Gregg Easterbrook

Pundits, columnists and editorialists are good at saying who and what they don’t like. But what is it that they do like? All opinion-makers should be required to pen regular accounts of who and what they admire. As my two-year stint as a Reuters weekly columnist concludes – you’re not out of the woods, I may pop up occasionally – let me offer an incomplete accounting of ideas, organizations and people I view as worthy of praise:

World Vision: Many Christians conveniently ignore Jesus’s teachings about the poor. Many Americans don’t care about the billion people globally who are impoverished. World Vision, an evangelical organization, combats both problems by working to end poverty in developing nations. World Vision has done more to help the global poor than most governments, is pragmatic regarding economics, and its staffers don’t proselytize. There are few organizations one can admire without reservation: World Vision is one.

Barack Obama: His “next year we will get serious about the national debt” act is wearing thin. But in the main, Obama has been a good president – and Americans are turning post-racial so quickly that already we seem to shrug about the incredible historic significance of an African-American in the Oval Office.

Obama took command of the country at a low point: a deep recession, a costly quagmire in Iraq. If he’d come onto the national stage under the conditions encountered by the previous two chief executives – Bill Clinton took the White House at the start of an economic boom, George W. Bush took the White House just before 9-11, which ensured him a five-year honeymoon as the nation rallied – Obama might already be viewed as a great president. And he might still cross that threshold. ObamaCare was a major legislative achievement, and though it has bureaucratic-nightmare potential, bear in mind that few of its advantages have yet taken effect.

Doctors Without Borders: In the parts of the developing world where there are medical emergencies, workers of Medecins Sans Frontieres are viewed as saints walking among men. That’s the way I feel, too.

Cass Sunstein: Obama’s regulatory czar wants regulations to be necessary and cost-effective, which offends both ideological extremes. He’s doing a fine job.

Third Way: The Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute continue to do good work. But Third Way is the future of think tanks, focused on pragmatic solutions, not panel discussions.

International Justice Mission: Founded just 14 years ago, IJM already has achieved results in pressuring the legal systems of African, Asian and South American countries to recognize human rights and to take concrete action against human trafficking, government corruption and police brutality.

Red Cross/Red Crescent/Red Star of David: The structure of the Red Cross, Red Crescent and Red Star of David societies can be confusing. But in a world of situation ethics and I’ve-got-mine-Jack, the brave personnel of these organizations represent the embodiment of selfless virtue.

Stephen Carter: Author of important nonfiction books, of bestselling novels and a chaired law professor at Yale University, for my money Carter is the nation’s leading public intellectual. A political and religious moderate – not many Ivy League professors have written a column for Christianity Today, which is traditionalist on spiritual issues and liberal on social questions – Carter is a fine candidate for a Supreme Court opening. Yes, he writes novels that contain conspiracies, including an evil Supreme Court justice. They’re novels! Surely even the Senate Judiciary Committee can understand the difference between scholarship and entertainment. Carter would bring to the highest court intellectual heft, equability and humility, all of which the Supremes need.

The deficit commission report: It’s the map for the only clear path out of America’s primary domestic problem.

Berea College: Founded to aid the poor of Appalachia, Berea College is a private institution that does not charge tuition. “Financial need” is a requirement for admission. As top colleges and universities increasingly become preserves of the well-off, Berea College tirelessly works to end college-based class distinctions.

Mitt Romney: So he flip-flops. If this is the worst thing about him, he’s a welcome addition to national politics. Romney has been a success as a business and a government executive. He behaves honorably and treats others with respect. At a time when American discourse grows bitter and divisive, an Obama-Romney presidential race could set an example for high-minded public behavior.

The Pew Charitable Trusts: The Pew Trusts is the nation’s leading progressive philanthropy, campaigning for reform in health care, the environment, energy policy and other subjects. Its divisions concerned with state government and public opinion do great jobs. The founding impulse of Pew was a left-wing Christian – a flavor missing in national discourse. Its president, Rebecca Rimel, is a self-made woman who began her career as a nurse.

Reuters readers: I thank all readers who followed this column. You’re number one on my list of What I Like.

PHOTO: People stand together as they create the biggest human smiley in the world on the Zagreb main square May 6, 2011.

Physicists in Switzerland just reported they are closing in on the “Higgs boson,” a hypothesized ultra-small unit that may be the building block of subatomic particles. Let’s hope they are right, so European taxpayers get a return on the $10 billion complex built to look for the Higgs boson.

Whether this particle is found will not affect your life in any way. But the search for abstract knowledge is part of the human quest.

Last year as the holidays approached, I reviewed the state of understanding of the size and age of the cosmos. This year for the holidays, the topic is what science knows (or thinks it knows) about some fundamental questions of nature.

* What is matter? When the atom was shown to contain neutrons, protons and electrons, these were assumed to be the basic components of matter. Then such particles were shown to be made up of quarks. Now it turns out quarks — well, you can fill in the sentence. The closer researchers look at matter, the less seems to be there. A baseball is solid at the macro scale: at the subatomic scale, it seems to be made of rapidly spinning packets of nothingness.

