that there is some conspiracy out there to produce an anti-Semitic backlash in a country, this country, that has been relatively free of that scourge since its founding.

Think about it. President Bush went to Israel to celebrate its 60th anniversary, a nice gesture and one in keeping with a President who personal proclivities are strongly pro-Israel even if his policies have not done Israel much good.

He used his visit there not just to salute our friend and ally but to promote confrontation with Iran, an idea that is utterly unpopular in the United States (to put it mildly) but is an applause producer in Israel. In fact, he went before the Israeli Knesset to denounce Americans who favor negotiations with Iran before resorting to war. He was clearly referring to Sen. Obama although Secretary of State Rice and Secretary of Defense Gates hold the same views and they work for Bush!

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Four years ago, when Mayor Gavin Newsom began issuing marriage licenses for same sex marriages, I was still a political columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle. I rushed down to City Hall to bear witness to the historic events of those days. At the time, I thought Gavin Newsom would be remembered for his bold and courageous initiative. Some said to me, "But it's not a good time." I responded, "It's never a good time to deny others the rights you already have."

Already, there are those who are preparing for a referendum for the November ballot that would ban same sex marriages in the California Constitution. But before we lose the joyous celebration of an expanded democracy, I'd like to recall what happened four years ago. Here, from 2004, is what I witnessed--one of the most joyous historic events in my life.

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May 15, I moderated a panel at the Jerusalem conference on the concept of Tikkun Olam, repairing the world. The organizers of the panel posed the question this way: "Repairing the World--Mission or Pretension [or, in another translation, Impudence]?" Here's what I said:

The Jewish people are a house of argument. We are also a house of justice, not because we have achieved justice, and not because we are the house of justice--to claim so much would be (in the official description of this panel) "impudent"--but because we measure our success by our commitment to justice.

We do not measure our success by the munificence of our palaces or the sleekness of our electronic devices, or our gross domestic products, or the sacrifices that our states demand of our citizens,* but by our care for a single humanity.

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Breaking news: the California Supreme Court has declared that, under that state's constitution, it's illegal to give different names to the legal recognition of same-sex and different-sex couples. (Don't get me started on the term "opposite sex."). California's version of civil unions have been called "domestic partnerships." Now, apparently, they must be called "marriage."

I'm just reading the decision now so I don't have a full formed and cogent response--except wanting to cry with happiness at being declared a full citizen in a state that's more populous than Canada. Read the decision yourself, if you like. The decision mentions the fact that, in 1948, the CSC was the first to strike down its state's interracial marriage ban--19 years before the USSC did so in Loving v. Virginia. The decision links its 1948 decision in Perez to its decision today (Mildred Loving herself made the link too, although I would argue it's distinct... but that's for another day).

I know that what TPM folks will want to talk about is whether this is good or bad for the Democrats. But folks, I can't go there yet. Can we take a couple of hours to be deliriously happy on behalf of the 100,000 registered domestic partners in California and their kids, who now have full equality under the law, and the many others who will flock to California to marry and raise families? More context after the break.

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I've been writing this week about the Republican leadership's insulting and destructive attempt to use outright lies to try to smear Barack Obama's steadfast commitment to Israel.

Well now President Bush joins the chorus of Republican attacks, pushing the Bush/McCain "argument" of smears and misleading attacks:

In a particularly sharp blast from halfway around the world, President Bush suggested Thursday that Sen. Barack Obama and other Democrats are in favor of "appeasement" of terrorists in the same way U.S. leaders appeased Nazis in the run-up to World War II.

"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," said Bush, in what White House aides privately acknowledged was a reference to calls by Obama and other Democrats for the U.S. president to sit down for talks with leaders like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"We have heard this foolish delusion before," Bush said in remarks to the Israeli Knesset. "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American Senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

Where to even start?

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I know I'm breaking TPM rules by using my space to link to another Cafe piece.

But I have to do it. Everybody needs to read Todd Gitlin's report about the cheerleading conference on war with Iran that is taking place in Israel. The whole war party is there, even President Bush.

Upon landing in Israel, Bush said he had a gift for Olmert and Peres but he could not reveal what it is for security reasons. But I can tell you.

