Wage Slaving 101

Former Obama economic adviser and current UC-Berkeley econ professor Christina Romer all but pours cold water on the notion of even having a minimum wage, let alone raising it to $9 an hour as the President suggested in his SOTU speech last month.

First, what’s the argument for having a minimum wage at all? Many of my students assume that government protection is the only thing ensuring decent wages for most American workers. But basic economics shows that competition between employers for workers can be very effective at preventing businesses from misbehaving. If every other store in town is paying workers $9 an hour, one offering $8 will find it hard to hire anyone — perhaps not when unemployment is high, but certainly in normal times. Robust competition is a powerful force helping to ensure that workers are paid what they contribute to their employers’ bottom lines. 

One argument for a minimum wage is that there sometimes isn’t enough competition among employers. In our nation’s history, there have been company towns where one employer truly dominated the local economy. As a result, that employer could affect the going wage for the entire area. In such a situation, a minimum wage can not only make workers better off but can also lead to more efficient levels of production and employment. 

But I suspect that few people, including economists, find this argument compelling today. Company towns are largely a thing of the past in this country; even Wal-Mart Stores, the nation’s largest employer, faces substantial competition for workers in most places. And many employers paying the minimum wage are small businesses that clearly face strong competition for workers. 

Now, I'm not a economics professor, but the problem isn't production, efficiency, or competition.
It's cost of living.  It's the fact that minimum wage doesn't begin to cover a place to live anywhere in America.




And Romer's solution is increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit.

It’s precisely because the redistributive effects of a minimum wage are complicated that most economists prefer other ways to help low-income families. For example, the current tax system already subsidizes work by the poor via an earned-income tax credit. A low-income family with earned income gets a payment from the government that supplements its wages. This approach is very well targeted — the subsidy goes only to poor families — and could easily be made more generous. 

By raising the reward for working, this tax credit also tends to increase the supply of labor. And that puts downward pressure on wages. As a result, some of the benefits go to businesses, as would be the case with any wage subsidy. Though this mutes some of the direct redistributive value of the program — particularly if there’s no constraining minimum wage — it also tends to increase employment. And a job may ultimately be the most valuable thing for a family struggling to escape poverty. 

Not if the job doesn't cover the cost of rent in the first place.  Even here in Kentucky, one of the cheapest states to live in,  you'd need to be pulling down $11+ an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment.

Ohio's $7.85 a hour minimum wage still means you'd need $13+ an hour, same with Indiana's federal minimum.  The $9 an hour the President is talking about is a solid first step, but more tax credits for the poor isn't going to fix the problem.

Talking about minimum wages without talking about cost of living problems is a ridiculous waste of time and space, and frankly I'm more than a little peeved at Professor Romer for forgetting that:  nowhere in the piece does she mention a living wage.

Just annoying as all hell.

Basic Mathe-Manics On Taxes

Stephen Olemacher at the Associated Press reminds us that you should take some time out of your busy schedule to feel sorry for America's most put upon resource, our obscenely rich one-percenters.

President Barack Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress say the wealthy must pay their fair share if the federal government is ever going to fix its finances and reduce the budget deficit to a manageable level.

A new analysis, however, shows that average tax bills for high-income families rarely have been higher since the Congressional Budget Office began tracking the data in 1979. Middle- and low-income families aren’t paying as much as they used to.

For 2013, families with incomes in the top 20 percent of the nation will pay an average of 27.2 percent of their income in federal taxes, according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a research organization based in Washington. The top 1 percent of households, those with incomes averaging $1.4 million, will pay an average of 35.5 percent.

Those tax rates, which include income, payroll, corporate and estate taxes, are among the highest since 1979.

The average family in the bottom 20 percent of households won’t pay any federal taxes. Instead, many families in this group will get payments from the federal government by claiming more in credits than they owe in taxes, including payroll taxes. That will give them a negative tax rate.