The Higgs boson, from which quarks may be made, is conceptualized not so much as a solid entity, rather, as a fluctuation in a mysterious field that some researchers think permeates the cosmos. What is the mysterious field? Your guess is as good as the next Nobel Prize winner’s.

Some scientists expect the Higgs boson to be proven a manifestation of “strings,” the hot idea in academic physics. String conjecture holds that in addition to the four dimensions of human experience — geometry plus time — there are six others. These dimensions are compressed to such smallness they make electrons seem huge; the spinning of the additional dimensions changes nothingness into substance. Ultimately, cheeseburgers are made of rapidly spinning other dimensions.

So far there is no evidence other dimensions exist, nor any proposal for what “another dimension” might be. In 2008, the New York Times ran an article about string thinking that hilariously included an attempt to illustrate alternative dimensions. The fifth dimension was depicted as looking like a paper towel tube. If there are 10 dimensions, good luck depicting them in three dimensions! This book by Lee Smolin, a prominent physicist, contends string thinking is highfalutin mumbo-jumbo.

* Why is most of the universe missing? The part of the cosmos that astronomers can locate — stars, nebulae and, increasingly, worlds – involves perhaps 100 billion galaxies containing 10 sextillion stars, a sextillion being an unfathomable number that is a one followed by 22 zeroes. Yet by current scientific estimates, only about four percent of the matter and energy of the cosmos resides in those stars, plus their associated planets and black holes. The other 96 percent is, well, we’ll get back to you on that.

Evidence indicates there is considerably more “dark matter” and “dark energy” – assumed present owing to the way galaxies move, but not yet located — than regular matter and regular energy. New evidence further suggests the preponderance of the cosmos is “dark energy,” which may be the utmost force in creation, more potent than all gravity, radiation and stellar output combined. Yet as Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University, who just shared a Nobel Prize for a key discovery about how dark energy appears to affect distant galaxies, says, “I have absolutely no clue what dark energy is.” Here is your columnist talking to Riess.

If dark energy and dark matter are real, then what we’ve always thought of as regular matter – what we are made of – will turn out to be weird stuff, since almost all of the universe will be made of something else entirely.

* Why is the universe friendly? Had dark energy been only a tiny bit weaker in the first eon after the Big Bang, all matter would have collapsed back into black holes. Had dark energy been only a tiny bit stronger, galaxies could not have formed. Had gravity been a tiny bit stronger, the stars would have burned through their nuclear material very quickly, and the cosmos fallen dark before life could originate. Had gravity been a tiny bit less strong, planets would not have formed; a haze of elements would orbit stars. If the four known fundamental forces possessed slightly different values, the cosmos would be weirdly distorted instead of geometrically normal. Had it not been for an unlikely idiosyncrasy of the element beryllium, stars could not manufacture the carbon on which life depends. In Harper’s, MIT physicist Alan Lightman just mulled these quandaries.

Maybe the universe is “friendly” because our cosmos has the only possible set of physical laws. (My chips are on that bet.) But having the universe be anthropocentric in character disquiets some researchers, suggesting purpose. In response, cosmologists have developed “multiverse” thinking or M-theory, which holds there are billions or even an infinite number of universes, all of which, through chance, received different physical laws. In M-theory our universe got laws that make life possible, which is good news but also a random fluke.

Stephen Hawking laid out the case for a multiverse in his recent book The Grand Design. Where’s the proof? There is none. Backers of this idea suppose that other universes are accelerating away from ours at more than the speed of light, and thus can never be observed. This makes the multiverse concept late-night dorm-room rumination, not science. To be science, an idea must be falsifiable. It’s impossible to disprove the existence of something claimed as beyond all observation.

M-theory is popular in academia, as it seems to say the “friendly” aspect of the cosmos is just a meaningless coincidence. Physicist Charles Townes, who won a Nobel Prize for the concept of the maser, wryly observed, “To posit the existence of an infinite number of unobservable universes seems considerably more freewheeling than positing a single unobservable God.”

* How did the universe begin? How did life begin? It may be centuries or millennia before humanity knows – if we ever know. So let me wish you happy holidays and close on a light note:

* What is the name of the universe? Our world is Earth, our star in Sol, our galaxy is the Milky Way. But the firmament lacks a name.

Perhaps the cosmos should be christened Ametros, Greek for “without measure.” That’s a pretty classy name. Or maybe we should call it Miss Universe. In alternate years, it could be Mr. Universe.

PHOTO: An artist’s rendering shows a planet called Kepler-20e in this handout released December 20, 2011. REUTERS/NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech/Handout

By Gregg Easterbrook
The opinions expressed are his own.

Conventional wisdom says the Republican presidential nomination will go to Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich. This could change – don’t be surprised if it changes more than once. But suppose conventional wisdom proves correct. If you were Barack Obama, which would you rather run against?

A follower of polls might say, “Of course Obama wants to run against Gingrich.” An Obama-Gingrich race could end with a walkover for the incumbent, as happened in LBJ-Goldwater of 1964 and Nixon-McGovern of 1972.