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Reader NYkrinDC runs down and analyzes a handful of the many (and varied) opinions and propositions currently circulating on the prospect of "armed humanitarian intervention" in Burma.

Allsburg discusses the intra-party ressentiment plaguing the Democrats (and he throws in some anthropological speculation as well).

While many folks have come to see Sen. Jim Webb as Obama's ideal vice presidential candidate, reader freaktown challenges the assumptions behind that line of thinking.

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They certainly sound egalitarian. For example, as I noted the other day, more than 85% of Americans say they agree that "Our society should do whatever is necessary to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed." That sentiment, if taken seriously, implies a quite radical policy agenda with respect to education, health care, and other forms of social support. It also seems very hard to square with tax-free inheritances for the children of multi-millionaires.

Perhaps survey respondents answering very general questions of this sort are simply paying lip service to egalitarian values. However, it is easy enough to find much less abstract expressions of egalitarian sympathies. For example, Americans asked to rate various social groups on a 100-point "feeling thermometer" report warmer feelings toward working class people than toward middle class people, warmer feelings toward poor people than toward rich people, and warmer feelings toward labor unions than toward big business. If these feelings were translated into policies, those policies would be quite egalitarian. But the connection between sympathies and policies is remarkably loose. In some cases - perhaps most strikingly, with respect to the minimum wage - public opinion is strongly and consistently egalitarian, but consistently ignored by policy-makers. (Thus, the real value of the federal minimum wage has eroded by more than 40% over the past 40 years.) More commonly, however, the public's own policy views fail to reflect their egalitarian-sounding impulses.

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I have written at length about why the proposed housing bailouts in their current form are bad housing policy. The basic point is that they would have the government guarantee new mortgages at prices that are still inflated by the housing bubble.

This is bad for three reasons. First, because the prices are still high, it leads to a situation in which homeowners will pay far more on their mortgage and other housing related costs than they would to rent a comparable unit. This takes away money needed for health care, child care and other necessary expenses. That is not a favor to moderate-income families.

Second, since the deflating bubble will cause house prices to fall, homeowners in the bubble areas will not accumulate any equity. The third point follows directly from the second point: because prices in bubble areas are likely to fall below the guarantee price, the government is likely to have to make good on the guarantees. Handing money to banks for their bad loans is not good policy.

But there is a more basic issue that should bother progressives. Progressives usually argue for policies that benefit low and middle income people at the expense of the wealthy. This one goes the other way.

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The Council on Foreign Relations has just released a zinger report on Latin America. It's just fantastic, and I have to admit that I rarely find myself doing jumping jacks and running around my block in Dupont Circle in Washington after reading a CFR Task Force report. But I am.

I think that the 96-page document is stacked full of sensible thinking and proposals that on each and every page fundamentally reject the kind of self-destructive pugnacious nationalism that former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Jesse Helms and his chief acolyte John Bolton have helped institutionalize.

It's just so good. The report is titled U.S.-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality and can be downloaded as a pdf here.

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I have maintained for a while that oil prices (and perhaps other commodities as well) are being driven higher not by the laws of supply and demand, but by the moves of speculators. This morning the Dow Jones news-wire reported the following.

OPEC member Iran is storing about 25 million barrels of heavy crude oil in tankers in the Persian Gulf. The country expects to move the stored crude by the end of the second quarter or early in the third quarter, an official from the National Iranian Oil Co. said Wednesday.

In other words, there is so little demand that they have completely used up their on shore storage capacity and don't expect to clear this inventory until October. Clearly it is time for Senator Byron Dorgan's Bill to raise commodity margin requirements. All of this talk from our President and others about third world growth being responsible for dramatically higher commodity prices is nonsense. It's his old friends in the trading pits that are responsible for creating yet another bubble. Is it possible that our new reliance on finance (as opposed to production) as the engine of our economy requires us always to create speculative bubbles? First Internet stocks, then housing, now commodities.

I've been wondering all day whether what's going on between the US and Israel on the one hand, and Iran on the other, is a game of chicken--the drag-strip game where two drivers race toward each other and the first one to turn away loses--or something worse.

