This column was published in yesterday's Haaretz. It was prompted by a warning sent around by university presidents to their faculties that Treasury officials have put them on notice: budgets would be cut, and last year's agreement with the professors will likely be put in jeopardy. The point is specific to Israel, but not only to Israel. The misunderstanding about how to perform public accounting for investments in education apply to every American state government.)

Once again, educational budgets are being threatened, this time by political leaders who let treasury officials tell them how to spend, the same way they allow the army general staff to tell them what to fear. Remember, Israel is a country where the norm is 40 students to a high school class, and universities are unable to cover their operating deficits; meanwhile, student achievement has slipped from the top of the Western pyramid to the bottom, teachers earn as much as secretaries, and professors earn perhaps half of what they would make abroad, where 3000 of them already reside.

I have known Finance Ministry employees. I bet the last thing on their minds is a desire to thwart educators. The problem is that most were themselves educated to monetarist logic at a time when "browsers" were still people who didn't want to pay for magazines. If you oppose them, you will meet with exasperation:

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As always, the Israeli authorities are denying their own soldiers' allegations about war crimes in Gaza. Naturally the New York Times is the main venue but soon the whole world will be hearing that 1300 Palestinian dead at the price of a half dozen Israelis was accomplished antiseptically. (The AP, on the other hand, tracks down actual victims -- living ones, anyway -- and confirms the soldiers' testimonies).

According to the Times, not only is there serious doubt that the IDF killed innocents, it seemingly went into Palestinian homes and spruced them up. "When we entered houses, we actually cleaned up the place,' said Yishai Goldflam, 32, a religiously observant film student in Jerusalem whose open letter to the Palestinian owners of the house he occupied for some days was published in the newspaper Maariv. 'There are always idiots who do immoral things. But they don't represent the majority. I remember once when a soldier wanted to take a Coke from a store, and he was stopped by his fellow soldiers because it was the wrong thing to do.'"

Yeah, right. Here is a rather more honest analysis from Ha'aretz. It asks the question: what in God's name did the Israelis think would happen when they hit one of the most crowded places on earth with almost everything they had. Some 400 kids died; what more do we need to know? And for what? A war that is already viewed as a colossal blunder for which Israel (not to mention grieving Gazans) will pay the price for years.

A friend who visited Gaza since the war said it resembled "what you would expect if the 101st airborne went to war with the neighborhoods in Slumdog Millionaire."

One TPMCafe member wrote (in response to my question as to why employers don't want to get out of providing health care): "Why don't you get out . . .and ask the employers this question?"

Well, I did in the book. And their answers persuade me it's ultimately about ideology. Here's a little excerpt from that chapter so you can see for yourself. I'd love to know what people think.

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Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Geithner presented an outline of his approach to regulating the financial system. The four pillars of that approach seem to be:

1. Increased power and regulatory centralization to deal with the problem of systemic risk


2. Increased protections for consumers and investors buying financial products


3. Closing regulatory gaps by shifting that organizes regulation based on financial functions, not types of financial institutions


4. International coordination among regulators

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If I were an Israeli, I would not have voted for either Binyamin Netanyahu or Ehud Barak. Each already had their chance at the prime minister's job and failed.

In the late 1990s, the electorate chose first Netanyahu and then Barak, and then, having watched their performance in office, quickly sent them packing. The two were the shortest serving elected prime ministers in Israel's history.

It is amazing that either one is given a second chance, but there is nothing intrinsically wrong with second chances. Politicians, like anyone else, are capable of surprising second acts. It is hard to imagine, however, that either of them is likely to stray very far from their respective past histories. Netanyahu will be sixty in a few months; Barak is sixty-seven. By now, each surely is who is he going to be.

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Why doesn't business get out of health-care provision? It really does seem like it's more ideology and inertia than anything else. And not just on the part of business: I don't get the sense that it's really popular politically to suggest moving away from an employer-centric system. Which would seem to point to the need for a years long campaign of education and agitation. Led by Matt, of course.

Although I do really like another suggestion that Matt makes in passing in the book: That territorial HR chiefs at big corporations might be a significant part of the problem. Maybe if we just promised to pay them all really big retention bonuses ...

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I like Philip's idea about specialized health courts to get us past the casino of malpractice litigation (and the expensive "defensive medicine" that inspires). But the biggest dead idea in health care is that employers still insist on being at the center of our system of providing coverage - -even thought the skyrocketing costs are killing them -- and the fact that people can't get access to group insurance outside the job context means folks stay in jobs (or decide not to start new businesses) because they're afraid of losing coverage . Bad for business, bad for the economy, bad for people. So my question for TPMCafe readers and my colleagues is this: why on earth does business NOT want to get out of the business of being the main health care source for all of us? If they made it their goal to shift much of this financing burden to government, wouldn't they (and we) be better off?