‘‘My sense is that high-income people feel abused by being targeted always for more taxes,’’ Roberton Williams, a fellow at the Tax Policy Center, said. ‘‘You can understand why they feel that way.’’

Indeed, the top 20% of income earners pay 78% of all income tax according to the article, which in America means we have people earning six figures who have to scrape by.  What the other 80% are supposed to do, well who knows, we don't matter.  As Sam Knight over at Washington Monthly puts it...

...yahoo!

It’s oh so difficult to feel even a subatomic iota of sorrow for the rich here for so many reasons: 1979, of course, marks two years before the start of the Reaganite consensus on executive worship and corporate tax cuts; much of the rich’s income is derived from “unearned” rent-seeking; the elites should be happy to help pay for a society that has helped them prosper; and, due to offshoring and the weakness of organized labor among other factors, lower income workers’ wages haven’t kept pace with their productivity explosion over the past few decades. In short, the wealthy have the money to comfortably pay these “historically high” tax rates — lower still than the high marginal rates that were commonplace throughout the rapid growth post-war era.

Moreover, high tax rates might actually spur growth, in the words of John Judis, by discouraging “the wealthy from rerouting their savings into the kind of speculative activity that helped create the Great Recession,” and, in the words of one small business owner, by encouraging businesses to reinvest their profit before the end of the year.

Or as Duncan Black puts it, America is a country where people are poor if they are making $250,000 a year, but we can't afford to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour.

StupidiNews!

• Catholic Cardinals will meet today in Vatican City to set a date for the conclave to select the next Pope,  the entire process which could be completed by the end of next week.
• Pediatric doctors at the University of Mississippi are announcing that they have "effectively cured" HIV in a child born with the virus, a major breakthrough.
• Releasing $190 million in aid to Egypt, Secretary of State John Kerry says President Mohammed Morsi must do more to improve rights for women and religious minorities.
• European leaders are putting pressure on Italy to continue with austerity cuts as EU finance ministers meet in Brussels to discuss bailing out Cyprus.
• Sunday's successful Dragon space capsule docking with the ISS means astronauts will transfer a total of 1,750 kg of cargo to and from the capsule before sending Dragon home in 3 weeks.

Last Call

Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein is crazy smart, and runs a good place over at Wonkblog.  But he’s always been one of those “high-INT/low-WIS” types who doesn’t always see the forest for the trees when it comes to Republicans.  This weekend however , he finally removes the scales from his eyes about the way the GOP operates, and to his credit, admits he’s been played:

My column this weekend is about the almost comically poor lines of communication between the White House and the Hill. The opening anecdote was drawn from a background briefing I attended with a respected Republican legislator who thought it would be a gamechanger for President Obama to say he’d be open to chained CPI — a policy that cuts Social Security benefits — as part of a budget deal.
The only problem? Obama has said he’s open to chained CPI as part of a budget deal. And this isn’t one of those times where the admission was in private, and we’re going off of news reports. It’s right there on his Web site. It’s literally in bold type. But key GOP legislators have no idea Obama’s made that concession.

Klein then investigates this further after Jon Chait points out the GOP is being cementheaded on purpose:

If Obama could get hold of Klein’s mystery legislator and inform him of his budget offer, it almost certainly wouldn’t make a difference. He would come up with something – the cuts aren’t real, or the taxes are awful, or they can’t trust Obama to carry them out, or something.

At  this point (as Booman notes), a Twitter exchange between NYT reporter John Harwood and GOP strategist Mike Murphy illuminates young Ezra.

And then GOP consultant Mike Murphy told Time magazine that Obama could get a deal if he uttered the six magic words, “Some beneficiaries pay more and chained CPI.”
When John Harwood noted on Twitter that Murphy seemed unaware that Obama had already offered both of those items, Murphy responded. At first, Murphy insisted that only means-testing had been offered. When corrected, he followed Chait’s prediction to a ‘T.’