This wondering comes from Jerusalem, where I'm attending Shimon Peres' President's Conference on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel. There's more to say about the goings-on, and the contribution I'm going to make tomorrow, but I'll do that later, when I have time.

For now, I'm preoccupied with Iran. The reason is that, for two days now, so many speakers have been preoccupied with Iran, and talking rather casually about the prospect of a preventive strike.

The sense of threat here is vivid, it is deeply felt, it is completely comprehensible, and it rises occasionally, or more than occasionally, to a well-nigh hysterical pitch--so much so that the Amerian strategist Edward Luttwak arose Monday night at a banquet at Peres' house to warn assembled luminaries against fearing annihilation at the hands of an Ahmadinejad who, after all, was not Hitler but Mussolini, and an inept one at that. It is not lost on any Israeli that Ahmadinejad, in his usual delicate manner, last week called Israel a "stinking corpse."

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Political scientists have shown that the state of the national economy has a substantial impact on voting behavior and election outcomes. Pioneers in this line of scholarship viewed their work as a bracing antidote to pessimistic concerns that the unsophisticated masses would be swayed by slick campaign ads or demagogic appeals. For example, Gerald Kramer characterized his findings as demonstrating "that election outcomes are in substantial party responsive to objective changes occurring under the incumbent party; they are not 'irrational,' or random, or solely the product of past loyalties and habits, or of campaign rhetoric and merchandising." In the same vein, V. O. Key Jr. interpreted retrospective voting as evidence for his "perverse and unorthodox argument" that "voters are not fools."

This optimistic interpretation of economic voting seems to me to be misconceived. While it is certainly true that American voters respond to "objective changes occurring under the incumbent party," they do so in ways that produce an immensely consequential partisan bias in economic accountability. While they may not be fools, they are short-sighted, and their myopia often leads them to cast votes that are damaging to their economic interests.

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Senators Grassley and Kohl have introduced legislation that would require disclosure of all gifts from pharmaceutical companies to doctors over $500. That sounds like good news, except, according to this report, Grassley's staff worked closely with Eli Lilly to re-write two aspects of the bill to gain Eli Lilly's support. Initially, the bill would apply to all gifts over $25. In addition, the Senators have added a pre-emption clause, so that this law will supersede all state laws, even those that are more strict. This bi-partisan effort to pass a bill and get industry "on board" does not portend well for post-2009 reforms: it sounds like the process that both Clinton and Obama are promising for their health care initiatives. For Eli Lilly, it's yes we can, indeed. But where does this leave patients?

The pre-emption clause is particularly disturbing. This "feel good" legislation overturns more consumer-protecting state rules. By working with a sponsor's staff in Washington, manufacturers are able not only to secure a more lax federal rule but also to undermine all state efforts to enforce more strict regimes.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for finding this.

Watching Rosemary Watson helps this Obamaniac even feel some sympathy for the former next President. She is absolutely brilliant.

They are all great. Start with this old one from Iowa and then the rest.

The possibility of eight years of watching this woman is another reason I'm for Hillary for Veep.

Following up on last week's post, what's odd is that folks like myself who promote tighter fair trade rules can be accused of trying to help American workers by focusing "on finding ways to keep the Chinese population trapped in crushing poverty," while when we talk about immigration, a person like Michael Lind refers to progressives as "dupes and allies on the fringe left" that help foreign immigrants at the expense of American workers. 

When you see these kinds of completely opposite accusations, you can usually bet that the DC/mainstream media paradigm is not really making room for understanding a pretty basic dissent from its politics. Right now, we have a recognized rightwing policy position that supports free trade combined with xenophobic anti-immigrant politics versus a liberal free trade position that promotes a bit more immigration, but in highly controlled guest worker conditions serving corporate interests combined with trade deals with token labor provisions that still are designed based on corporate interests.

What's missing is a basic debate on why we have international policies that give corporate capital the right to cross borders at will, make contracts freely without government interference, then pull investments out when governments demand corporate accountability, yet labor is denied similar freedom on a global basis. The fair trade-immigrant rights position actually boils down to a simple demand: give labor at least the same rights as corporate capital in the global economy.

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I can't help myself.