Jeff Zeleny reports this morning that President Obama promised Centrist Democratic Senators that "he will think about his proposal to raise taxes on gas and oil producers, which has evoked an outcry among small producers in gulf states." It is very clear that the obvious solution to energy conservation through the oil and gas taxes that most developed countries have adopted, will be a political battle here.

So I have another solution that would be far more politically savvy and achieve the same ends--a tax on imported oil and gas. Since we import almost 60% of our oil, the import tax would raise a lot of revenue, encourage production from the small producers who have been capping wells because of falling prices, push consumers towards more fuel efficient cars and set a floor under energy prices so that wind, solar and geothermal could be immediately price competitive. The political benefit would be that Blue Dog Democrats and Republicans alike in oil and gas producing states like Texas, Louisiana, Colorado, California and Montana would find it hard to vote against such a tax. I know Exxon and Chevron would lobby hard against this, but they are hardly the partners Mitch McConnell and John Boehner want to be fronting.

What am I missing?

Roger Cohen is definitely my favorite New York Times columnist. Every week he brings us thinking on the Middle East that leaves his other MSM colleagues in the dust.

I read today's column and thought, for a moment, that I was reading The Independent or The Guardian. Or Ha'aretz.

But Cohen is in the Times and he reports on an amazing shift among some of the biggest foreign policy thinkers (and doers) in the United States on the subject of Hamas. He writes about a letter organized by the US/Middle East project in which Brent Scowcroft, Thomas Pickering, Chuck Hagel, Paul Volcker, Lee Hamilton, James Wolfensohn, Carla Hills, Nancy Kassebaum, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Ted Sorensen urge that we recognize reality and start dealing, in some form, with Hamas. Henry Siegman from the US/Mideast Project and long time Jewish community leader quarterbacked the effort.

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In the movie Lars and the Real Girl, the main character imagines that a female blow-up doll is his fiancé. To humor Lars, his brother and sister-in-law go along with the charade. Over the course of the movie, more people are drawn into the circle, until eventually the whole town is treating Bianca the blow-up doll as one of its leading citizens.

This seems to pretty well describe the debate over the budget deficit, except it's not clear that many people realize it's a charade. The main story is that Lars' budget hawk counterparts are upset that the deficits projected for 2013 or 2019 are too large. They want President Obama to commit to spending cuts and/or tax increases in order to bring these deficits to levels they consider acceptable.

The unreality of this picture is striking because the budget hawks seem not to notice that we are in the middle of an economic meltdown.

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I agree with Bob Litan that we'll get change, for better or worse. To get rid of dead ideas, and move forward to a good place, I think America needs to have a discussion on the principles for change. For example, Matt argues that schools should not be considered a local activity, citing dramatic inequality of funding among states, and the idiocy of states setting their own standards under NCLB. I think this is only partially correct--I believe in national standards, for example. But successful schools are uniquely a function of their particular culture, which is in turn driven by the personality and commitment of the people involved in that school. (See Chapter 5 of Life Without Lawyers: "Bureaucracy Can't Teach."). So to me the principle here is that "Responsibility for different decisions in schools should be given to the person or institution best able to meet the goal." So the feds can oversee national testing, and perhaps even set pedalogical goals. But the act of teaching and accountability should be mainly local, with federal rules far away from daily decisions.

Other possible principles for change:

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It may be wishful thinking on my part but I think that the current crisis and likely slow recovery will afford considerable opportunities for fresh thinking, including a willingness to reject some of those dead ideas targeted by Matt in his book. In effect, the current crisis has been akin to a rescrambling of the eggs that the late Mancur Olson argued was necessary to break the gridlock of interest groups. Wars can have this effect. So can deep recessions. It is at such times that people are most likely to question the status quo and be willing to embrace ideas for moving beyond it. Such times, of course, are potentially dangerous; they can lead to revolution. What Matt is calling for is a continuous, bloodless revolution in ideas. That can happen as parties to the old status quo conventions age and die. Or crises such as the current one can bring change much faster.

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I don't usually link to Gawker but this is worth a look (also it includes some good links).

It's amazing. Obama has been President less than a hundred days, the country (by every indicator) is in better shape than when he came in, he passed a monumental stimulus package and these guys are just full of sneer.

I get it. They all voted for Obama. They all thought Bush was an idiot. So, to make themselves feel better about themselves, they mock a President they admire. (They couldn't do that to Bush because they had COMPLETE CONTEMPT for him).

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Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of hosting Advisor to President Mahmoud Abbas and Palestine Minister for Economic Development Mohammad Shtayyeh in my office to discuss the status of Palestinian Government unity government talks between Fatah and Hamas.