1. (Chait: “the cuts aren’t real”) Murphy: “his CCPI offer is small beans gimmick.”
2. (Chait: “the taxes are awful”) Murphy: the CCPI offer is conditional on “big new revenue.”
3. (Chait: “they can’t trust Obama to carry them out”) Murphy retweets a Twitter comment from someone who was listening in to the conversation: “R’s also don’t trust him, and there’s a history to justify this mistrust.”

As Ezra points out, Mike Murphy is not a fire-breather. He’s very much a moderate Republican circa 1990.

No matter what Harwood said when pointing out President Obama is the one compromising here, and has publicly made the exact offers the GOP claims he refuses to make, Murphy rejected those offers as “unserious” or “untrustworthy.”  And it finally dawns on Ezra that all Republicans are behaving this way.

This had led to a lot of Republicans fanning out to explain what the president should be offering if he was serious about making a deal. Then, when it turns out that the president did offer those items, there’s more furious hand-waving about how no, actually, this is what the president needs to offer to make a deal. Then, when it turns out he’s offered most of that, too, the hand-waving stops and the truth comes out: Republicans won’t make a deal that includes further taxes, they just want to get the White House to implement their agenda in return for nothing. Luckily for them, most of the time, the conversation doesn’t get that far, and the initial comments that the president needs to “get serious” on entitlements is met with sage nods.

Congrats, Ezra.  You’ve discovered the fact you’re surrounded by Village Centrists.  Now how about helping America see through their “both sides do it” nonsense and lets pin the blame where it belongs, eh?

 

Keep up the good work.

A Useless, Barbaric Relic Of The Past

George F. Will is really sick and tired of minorities acting like there's still any need for Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, because frankly Republicans are busy trying to actively disenfranchise minority voters in all states, not just historically racist Southern ones.  Why single out them?  In the name of put-upon old rich white men, Will demands that you people let it go already and that the era for the need for Section 5 has passed.

Progressives are remarkably uninterested in progress. Social Security is 78 years old, and myriad social improvements have added 17 years to life expectancy since 1935, yet progressives insist the program remain frozen, like a fly in amber. Medicare is 48 years old, and the competence and role of medicine have been transformed since 1965, yet progressives cling to Medicare “as we know it.” And they say that the Voting Rights Act, another 48-year-old, must remain unchanged, despite dramatic improvements in race relations.

The question concerning which the Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday was whether Section 5 of the act is still constitutional, given the disappearance of the conditions that once made it acceptable as a temporary and emergency truncation of states’ sovereignty under federalism. In 2008, two years after the fourth renewal of the act, Barack Obama won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Al Gore and John Kerry in 2000 and 2004, respectively. Today Mississippi has more black elected officials — not more per capita, more — than any other state. Yet defenders of the continuing necessity of Section 5 merely shrug about the fact that race is no longer a barrier to either the nation’s highest office or to state and local offices in what once was the state most emblematic of resistance to racial equality.

And there we have it.  "How can there be disenfranchisement when we have a black President and black people getting elected in Mississippi?"   Gosh, I dunno.  Maybe the part where we make voter ID laws a de facto poll tax?  Maybe the part where Republicans actually opposed efforts to register more voters, or any effort to increase the number of voters in the US at all, because minorities who traditionally have been barred from voting by dint of long lines at urban polling stations, elimination of early and weekend voting, and faulty voting equipment are assumed to all be criminals anyway?

Will plows on, regardless.

Section 5 was enacted as a temporary response to many measures employed, primarily in the South, to disenfranchise minorities. It requires nine states and some jurisdictions in others to get federal permission — “pre-clearance” — for even minor changes in voting procedures. It has been extended four times, most recently in 2006 for 25 years. The 2006 House vote was 390 to 33, the Senate vote was 98 to 0; obviously, the political class’s piety about the act has extinguished thought about its necessity. But one reason for judicial review — for active judicial engagement in the protection of constitutional rights and arrangements — is that the political class, with its majoritarian temptations, cannot be trusted to do so.