I can't help but think that Obama-Clinton is the dream ticket. No, not because Hillary is my second favorite Democrat. She isn't.

But I doubt Lyndon Johnson was the Kennedy people's second favorite either. The name of the game is winning. We have to get every Democrat energized for this election and shut the door on any possibility that John McCain and endless war will win.

I'm not saying she deserves to be VP. I'm saying that I can't think of a stronger ticket.

Am I wrong? No way.

As West Virginians go to the polls, reader (and former resident) Akbar Jenkins looks at some of the state's demographic and cultural history, as well as its probable effect on voting patterns.

Robert Feinman argues that the military might just as well be considered the fourth branch of the government at this point, which I think is a fair assessment of a not necessarily novel phenomenon. The military's ever-increasing, and increasingly political, role in the country's affairs dates back to the transition from the WWII to the Cold War framework.

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Imagine a society that lets its automakers oversee crash tests on new models, allowing the industry to report results, as it sees fit, to government and consumers. Sometimes, an automaker might not reveal the outcome of a test that turned out badly, deciding that the dummies in the vehicle were too short--no wonder their chests were crushed!

In other cases, a company might postpone reporting on crash test results for a year or two, hoping that later trials would turn out better. In these cases dozens of trials might be required in order to achieve the desired outcome. The car maker would, of course, pass along the additional cost, in the form of higher sticker prices. In this society, crash tests are not run and paid for by an independent entity like our National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (funded by taxpayers) or the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (funded by auto insurers). Instead, the auto industry itself finances and controls the trials. Automakers also provide most of the funding for the government agency that rules on car safety. Finally, under this system, head-to-head comparisons of cars in a similar weight class are frowned upon. Such trials would create winners and losers--and who wants to be a loser? Instead, each company tests its own cars, and when outcomes finally are published, they tend to be excellent.

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There's something distasteful about this whole need for Barack Obama to assure us that he is, indeed, the best friend Israel could ever have. Jeffrey Goldberg has been beaten up some, but I've enjoyed much of his work. Indeed if you want to see how great reporting can be prescient read this piece, and pay close attention to the section of Missouri Dems, Claire McCaskill and Hillary Clinton. But it's amazing how much of Goldberg's Q&A is dedicated to Obama proving that he does believe in Israel's right to exist--as opposed to, I guess, believing Israel deserves to be destroyed in a downpour of hellfire. 

But Obama, labors under the burden of being a presumed Hamas agent, and thus twice he has to weigh in on whether "justice is on Israel's side." Given the nature of people, I don't even know what that means. Hell, I bleed red, black and green, but I'd never presume that justice was on black folks' side--at least not as a post-25-year-old. Indeed, these days, I'm much more concerned with getting black folks on justice's side, as the saying goes.

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One of the most controversial findings in Unequal Democracy is that the incomes of middle-class and working poor families have grown much less robustly under Republican presidents than when Democrats are in the White House. The Census Bureau's Historical Income Tables show that, since 1948, middle-class incomes have grown more than twice as fast under Democrats, while the incomes of working poor families (at the 20th percentile of the income distribution) have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans. Only families near the top of the income distribution have done about equally well under both parties. Skeptics have suggested a variety of reasons to doubt these figures. Here are a few - and the reasons why they are not compelling.

1. The pattern simply reflects the fact that Democrats held the White House for most of the high-growth period before the mid-1970s, while Republicans have mostly been in charge in the more recent slow-growth era. While it is true that income growth has slowed considerably, especially for middle- and low-income families, the partisan differences in income growth appear in both periods considered separately. Allowing for shifts in income growth patterns unrelated to partisan control, oil price shocks, changing levels of labor force participation, and other potentially important economic and social conditions leaves the partisan differences in income growth patterns virtually unchanged.

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I previously referenced this interview in my Cafe piece on Joe Lieberman's smear about Obama and Hamas.

But I want to comment on it independent of that silliness.

This is a great interview about Israel. That is not because Obama says the kind of things I would say about Israel and the Palestinians. I would be far more critical of Israeli policies than he is and far more sympathetic to the legitimate needs of the Palestinian people.

But this is a very different statement than one sees from most candidates. And I'll tell you why.