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Let me toss in a few thoughts. First, if you watched Obama's press conference Tuesday night, it's clear that the Dead Idea that will be hardest to bury is the idea that "Taxes Hurt The Economy (And They're Always Too High)". I thought the president was at his worst on all the questioning about the $7 trillion to $9 trillion he's slated to add to the national debt, and the reason is that it's taboo to mention higher taxes as one obvious thing we're going to have to do to close the budget gap once the recession is safely past. This is the only way to make the math work as 76 million baby boomers retire. I'm interested that Bob thinks the economic trauma we're going through will make it harder to raise taxes in a few years - he may be right, but my own hunch is that with retirement savings so decimated, it's going to be harder than ever to trim future retirement benefits, so somehow both parties will come up with a hand-holding way to boost taxes to help us get back to fiscal sanity (perhaps as part of some broader tax "reform"). More likely we'll end up doing some of both. But in any event, when Obama seems off his game, and tap dancing unpersuasively, it's a sure sign he's paying political deference to a Dead Idea.

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"This was Mr. Obama as more enervating than energizing."

In one Baker-Nagourney sentence, even a compliment is only a prologue to a dig that, come to think of it, might help explain why they're so petulant:

He showed his usual comfort with a wide array of subjects, even as he excluded the nation's big newspapers from the questioning in favor of a more eclectic mix.

My italics but their pique. Take that, Barack Obama, you pompous pedagogue, stringing together whole sentences and indeed paragraphs as if Americans were entitled to hear a line of reasoning. Take that if you dare to exclude "the nation's big newspapers" even as they prove less big every day.

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When I was reading through the seven Dead Ideas in Matt's book, I got most excited about "Your Company Should Take Care of You" and "Taxes Hurt the Economy (and They're Always Too High)." That's partly because they're the chapters are full of wonderful historical detail--about the rise of the corporate welfare state in the U.S. and past debates over tax policy--that I wasn't very familiar with. It's also because the ideas are so flawed and the fixes so straightforward: Get employers out of pension and health care provision, and raise our taxes enough to pay for what we want government to accomplish.

But Robert Litan's second thoughts about the inevitability of higher taxes got me second-thinking too. My reactions to a book like this aren't very good proxies for what the likely political realities are. So I'm curious, Matt (and all you TPMCafe commenters): Which of your Dead Ideas do you think are likely to keel over first?

Even as recently as reading Matt's terrific book, but before the furor over the AIG bonuses and compensation for execs of TARP-owned financial institutions, I shared Matt's view that inevitably federal taxes as a share of GDP will have to rise in order to meet our large and rapidly growing entitlement obligations. To be sure, some cuts in future benefits would be in the mix, but in the end I suspected that the tax/GDP ratio would settle somewhere in the mid-to-high 20s.

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Paul Krugman is in despair. Why should I care? When some of us were writing about the coming recession 14 months ago, Krugman was oblivious, saying "it's unlikely that America will experience a recession as severe as that in, say, Argentina."As Barack Obama's campaign gained strength a year ago, Krugman insisted that it was pipe dream and that Hillary Clinton was the only candidate that could beat the Republicans.

Now Krugman insists the only route for the Obama administration is to nationalize the banks. Krugman insists the public/private partnership announced yesterday by Tim Geithner is fatally flawed.

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Many dead ideas are institutionalized in law. The farm bill was passed in 1933, when 25% of the country lived on farms. In the year 2009 2% live on farms, and large corporations pocket $10 billion in entirely unnecessary subsidies. Pick almost any law, and you will find unintended consequences that tend to undermine the original goal. No Child Left Behind, special education laws, rules requiring due process for school discipline--these are rich lodes of unintended consequences. The meltdown on Wall Street-- certainly the result of a cultural hubris and regulatory laxity--at least has the virtue of forcing a change in values and law. What I worry about is the power of inertia in less dramatic circumstances. Washington itself is inert, crushed under layers of legal concrete- about 100 million words of law. Congress keeps passing laws, but almost never goes back to see how they're working, or adjust them to changed circumstances.
What's needed is not just to identify dead ideas, but somehow set in motion a continual effort to refresh the law of the land.

I have taken it on as a mission to expose neo-McCarthyist attempts to squelch dissenting (i.e., non-Likud) voices on the Middle East.

McCarthyism did not start with the firing of liberals, lefties, Commies, socialists and anyone who ever met one. It started with lists. Black lists.

Before hiring someone, universities, Hollywood studios, publishers, school systems would check various black lists to make sure that the potential hiree was in no way, associated with the left. In one famous case, actress Nancy Davis (who later became Nancy Reagan) was blacklisted because she had the same name as some liberal. Jobs were lost. Lives were destroyed. People committed suicide.

Just having one's name on such a list was often a life destroyer.

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These videos depict what the Israeli soldiers are describing,

Who is to blame? The soldiers who perpetrated these acts? Or is it the government that sent them to Gaza?