Hey, that's Wario Scalia's argument.   Will buys it wholesale.  After decades of bitching about Congress not being able to agree on anything and not being able to come together for overwhelming bipartisan support, when they came together to renew the Voting Rights Act with overwhelming bipartisan support , that just proves that overwhelming bipartisan support is awful and that you can't trust it.  Why trust legislation to legislators?  (Also see George F. Will on why you can't trust the executive to execute, which is to say any of his columns on our "imperial President" over the last four years.)  But hey, let's just have the Supreme Court make endless 5-4 decisions on turning America into a right-wing utopia, that's a real governance system, dammit.

In 1982, Section 2 of the act was amended to say that the measure is violated whenever nomination and election processes “are not equally open to participation” by minority voters. And equality of participation is said to be denied whenever minority voters “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to . . . elect representatives of their choice.” And representatives “of their choice” has been construed to mean representatives who are members of the same minority. This expresses two tenets of progressivism’s racialism. One is identity politics: Your race is your political identity. The other is categorical representation: Members of a race can be understood and represented only by members of this race. By this reasoning the Voting Rights Act has become an instrument for what Roberts has hitherto called “a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” 

Section 5 is racism because African-Americans voting for African-Americans is racism, and liberals are racist for allowing it to continue.  As usual, the rich white guy has now made the call that racism is over, and that anyone who still believes this "racist remedy" is necessary is a racist.  Because George F. Will says so!

Seriously, at this point the barbarous ancient relic in this article is George F. Will, not Section 5.

Last Call

It's no secret that African-Americans are the most vocal supporters of gun control laws in the country and for good reason:  black men are six times more likely than white men to be victims of a gun-related crime, and eight times more likely to be the perpetrator.  As a black man, I find both statistics horrifying.

Little wonder then that the NRA in 2013 is depending on minority outreach to black neighborhoods.  The effort is lead by activists like Colion Noir, who makes this argument:



He basically saying that if there's any group that needs the protection of the Second Amendment and should be arming themselves, it's guys who look like me.  And yes, for hundreds of years, black folk have been victimized.  If this sounds familiar, it's because Noir is making a variation of NRA knucklehead Larry Ward's argument that "If slaves had owned guns, there wouldn't have been slavery". 

But the twist here is that Noir's bad guy is the federal government.  Throw that into the mix and you have the bog standard boilerplate of the GOP's outreach to black folk:  the government is enslaving you, it can't protect you, it has abandoned you, so you you rely on yourself.  This would have more impact if the actions of the GOP weren't to actively remove the government's ability to protect people by cutting law enforcement, cutting programs to assist the poor, cutting education dollars and teachers and school equipment, and slashing voting rights and gerrymandering the House.

Sad, really.  But that's the plan:  since white guys aren't selling guns to the shrinking black middle class, maybe black NRA spokesmen like Noir can.

You're just a customer, after all.

My Advice For The GOP

It's really simple.

Stop talking about rape.  Ever.  You only make it worse.

In criticizing controversial comments made by former Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, a California GOP leader ceded Friday that pregnancies by rape are rare "because it's an act of violence, because the body is traumatized."

"That was an insensitive remark," Celeste Greig told the Daily Democrat. "I'm sure he regretted it. He should have come back and apologized."

Greig is president of the conservative California Republican Assembly, a GOP volunteer organization that Ronald Reagan coincidentally once called "the conscience of the Republican Party."

However, in shades of Akin, Greig then added: "Granted, the percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it's an act of violence, because the body is traumatized. I don't know what percentage of pregnancies are due to the violence of rape. Because of the trauma the body goes through, I don't know what percentage of pregnancy results from the act."

Granted, Ms, Greig, your ignorance of science, biology, and law makes you disturbingly unqualified to head pretty much any other organization other than a group of conservative Republican morons.