Gingrich, some thinking goes, has a borderline personality. His past is full of strange diatribes on a weird range of subjects. As Ronald Reagan sometimes confused movies with reality, Gingrich confuses science fiction novels with reality. He threw a temper tantrum about his seat on Air Force One. Hardly anyone likes him personally. He was a transparent opportunist with Fannie and Freddie, organizations that voters hate. Gingrich is proficient at bloviating, and the one time in his life he held actual responsibility as Speaker of the House he did a terrible job. Would you trust the nation’s budget to a man who ran a $1 million tab at Tiffany?

Gingrich hectors others about their personal lives, while presenting himself as a champion of traditional values. Yet he admits betraying not one but two wives. Some kind of new low in politics was achieved when Gingrich formally pledged to stop committing adultery. Gingrich wears the letter H — for hypocrite — around his neck as Hester Prynne wore an A around hers in The Scarlet Letter.

These are sound reasons why Obama might prefer to face Newt. They are reasons the Republican National Committee is said to be feeling panicky about a Gingrich candidacy. Newt has the potential to lose by a spectacular margin, dragging Republican Senate and House candidates down with him. The Republican establishment has not forgotten how much damage he did to the GOP during his administration of the House. Run against a guy even your opponents despise? Sounds promising.

But, as you’ve probably guessed by now, there is a but.

Gingrich is a wild card. He probably would end up a flaming wreckage in electoral terms, but there’s a chance he could become seen as the man unafraid to bring sweeping change to an ossified Washington, D.C. There’s perhaps a 90 percent likelihood Obama would wipe the floor with Gingrich, versus a 10 percent likelihood Gingrich would stage an historic upset. In game theory terms, this invokes the minimax problem – should Obama maximize his chance of a huge victory or minimize his chance of a stinging defeat?

We must take into consideration that Gingrich can be vicious. He viciously denounced Bill Clinton and demanded his impeachment for having an affair, all the while, as we now know, Newt was busy cheating on his own wife. This shows Gingrich will say anything in order to serve himself. Of all GOP contenders, Gingrich seems the only one who might stoop to appealing to the very worst aspects of the American character — if he thought he would personally benefit.

Now consider Mitt Romney. He is perceived as being more appealing to independents than Gingrich. Romney possesses an air of maturity and reasonableness, qualities Gingrich sorely lacks. Also unlike Gingrich, Romney has been a success as an executive — running private businesses, the Olympics and the state of Massachusetts. There seems little chance Romney will stage a campaign that melts down and simply hands a reelection to Obama, which Gingrich might do. Because he is perceived as admirable, Mitt could help Republicans pick up House and Senate seats, even if they miss the White House.

Overall, in most respects, Romney is a significantly more formidable opponent than Gingrich. Yet there are reasons the president might prefer to run against Mitt.

His Latter-Day Saints faith could be a negative — one Obama need not even mention. Evangelicals normally turn out for Republican candidates, but they may be put off by the longstanding question of whether Mormons are Christians. As a churchgoer myself, I think Mormons have the same claim to be followers of Christ as anyone else does. But then I belong to an eccentric joint Christian-Jewish congregation that takes a broad view of spirituality. Many traditional Christians, however, are suspicious of the Mormon denomination. This could knock a couple of points off a Romney vote without the president having to do or say anything.

Romney’s other powerful negative is his background in private equity. Right now “Wall Street” is an expletive, and Romney is Wall Street up one side and down the other. His years running Bain Capital will be described in campaign advertising as vulture capitalism – corporate raiding, followed by layoffs and outsourcing with huge profits for wealthy insiders and average people out of work.

That may not be a fair charge, but it is a powerful one, with which Obama could pillory Romney. There is a clear political playbook to use against Romney.

This especially matters to the youth-vote/youth-volunteer equation. The young voters who enthusiastically supported Obama in 2008 now seem more turned off by him. But if 2012 pits Obama versus Mr. One Percent, young voters might get excited again. Obama would be offering them a chance to defeat Wall Street, at least symbolically.

Whatever other failings he may have, Romney has always comported himself with dignity. An Obama-Romney contest would be the kind of decorous, high-minded campaign at which the president excels. In an Obama-Gingrich race, practically anything could happen.

So forget the polls. If I am Barack Obama, I want to run against Mitt Romney.

Photo: Republican presidential candidate former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) looks on as fellow candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (L) makes a point during the Republican Party presidential candidates debate at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, December 10, 2011. REUTERS/Jeff Haynes

By Gregg Easterbrook
The views expressed are his own.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo just struck a deal with his state legislature for a long-term tax increase on the well-off, while California Governor Jerry Brown recently said he wants a November 2012 voter referendum aimed at raising the state’s top tax rate.

Conservatives predictably are in a tizzy, liberals in a transport of delight. Moderates might simply be glad to learn that California and New York are dealing with budget deficits on their own, rather than demanding a bailout.

Both states are moving to raise their top-rate taxes on personal income, making the rates border on confiscatory when one combines it with the federal and local taxes. Yet both are holding property taxes down. In June, Cuomo persuaded the New York state legislature to impose a cap on property taxes. California is entering its fourth decade of property taxes capped at a low level for most homeowners, under Proposition 13, passed in 1978.

Here’s the problem: Personal income is mobile — it can leave State A for lower rates in State B. Real estate cannot move: it must stay in State A.