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One very foolish meme that's made it's way into the primary is this notion that black people voting for Barack in large margins is the equivalent (or on the scale of racism, arguably worse) of white people breaking for Hillary in similar margins. I doubt that anyone who reads this blog thinks like that, and truthfully, I haven't seen it in any of the blogs I read. It's one of those notions that you hear from beefheads like Joe Scarborough or in the Huffington Post comment section. I know, I know, those sources are roughly equal in credibility, but I just want to venture a quick response.

Blacks have been voting for whites for president since they've gotten the vote. There is no question about black people's ability to vote for a white man for president. Even in cases when blacks have a so-called black leader in the actual race, they still--in crucial times--have voted for the white guy. This is why it was patently foolish to infer that Latinos voting for Hillary were racist, when in fact Latinos had supported black candidates on several occasions.

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Hey all. My name is Ta-Nehisi Coates. I'm a struggling writer (is there any other kind?), novice blogger, the father of a lovely baby boy (he's seven, guess I better stop calling him "a baby."), and an admitted member of the Obama for sainthood cult. Anyway, the great folks here at TPM have invited me to cross-post some of my stuff here. I promise to try to keep the references to Robotech, intelligent swords and Wu-Tang Clan to a minimum. But bear with me, the ghetto nerdiness runs deep in this one.

Mother's Day has come and gone, but not the needs of working mothers--or, we should say, working families. Questions of sick leave, flexibility, fair pay, and mandatory overtime, and all the rest affect not just mothers but children, fathers, mothers, nieces, older people--really, everyone in the economy who has to care for, or be cared for, at any point in our lives. Which includes us all.

Here's my own experience with this: I am unspeakably grateful that while my father was dying this past year, my boss insisted that I take whatever time I needed, whenever I needed it, to fly to Florida to be with him. As a result I was there once a month in his final months, in the room with him during his last five days, held his hand while he literally gasped his last breath, and stayed with my stepmother and siblings while he was buried -- without worrying for a second about my paycheck, my amount of vacation or bereavement leave, or my annual review. I did not have to choose between caring for my family and keeping a roof over my head.

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So now Lieberman is putting out the line that a Hamas "endorsement" of Obama is the same as an Obama endorsement of Hamas.

I'm not going to argue about the illogic of Lieberman's statement. Or its sheer obscenity. If Obama is such a Hamas man, why did Lieberman demand (and get) his endorsement over Lamont in lhis 2006 primary.

It's a stupid, ugly and obscene statement.

But the worst thing about it is that it hurts American Jews and Israel. Joe Lieberman is the most prominent American Jewish politician. He is the only Jew to have ever been nominated on a national ticket. He is, by definition, a national figure.

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I'm delighted to be at TPMCafe and I'm looking forward to this week's discussion of Unequal Democracy. The book focuses on escalating economic inequality in contemporary America and the ways in which partisan politics and public policy have contributed to it. However, my aim in writing it was broader - to use the politics of economic inequality as a starting point for a more general examination of how American democracy really works. Here are some of the things I think I've learned.

1. Ordinary citizens' policy preferences are often only loosely connected to their beliefs and values. For example, upward of 85% of Americans agree that "our society should do whatever is necessary to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed," but support for specific policies that would promote equal opportunity is much more modest. One problem is that many people are too inattentive to grasp connections between values and policies. Among people with strongly egalitarian values, those who were highly informed about politics opposed the highly inegalitarian Bush tax cuts by a four- to-one margin, but those who were least informed were more likely to support the tax cuts than to oppose them.

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Progressives have generally sought to promote affordable housing. We usually think that it is a good idea that moderate income people can buy or rent good housing. However, Congress seems determined to go on the opposite path, striving to keep house prices out of reach of tens of millions of families.

At least this is how the NYT describes the story. According to the NYT, a major purpose of the housing bailout bills before Congress is to keep house prices from falling.

There was a housing bubble in the United States over the last decade. After just keeping pace with inflation for a century, house prices rose more than 70 percent after adjusting for inflation over the years from 1996 to 2006.

Have the NYT editorial writers not noticed this bubble or do they think the housing bubble was a good development that the government should try to foster?

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