Republicans everywhere:  when you feel the need to give a "scientific" explanation for your staggeringly stupid, uninformed, and completely wrong beliefs in order to give yourselves more credibility, choose instead to keep your damn mouths shut.  You'll get more votes.

Here's another piece of advice:  rape is rape.  It's a horrific, destructive act.  Getting pregnant from rape is not a cool bonus prize from God, and the traumatic experience of rape does not cause a woman to not get pregnant.  Get those two things through your rebarred concrete skulls and your party might even survive another 10 years.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Venezuela's Vice President says that President Hugo Chavez's health has taken a significant turn for the worse, and that he is "fighting for his life" following cancer treatment.
• President Obama blasted Congressional Republicans in his weekly address, saying that the current sequestration cuts now in effect must be replaced by "smart" cuts and balanced reforms.
• House Republicans reportedly will introduce an immigration bill next week that will grant citizenship to undocumented immigrants only if they go to the back of the line through existing channels.
• The US State Department's initial report on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline indicates initial approval of the project as environmentally acceptable.
• A federal judge has cut Samsung's billion-dollar patent award to Apple nearly in half, and is ordering a new damages trial on appeal.

Last Call

Matt Yglesias on sequestration:

Long story short, if you're a defense dove like me and have a nonutopian view of the domestic discretionary budget, then this looks like we're mostly talking about harmless spending cuts. It is very true that the current moment is not an optimal time to cut wasteful government spending. Given the high unemployment rate, the low and stable inflation rate, the low cost of federal borrowing, and the weird dynamics of "Evans Rule" monetary policy, I would say that 2013 is an excellent time for the federal government to waste some money on make-work military contracting gigs. But in the grand scheme of things, wasting resources on low-value programs is not a great idea, and there's more to life than timing.

Spoken like a man halfway to David Brooks' View From Nowhere.  Steve M. rips into Yggy and rightfully so:

Maybe there's more to life than timing for you, Matt, a fast-track journalist who's skipped effortlessly from excellent career-building job to excellent career-building job in the past decade, but for the ordinary schmucks who've waited years for a genuine ray of hope in their economy, the one that seems to have permanently high rates of unemployment, timing is everything -- as in, these people need a break now.

What Yglesias says in the lead-up to that statement is absolutely correct: we should be doing far more to put money in ordinary people's pockets. I don't care what it is: I'd take "make-work military contracting gigs" or a huge infrastructure repair program or any other way you could make it happen. Whatever will inspire people go to the mall next weekend. Whatever will flow money through the rest of the economy.

If military contractors are laying people off, retailers in regions where military items are made will suffer. If federal workers are experiencing one-day-a-week furloughs, their ability to spend drops 20%. And on and on. And, of course, this happens in an economy where most people barely have an economic cushion -- I bet Yglesias has one -- so how far will some of these people sink, even if the cuts are temporary?

Excellent point. Real people are going to get hurt here, and it's important to remember that.

The Massive Malay Melee

The kids over at WIN THE MORNING, JR. do some actual journalism for once, and have caught conservative bloggers and columnists behaving rather badly, taking a buck or three (or hundreds of thousands) writing stories about Malaysia...stories which are actually propaganda press releases from the country's government.  At the center: former Guardian columnist Josh Trevino.

The payments to conservative American opinion writers — whose work appeared in outlets from the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner to the Washington Times to National Review and RedState — emerged in a filing this week to the Department of Justice. The filing under the Foreign Agent Registration Act outlines a campaign spanning May 2008 to April 2011 and led by Joshua Trevino, a conservative pundit, who received $389,724.70 under the contract and paid smaller sums to a series of conservative writers.