Cuomo’s plan will raise the New York top rate income tax to 8.82 percent (a temporary “surcharge” about to expire was slightly higher). Meanwhile, across the state border, Connecticut’s top rate is 6.7 percent. For a well-to-do household, a move to the Nutmeg State might be very attractive.

On the other side of the country, Brown’s plan would raise California’s top rate income tax to a stunning 11.3 percent. Meanwhile, Nevada, right across the California border, has no state income tax.

But top earners may not have to actually uproot themselves to a lesser taxed state because courts can broadly interpret state residency rules. Former White House adviser Rahm Emanuel was able to spend many years living in Washington, D.C., and also satisfy the residency requirement for running for mayor of Chicago by telling a court he had “intended” to move to Illinois.

Think about a Hollywood mogul or Silicon Valley executive who makes $5 million a year, which would mean a $565,000 annual state income tax under Brown’s proposal. In theory, that person could buy a pied-ἁ-terre in Reno, use the address to stop paying California income taxes, and if pressed legally, say he or she “intended” to move to Nevada.

These New York and California examples assume that the rich will be completely honest with their taxes. But the higher state income tax rates are, the greater the incentive for a wealthy flier to hire a tax attorney who can make income appear to be earned in some other jurisdiction.

The actions by California and New York might bring a short-term revenue boost. However, long-term, high top-rate taxes may drive income to lower-tax states, leaving the Golden and Empire states worse off.

So, are the governors of two of the nation’s largest states crazy? No, they are pandering to the number-one voting bloc in the United States: senior citizens.

Seniors don’t pay much in income taxes. Even affluent senior citizens rarely reach top-rate territory for earned income. Instead, they tend to receive their income as interest, dividends and capital gains. But seniors do hold real estate, and complain vociferously about the property tax.

Last month the Pew Research Center reported that seniors are the best-off large cohort in America. Those over 65 years have a median net worth of $170,000, compared to $102,000 for those 45-54 — traditionally the peak earning years — and young adults have a median net worth of just $4,000. Seniors are also the only large group in the U.S. to receive federal income supplements via Social Security: an income-transfer program funded mainly by taxes on the young.

Political proposals to cap or hold down property taxes while raising top-rate income taxes sound like populist crusading against the rich. But this is just cynical politics, disguised as idealism.

Photo: Caroline Meeks, M.D., teaches a laughter therapy class to a group of seniors at the Clairmont Friendship Center in San Diego, California November 17, 2010. LAUGHTERYOGA REUTERS/Mike Blake

Gift-buying season is upon us. And so are books-of-the-year lists. Here are some new books that have not necessarily made it on to any book list, but which are nonetheless good reads and good gifts:

WINNING THE WAR ON WAR by Joshua Goldstein

This is the most important political book of the year. It deserves substantial attention and is worthy of awards. Goldstein, a professor emeritus at American University, shows in meticulous detail that Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia are terrible exceptions to what is otherwise a trend of steady decline in incidence, intensity and severity of human combat. Cable news creates an impression of general carnage: yet with each passing year, nations and tribal groups harm each other less, both directly through war and indirectly through conflict. “Book trailers” are a mixed blessing; the trailer for “Winning the War on War” is worth watching.

Steven Pinker, a better-known writer, also published a book this autumn about the decline of violence. Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature” is also worth reading or giving. Pinker concentrates on the evolution of morality (how violence has gradually come to be seen as wrong), whereas Goldstein’s focus is politics (the policy choices that reduce conflict and prevent harm).

Either way, you should read both books. The decline of war and violence is the no. 1 overlooked story in the international media.

JOIN THE CLUB by Tina Rosenberg

Everyone complains about the malevolence of peer pressure – what about its positive uses? Drawing on examples and interviews from around the world, Rosenberg, whose “The Haunted Land” won the 1995 National Book Award, shows how positive peer pressure has been employed by educational reformers, public health officials, entrepreneurs and nonviolent “velvet” rebellions against dictatorship. A wise, noteworthy book with clear applications both for protest movements and business administration.

FUTURE BABBLE by Dan Gardner

Does it seem to you that “expert” predictions fare little better than coin flips? Gardner, who specializes in science and risk-perception, shows they fare no better. “Future Babble” is delightfully entertaining, and might be considered dark humor if it did not contain so many examples of widely-listened-to “experts” turning out to have no idea what they were talking about.

THE END OF ANGER by Ellis Cose

America may or may not be becoming post-racial. But black rage and white guilt are both on their way to being antiquated concepts, contends Cose, who used to write for Newsweek. It’s hard to ideologically characterize his African-American voice – which is a reason to read this book.

STATE VERSUS DEFENSE by Stephen Glain

The Department of State and Department of Defense have overlapping duties and jurisdiction, plus conflicting institutional incentives. There is too much recitation of well-known incidents from this globetrotting international writer, but it’s a smart guide to a major behind-the-scenes Washington story. As the Department of Defense hands over Iraq to the Department of State, this subject will rise in magnitude.