I say it's the government. Just as Lynndie England and Charles Graner were not Abu Ghraib's real culprits, neither are the Israeli soldiers the culprits of Gaza. Any government that sends 19-year old adolescents into a situation they can only perceive as terrifying is responsible for what ensues.

This was Olmert and Barak's war. The soldiers would not have been in Gaza if it were not for them. The Palestinians paid a terrible price for this war. But so did Israel. It lost, in more ways than most Israelis grasp.

Thanks for joining this book club conversation about The Tyranny of Dead Ideas. The book is about how we get trapped in old ways of thinking that end up really hurting us -- about the threat now posed to our economy by the things we think we know. Look at the last 18 months and you'll see how this explains much of what's happened. The failure to explode a Dead Idea -- that Financial Markets Can Regulate Themselves -- got us into today's economic ditch (as even Alan Greenspan, the chief apostle of that perverse notion, now admits). But unless we now expose and move past the other Dead Ideas at the heart of the book - on health care, taxes, trade, schools, and the very idea of capitalism being an economic meritocracy - we won't find our way back to a durable prosperity.

When it comes to how we think about the world, I believe we're in a situation like 1928.

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This week at Cafe we have Matt Miller with us, book clubbing on The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity. In it he dissects a series of conventional ideas - on education, free trade, health coverage, taxes - that are out of date and threaten our nation. From Matt's opening post (to go up shortly):

The book is about how we get trapped in old ways of thinking that end up really hurting us -- about the threat now posed to our economy by the things we think we know. Look at the last 18 months and you'll see how this explains much of what's happened. The failure to explode a Dead Idea -- that Financial Markets Can Regulate Themselves -- got us into today's economic ditch (as even Alan Greenspan, the chief apostle of that perverse notion, now admits).

Matt Miller is co-host of public radio's Left, Right & Center, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and author of The Two Percent Solution.

Joining him are Robert Litan, expert on antitrust, banking, and internet policy at the Brookings Institution and Kauffman Foundation; Justin Fox, business and economics columnist for TIME Magazine; Jeff Madrick, editor of Challenge Magazine; Philip Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense and founder of Common Good; Michael Shellenberger, president of the Breakthrough Institute.

Roger Cohen is a fearless columnist. In the New York Times, of all places, he challenges every Middle East assumption of the neocon right.

He believes that the President's greeting to Iran on Friday was a master stroke: "President Obama achieved four things essential to any rapprochement.He abandoned regime change as an American goal. He shelved the so-called military option. He buried a carrot-and-sticks approach viewed with contempt by Iranians as fit only for donkeys. And he placed Iran's nuclear program within "the full range of issues before us."

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Reasonable people, from President Shimon Peres to historian of European fascism Zeev Sternhell, have argued fervently that Kadima's Livni and Labor's Barak should join Netanyahu's coalition--that not doing so, in effect, means that Avigdor Lieberman will get the Israel he wants; that the economy and Iran require national solidarity. Barak is trying.

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President Obama's team was filling the airwaves today with assurances that Congress and the American people really don't mean to crack down the multimillion dollar paychecks on Wall Street. Actually, it looks the American people, insofar as they have any voice in their government, really do want to bring an end to these multimillion dollar paychecks.

There is little evidence that the vast majority of the people receiving these paychecks possessed any skill other than ripping off the rest off society to enrich themselves. When the Obama crew tells us that their bailout scheme will cause some of these folks to get even richer on our tax dollars, and, by the way, we really can't tax away the bonuses from the AIG boys, it's hard not to get a bit angry.

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Regrettably, the Obama administration seems to be fumbling the ball on an economic policy course that restores confidence in the American economy on both the optics level and also on a substantive front that reorganizes the "social contract" and design of the real economy in the U.S.

Obama, in his 'loyalty' to his current economic team and the mistakes they are making is the antithesis of Abraham Lincoln. Obama may have tried to mimic Lincoln's "team of rivals" approach to politics -- but he needs to read the chapters on the number of generals Lincoln fired during the Civil War to finally get things moved forward.

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Could we organize a group tour for the Senate centrists to visit the rock-throwin monkey?

Can we sign up Jon Corzine as Tim Geithner's driver?

The Democrats are in the tank for Hollywood. That's why you can be executed for downloading Adam Sandler's booger humor. They are also in the tank for Big Finance. This is very bad. The Republicans are in the tank for everybody else. This is usually worse.

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It was inevitable, And so depressing.

As Israel moved right and religious, the IDF moved with it. In 1967, the officer corps was mainly from the kibbutzim, secular, and left-wing. But that Israel is disappearing (along with the near defunct kibbutz movement).

Now the officers, like a near majority of the troops, come from religious right backgrounds. And suddenly you have rightist rabbis who offer sanction to attacking anything that moves. This comes out of those soldier testimonies which is huge news in Israel. Appalled soldiers are telling what they saw and did in Gaza and it is sickening. Expect more like this (from the Times today).

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