Trevino lost his column at the Guardian last year after allegations that his relationship with Malaysian business interests wasn't being disclosed in columns dealing with Malaysia. Trevino told Politico in 2011 that "I was never on any 'Malaysian entity's payroll,' and I resent your assumption that I was."
According to Trevino's belated federal filing, the interests paying Trevino were in fact the government of Malaysia, "its ruling party, or interests closely aligned with either." The Malaysian government has been accused of multiple human rights abuses and restricting the press and personal freedoms. Anwar, the opposition leader, has faced prosecution for sodomy, a prosecution widely denounced in the West which Trevino defended as more "nuanced" than American observers realized. The government for which Trevino worked also attacked Anwar for saying positive things about Israel; Trevino has argued that Anwar is not the pro-democracy figure he appears.

The federal filing specified that Trevino was engaged through the lobbying firm APCO Worldwide and the David All Group, an American online consulting firm. The contract also involved a firm called FBC (short for Fact-Based Communications), whose involvement in covert propaganda prompted a related scandal and forced an executive at The Atlantic to resign from its board.

The problem is that Trevino has run afoul of many sites for failure to disclose taking money from a foreign government along this lines...and he contracted these columns out to his wingnut welfare buddies.

Trevino's subcontractors included conservative writer Ben Domenech, who made $36,000 from the arrangement, and Rachel Ehrenfeld, the director of the American Center for Democracy, who made $30,000. Seth Mandel, an editor at Commentary, made $5,500 (his byline is attached to the National Review item linked to above). Brad Jackson, writing at the time for RedState, made $24,700. Overall, 10 writers were part of the arrangement. 

So yeah, HuffPo has already pulled all Trevino's pieces, and I'm expecting more will follow.

Oh, and didn't conservative columnists and bloggers make a huge stink about how unethical it was that Chuck Hagel reportedly took money from "Friends of Hamas" (which never existed) to speak their "propaganda"?

Funny how that works.

The Beginning Of The End Of Same-Sex Marriage Bans

The Obama Justice Department released a brief backing the end of California's Prop 8, which overturned the state's law allowing same-sex marriage.  The argument that the Justice Department makes here, backed by the President himself, is the end of same-sex marriage bans.

It goes something like this:

1. Hi, we're the Executive Branch.  Maybe you've heard of us.
2. California's Prop 8 basically allows taking rights away from a specific class of people.
3. We think that warrants "heightened scrutiny."
4. This means California has to have an ironclad, 100% bulletproof reason for doing this.
5. Here are the reasons California laid out for doing this.  We list them.
6. None of these reasons come anywhere close to the ironclad, 100% bulletproof level. 
7. That leaves discrimination for its own sake.  That's unconstitutional.
8. Junk Prop 8 and let people marry in any state with legalized same-sex marriage.
9. Oh, and by the way, the logical endpoint of our argument, hint hint...
10. ...Is for you guys to say "Hey, we can't come up with an ironclad, 100% bulletproof reason either...
11. ...And if you then hold all same-sex marriage bans in states to heightened scrutiny...
12. ...None of them would pass muster, period.  They'd have to go too."
13. Voila!  End of same-sex marriage bans.

Now, will SCOTUS actually get to 13 there?  Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSBlog says no, and argues the DoJ stops at 8, where 9-13 are simply implied.  That's true to a point, but the implication is strong.

In essence, the position of the federal government would simultaneously give some support to marriage equality while showing some respect for the rights of states to regulate that institution.  What the brief endorsed is what has been called the “eight-state solution” — that is, if a state already recognizes for same-sex couples all the privileges and benefits that married couples have (as in the eight states that do so through “civil unions”) those states must go the final step and allow those couples to get married.  The argument is that it violates the Constitution’s guarantee of legal equality when both same-sex and opposite-sex couples are entitled to the same marital benefits, but only the opposite-sex couples can get married.

“The Court can resolve this case,” the new brief said, “by focusing on the particular circumstances presented by California law and the recognition it gives to committed same-sex relationships, rather than addressing the equal protection issue under circumstances not present here.”   That final phrase was the brief’s strongest indication that the administration is not yet ready to take a firm position on whether the “fundamental right to marry” that the Court has recognized repeatedly is a right that should be open also to same-sex couples.