CHURCHILL’S SECRET WAR by Madhusree Mukerjee

Count me as a card-carrying member of the Winston Fan Club. But as Mukerjee shows, Churchill’s World War II-era abuse of what are now India and Pakistan was shameful, and was in part racially motivated. Shipping food out of starving India so England could have more in reserve may have been the kind of terrible choice leaders make during war. Churchill’s legacy should also include his mistreatment of a region that his nation conquered by force. Mukerjee is an India-born physicist who lives in Germany.

GETTING BETTER by Charles Kenny

Just as war is assumed to be ever-worse while it actually is in decline, the developing world is assumed to be falling to pieces while it’s actually improving on most measures – health, per-capita income, freedom of expression, education for women. Kenny, an economist who has become an important scholar on the reality of the developing world, shows that conditions in most nations are trending upward, and that this is happening almost entirely because of the efforts of developing world citizens – not U.S. or European Union initiatives. The latest United Nations Human Development Report backs up this book’s claims. That the developing world mostly is improving, not imploding as predicted, is another story rarely reported.

TERROR SECURITY AND MONEY by John Mueller and Mark Stewart

This timely and provocative book, by professors at Ohio State and University of Newcastle in Australia, contends that in the wake of 9/11, all investments in domestic security were assumed justified: yet much of the spending has been wasteful or even counterproductive. Some $600 billion (in current dollars) has been spent combating domestic terrorism since 2001. In calling for rational decisions about security, Mueller and Stewart sound like they are arguing that a few terror deaths per year don’t matter. But what they are actually saying is that security appropriations should be subject to the same benefit-cost analysis as any other kind of government spending.

Mueller holds the best academic title in all of higher education, as the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at Ohio State. Presumably, in matters of national security, the Woody Hayes chair advises the Pentagon to go straight up the middle.

THE WAR LOVERS by Evan Thomas

Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, William Hearst – all were eager for the United States to go to war against Spain. A century later, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were eager for war with Iraq. Will we ever learn? This book weaves the psycho-history of its protagonists into tales of Ivy League politics of the era, and sidetracks onto Thomas Reed and William James. Thomas, a former Newsweek writer, who is currently a professor of journalism at Princeton University, is the author of the bestseller, “Sea of Thunder”, and is supplanting David McCullough as America’s most accomplished writer of serious popular history.

RACE AGAINST THE MACHINE by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee

These two faculty members at MIT warn that digital advances and automation may backfire against humanity by wiping out jobs. One hardly even needs to point out that a jeremiad against electronic commerce was published digitally as an e-book via Amazon. So far, the Luddites have been wrong: electronic advances have improved living standards for average people. But the night is young.

A few other new books to bear in mind:

GRAND PURSUIT by Sylvia Nasar

This book has gotten attention but it deserves even more. Its trailer would be an excellent high school or college teaching tool.

FLOURISH by Martin Seligman

A tad touchy-feely, but from a University of Pennsylvania professor who is the guru of the academic “positive psychology” movement.

TOP SECRET AMERICA by Dana Priest and William Arkin

The book version of a must-read Washington Post series about using the patina of anti-terrorism to justify government secrecy and wasteful spending.

INSTANT CITY by Steve Inskeep

A profile of Karachi, a crossroads city of Pakistan, a country the world worries about more every day. As someone who’s spent time in Pakistan, I found this book spot-on.

THE SUBMISSION by Amy Waldman

Had to throw in one novel. Don DeLillo’s “Falling Man” has the best literary grace about 9/11. The Submission is the most original and challenging novel about what happened on September 11, 2001.

Photo: An employee holds copies of the six shortlisted books for the Man Booker Prize as she poses for photographers in a bookshop in London October 5, 2009. REUTERS/Toby Melville

The super committee has predictably failed – maybe there was green kryptonite hidden in its meeting room. Months of nearly round-the-clock debate about reigning in the national debt, conducted at the highest levels of government, come to a close with nothing done about the problem. This is the essence of contemporary Washington: lots of empty talk, interest groups appeased, all difficult decisions indefinitely tabled and the national interest ignored.

What comes next? Most likely, Congress will make the national debt even worse.

Republicans want to extend the George W. Bush top-rate tax cuts. Democrats want to extend the Barack Obama payroll tax cut, and enact yet another bonus extension of unemployment benefits. One or all may happen by Christmas as both parties switch to full-blown pandering mode.

If the costs in the December 2010 stimulus bill are any guide, a package of extended tax cuts for the well-off, payroll tax cuts for everyone and bonus payments to the unemployed will add around $700 billion to the national debt.

Bear in mind, last December’s stimulus bill (the third, following a 2008 stimulus under Bush and a 2009 stimulus under Obama) entailed $860 billion in borrowing. If another $700 billion or so is borrowed for lead items on the parties’ wish lists, during the very 12 months that Washington has refused to take action to reduce the national debt by $1.2 trillion over many years, an extra $1.5 trillion will be added to the debt in the here and now.

If tax-cut and unemployment-benefit extensions pass, Congress will already have spent every penny of the $1.2 trillion the deficit commission was supposed to save. Though no money has actually been saved yet – the “mandatory” spending reductions triggered by super committee inaction don’t start until 2013, which leaves plenty of time for Congress to cancel them.

As Oprah viewers know, when people finally toss out the clutter from their closets, often the next step is a wild shopping spree. In the case of Congress, the shopping spree looms without the first step of throwing stuff away.

But don’t we need income tax cuts to spur the economy? The entire Great Recession has happened with federal taxes at post-war lows. Bush’s income tax reductions were enacted in 2001 and 2003, and then extended in 2010. If income tax cuts haven’t fixed the economy in many years of use, it’s extremely unlikely that they will magically acquire the power to do so in 2012.

Don’t we need an extended payroll tax cuts to spur demand? A year of payroll tax  holiday has led to only a modest increase in the GDP.

Doesn’t high unemployment mean benefits must be extended? The jobless rate is the number one issue in the economy. But as Lawrence Summers argued before his stint in the Obama White House, unemployment benefits can make the jobless rate worse by encouraging people to pass on entry-level employment. Unemployment benefits are hardly lavish. So if they pay about the same for doing nothing as an entry-level wage, why bother to work?

Through unemployment premiums deducted from their paychecks, most Americans funded about half a year of coverage. Now, most who lost jobs have received two years of coverage, courtesy of the national debt, and the president proposes a third year of coverage, also funded by borrowing. Rather than pay people for doing nothing, any benefits extension should require community-service hours.

Beyond looming demands for more tax cuts and benefits, Medicare payments to physicians are scheduled to decline by 27 percent in January. The financing of Obama’s health care package is predicated on enormous Medicare savings down the road, so a Medicare payment cut in January sounds like good news. But there’s already a move afoot to cancel the cut.

For nine consecutive years, Congress has cancelled scheduled Medicare payment cuts to physicians, who constitute one of the country’s best-funded lobbies. Mere weeks after the 2010 enactment of his health care plan, which promised unspecified big spending cuts, President Obama asked Congress to cancel the only scheduled Medicare spending cut, saying  “we cannot allow this to happen.”

It’s true that the Medicare physician fee structure needs fundamental reform. For about two decades, Medicare has paid hospitals per-patient flat fees called DRGs, rather than paying per procedure, as with doctors. Peter Orszag, Obama’s first budget director, notes this approach has contained taxpayer costs at hospitals. Something similar might work for physicians.

But when Washington forecasts dramatic health care cost cuts in the future, while repeatedly cancelling health care cost cuts in the present, this makes concern about the national debt seem like a big joke. That, in turn, emboldens interest groups to reach into the cookie jar.

Some commentators contend that more borrow-and-spend will repair the economy. Perhaps. Your columnist believes reckless borrowing has become a core reason the economy and job creation remain cool.

Political leaders of both parties seem determined to push the nation off a fiscal cliff. That leads to pessimism about the country’s future, which discourages investment and job creation. Why hire if the country’s leaders are acting irresponsibly?

With the failure of the super committee, Americans ought to feel dismayed by yet another  indication that leaders of both parties are more concerned about their own temperature than that of the nation’s.

Photo: Mineral curator Mike Romsey holds a newly classified mineral, to be named Jadarite, at the Natural History Museum in central London April 25, 2007. A mineral found by geologists in Serbia shares virtually the same chemical composition as the fictional kryptonite from outer space, used by the superhero’s nemesis Lex Luthor to weaken him in the film “Superman Returns”. REUTERS/Toby Melville

Action by the debt-reduction ‘super committee’ is due in less than a week. You will not be surprised to learn the super committee may only announce grandiose goals, while “deferring” specifics to some unspecified future point.

If, after months of hype, the super committee turns out to be a Potemkin committee, taking no action against the tide of government red ink, here is what will happen: Absolutely nothing.

That’s why falling dangerously arrears on national fiscal policy is so seductive – in the short term, nothing happens. Greece, Italy, Portugal – their governments made irresponsible decision after irresponsible decision, and nothing happened. So the irresponsible decisions continued.

America’s political leadership can continue to act irresponsibly about money for years to come, and absolutely nothing will happen … until it’s too late.

Consider an analogy to household finances. My wife and I are squares about money. We borrow conservatively, repay early, plan cautious budgets and won’t buy anything unless we know we can cover the cost within a short time. The result is a nice house that’s mostly our own equity, plus retirement savings and a strong credit rating. In fiscal terms, we are pretty much where the United States was a quarter century ago.

Suppose I ran out and bought a high-end sports car for me and a diamond brooch for her. This would be irresponsible, especially from the standpoint of our three children. What would happen the next day?

Absolutely nothing. I could break years of rigorous self-discipline about debt and short-term outlook, but pay no penalty at all.

Observing that nothing happened, suppose I then take my wife on a luxury world tour – first-class flights, presidential suites, Bollinger ’75. I could just sign for it, no questions would be asked. What would happen? Absolutely nothing.

I could go on like this for quite a while, overspending without restraint. The sun would continue to rise. It would seem nothing was going wrong — until my family’s finances were ruined. By the time that point had been reached, it would be too late.

In most of its history, the United States government has been conservative about debt. The nation had to borrow significantly during the early 1940s, but responded with a strict focus on repaying that debt quickly during the late 1940s and early 1950s. As recently as the Reagan deficit years of the early 1980s, there was bipartisan consensus that significant borrowing should be a temporary policy only. In the late 1990s and first two years of the 2000s, the national debt declined as the budget went into surplus and Congress resisted the impulse to overspend.