The eight states that apparently would be covered by the argument the Solicitor General has now made are California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, and Rhode Island.

Some believe the brief is woefully inadequate, mostly those who have always found the President lacking in some way.  Marcy Wheeler goes as far to call the President a liar and a coward:

Mr. Obama has consistently lied about his dedication to civil liberties, privacy and the Fourth Amendment, I guess it should not be shocking that he would lie about his dedication to civil rights for all, across all the states, in the form of marriage equality. And that is exactly what he has done. And as Denniston’s article makes clear, this decision bore the active participation and decision making of Obama personally. The cowardice is his to bear personally. Thanks for the fish Mr. Obama. 

Which is odd, because Allahpundit at Hotair suggests the President is a liar precisely because the brief effectively is the full-throated defense of the equal protection of same-sex marriage rights that Wheeler was looking for.

The news also isn’t that O’s revealing himself once again to have been a liar on this issue. When he ran in 2008, he pretended to be against gay marriage to parry Republican claims that he was a devout liberal rather than the centrist “post-partisan pragmatist” his campaign touted him as. He finally dropped the facade last year — it’s politically safe now to support gay marriage, even in the GOP (sort of) — but he’s continued to insist that this issue should be left to the states because … I’m not sure why. Literally no one believes he sincerely feels that way, and since he’d already taken the plunge by endorsing legal gay marriage, he had little to gain politically from his phony federalism. The best I can do by way of a theory is to guess that O, instinctively, likes to posture as a “moderate” even when he’s pushing reliably liberal positions. (E.g., “the balanced approach.”) It’s good for his brand as the “reasonable” adult in the room in Washington, a vestigial version of the pragmatic independence he feigned in summer ’08. Plus, I suppose he might have thought that posing as a federalist on SSM would cushion the blow for opponents once he revealed his support for legalization. It’s not as big of a deal to find out that the president thinks gays should be allowed to marry if he’s qualifying that by saying you should get decide to your home state’s rules. But that was nonsense, as the DOJ’s brief confirms, and anyone who didn’t see through it instantly is a fool.

But Greg Sargent believes the goal is step 13 there, and that the argument that the DoJ gives means 9-13 must be implied (and basically says "look, the time is right to do this.")  I agree with this analysis:

Because Supreme Court justices give weight to the opinion of solicitors general, this makes it more likely — though it certainly doesn’t assure this — that the Court will adopt an equally sweeping ruling. It sets forth a legal view that comports with Obama’s view that “the love we commit to one another” should be equal before the law. It sends a strong signal that the administration believes the culture is ready for full equality for gay and lesbian Americans. If the Court responds in kind, it will give gay advocates a powerful weapon to challenge other state laws around the country banning gay marriage, and they’d likely be toppled as unconstitutional — one by one. This could truly help put this persistent relic of legalized discrimination on the road to extinction.

Now the question is again, will SCOTUS get all the way to 13, or stop at 8?  If it does get to 13, then as Greg mentions, the precedent means that same-sex marriage bans will be struck down time and time again as states simply can't come up with any good legal reason to ban it.

That would leave a huge vacuum across the country, which you could then make the argument that the vacuum had to be filled with a national legalized same-sex marriage law.

We'll get there.  The question is how long it will take.

StupidiNews!

• With Congress effectively on vacation again without taking any action, the steep cuts known as sequestration will go into effect today. 
• Kansas Democrats were able to force an amendment to a bill that would test all lawmakers for drugs as well as all welfare recipients.
• Chrysler says it will add 1,250 jobs at its transmission manufacturing plants in Indiana, spending nearly $400 million to upgrade capacity.
• After losing more than $700 million over the last three years, Groupon has fired co-founder Andrew Mason as CEO.
• The FCC apparently disagrees with the government's decision to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent unlocking of cell phones to take to a different carrier.