Then, beginning in fiscal 2003, discipline went out the window. The FY 2003 deficit of $378 billion was considered shocking at the time — the worst, in current dollars, since World War II. Every year since then, save fiscal 2007, has seen a federal deficit that would have been shocking in any previous decade. Yet nothing happened! The sun still rises, and other nations still lend the United States money.

When Congress and the White House discovered they could borrow recklessly and nothing bad seemed to happen, forbidden fruit had been tasted. Since then, neither Republicans nor Democrats in Washington have shown restraint. Republicans want lower taxes and more corporate welfare, Democrats want more spending for their party’s interest groups. Both sides keep ordering cases of champagne – and nothing happens … in the short-term, that is.

Currently the plan is for trillion-plus annual deficits as far as the eye can see. Even if the super committee achieves its mandate of reducing the deficit by $120 billion a year – a “draconian” reduction equivalent to 3 percent of annual federal spending — the national debt still would be projected to bloat from $14 trillion today to $19.6 trillion in a decade.

But the White House and Congressional leaders of both parties know that if the super committee fails, nothing will happen right away. Supposedly automatic budget cuts would be triggered. But they would not take effect until 2013, ensuring that for now, no program is cut and no tax is increased. Waiter, more Bollinger!

Then, in 2013, waivers for the “automatic” cuts could begin. Timothy Noah noted recently in the New Republic that the Gramm-Rudman balanced-budget act, passed to considerable theatrics in 1985, on paper imposed automatic cuts if Congress overspent or under-taxed. The rules proved toothless when lawmakers “realized they did not need to take the law seriously,” and started passing waivers. Same with the Pay-Go legislation enacted to great theatrics again in 2007. On paper it requires disciplined spending – but nearly every appropriations bill since 2007 has included a Pay-Go waiver.

The supposedly mandatory, automatic cuts might later be quietly repealed. Among the most important public policy books of the last decade is Reform at Risk: What Happens After Major Policy Changes Are Enacted, by Eric Patashnik of the University of Virginia. This 2006 book details how Congress enacts what appear to be super-dramatic reforms, but as soon as the media spotlight shifts elsewhere, lobbyists and committee chairs quietly undo the reforms by repealing sentences or paragraphs of the legislation. Often the repeals are hidden in seemingly innocuous “technical corrections” bills deliberately worded so as to be incomprehensible. The supposedly mandatory super committee spending cuts may disappear in this fashion.

A core reason why Washington keeps borrowing too much, and taxing too little, is that national leaders know that if they behave irresponsibly, in the short term nothing will happen.

In the long term, though, the United States will become Greece. At that point, it will be too obvious for Washington to deny what has happened, and it will also be too late to do anything about it.

Photo: An aide peeks in the committee room door as Democratic members of the ‘super committee’ wrap up a meeting at the U.S. Capitol in Washington November 16, 2011. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Increasingly, Mitt Romney seems the Republican candidate who has given serious thought to governing – to what specific policy actions he would take if he became president. The other Republican candidates seem mainly concerned with self-promotion and applause lines, while Newt Gingrich’s “Day 1 Project” seems more like a dress rehearsal than a real concept for governing.

If Romney is the serious challenger to President Barack Obama, then his fiscal policy speech a few days ago bears inspection. It was notably better than most campaign speeches, and contained both gold and dross. Here are some highlights:

Gold: “We cannot with moral conscience borrow trillions of dollars that can only be repaid by our children.” Reckless borrowing, with the invoice passed to our children – nobody in power in Washington right now will be asked to repay the national debt – is not just numbers, it is a moral issue. Romney recognizes this.

Dross: Obama is to blame for “massive defense cuts.” Democrats always accuse Republicans of wanting to despoil the environment; Republicans always accuse Democrats of wanting a weak defense. Neither claim is true. Converted to today’s dollars, the 2000 defense budget was $390 billion. Check Table 32-1 for the key Pentagon numbers under Obama. The 2010 defense budget, the first Obama fully controlled, was $690 billion, and this year’s defense budget is $708 billion. “Massive defense cuts” is not true. Although the White House does project a decline in defense spending to $620 billion in 2013, almost all the projected reduction stems from the expected ends of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Doesn’t everyone want those wars to end?

Gold: “I will make government simpler, smaller, and smarter.” In Romney’s case this is not just rhetoric, since he helped make Massachusetts government simpler, smaller and smarter. Compared to most other states, Massachusetts has a strong economy, good health care coverage for average people and a relatively small debt. If Romney could do for the nation what he did for Massachusetts, we’d all be happy.

Dross: Seniors should be angry at the White House because “it was President Obama who cut $500 billion from Medicare.” The essence of doubletalk is to say that federal spending must be reduced, and then denounce spending cuts. Equally important, Obama has not reduced Medicare spending, and Romney must know this.

The “$500 billion Medicare cuts” figure being batted around by Republican candidates is an estimate for 10 years of projected future reductions from unspecified future savings to be identified by the new Independent Payment Advisory Board, whose advice does not even start until 2014. Obama’s own actuaries have warned there is an “extremely low likelihood” many projected Medicare cuts will occur.

Twenty-four karat gold: Romney placed his hand on the third rail of American politics, by proposing Social Security cutbacks. He said, “I believe we can save Social Security with a few commonsense reforms. First, there will be no change for retirees or those near retirement. No change. Second, for the next generation of retirees, we should slowly raise the retirement age. And finally, for the next generation of retirees, we should slow the growth in benefits for those with higher incomes.”

The test of leadership is saying what your audience does not want to hear. John Kennedy proved he was a leader by telling the East Coast liberal establishment that the old Soviet Union was a dire threat, something it did not want to hear. Lyndon Johnson proved he was a leader by telling Southern states the Civil Rights Act must pass. Ronald Reagan proved he was a leader by telling conservatives the time had come for arms control.

Is Romney the one to tell America what it does not want to hear about Social Security? There simply is no escape route from the red-ink mess that does not include raising the Social Security retirement age (lifespans are significantly increased from when the system was created), slowing the growth in benefits and reducing benefits to the well-off.

The Social Security trustees report that the system can currently pay only about three-quarters of scheduled benefits. In 2010, the report notes, that system wasn’t even self-sustaining, having to draw on the federal debt. If benefits aren’t trimmed, either taxes must rise or the federal deficit must accelerate anew. Neither would be good for the country, and that’s assuming China would keep loaning us additional money, which may not be an accurate assumption.

Beyond that, Social Security is not and has never been an investment program: it is an income transfer program, taking from working-age people and giving to retirees. Many seniors need their Social Security checks, but those who don’t should no longer receive them. That average working-age people are being taxed to fund income transfers to well-off seniors is bad policy, and not moral. National leaders including President Obama strenuously avoid speaking the truth about Social Security, because that truth is so unpopular.

Should Romney reach the White House, a measure of his presidency will be whether he keeps the promises made in this speech.

Photo: Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney listens as former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu speaks at a campaign stop in Exeter, New Hampshire November 3, 2011. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

When Al Gore was in the White House, global warming was a disaster of the first order. Republican presidential candidates are now saying it is anything from a fraud to trivial.

Both sides claim sound science, and both are wrong. In politics, “sound science” means whatever supports your preconceived positions.

For American voters, climate change is an issue offering lessons in how to reject political nonsense on the extremes, and find the middle. If we can’t find the middle of a generation-long concern like climate change, one where modest steps are sufficient for the moment, how will we ever tackle immediate issues such as jobs, debt and the looming retirement of the Baby Boomers?

First, here are the positions of Republican presidential contenders Mitt Romney and Rick Perry. (Herman Cain has not taken a position on climate change.)

Last June, Romney said in New Hampshire: “I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer” and that “humans contribute to that.” In New England, voters of both parties tend to support environmental protection. Romney’s June statement is similar to what George W. Bush said when he was president.

Speaking last month in Pennsylvania, a coal-producing state, Romney switched gears, saying, “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course.” Watch what he says here beginning at 2:17.

Perry, both speaking and in his campaign book “Fed Up”, has said climate change claims are based on “doctored data” and that “we are seeing almost weekly or even daily scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing our climate to change.”

My guess is that the “doctored data” to which Perry refers is probably Climate-Gate – a real but trivial scandal which has assumed conspiracy-theory status on the right. The researchers who sent the Climate-Gate emails may have been nutty as fruitcakes, but do not represent the academic mainstream.

The “scientists… coming forward” to which Perry refers probably are in this petition, which Rush Limbaugh has talked up. Organized under the name of Frederick Seitz, a distinguished past president of the National Academy of Sciences, the petition, supposedly signed by 31,487 scientists, claims claims “there is no convincing scientific evidence” of imminent danger from artificial greenhouse gases. Seitz, who died in 2008, was 87 years of age when he endorsed the petition. The sample card appears to bear the signature of the late Hungarian-American scientist Edward Teller, who was 90 yards of age when the petition began.

To be listed as a “scientist” signer, you only check a box attesting that you are. No credentials or affiliations for the signatories are given. I pulled three names from the signature list at random — Robert Simpson Hahn, Cathryn E. Hahn and Gregory A. Hahn. None appear on any science organization membership list or academic directory that I could locate; a Robert Simpson Hahn published a chemistry dissertation in 1944. Whether the petition actually has been signed by 31,487 working scientists is anyone’s guess.

What does the science mainstream think? In May, the National Research Council warned the “risk of dangerous climate change impacts is growing.” Last month the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study, led by Richard Muller, a prominent physicist and previously a climate change skeptic, concluded that “global warming is real”.

In 2005, the National Academy of Sciences joined the science academies of Britain, Germany, Japan and other nations in a joint statement saying, “There is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring.” And, in 2006, the federal Climate Change Science Program, under the direction of the George W. Bush White House, found “clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.”

Mainstream researchers could be wrong, of course. But it’s unlikely Rick Perry knows more about climate change than the National Academy of Sciences. Just as Gore’s Hollywood exaggerations about global warming made you wince, the right’s current fad for global-warming denial is also wince-inducing.

One aspect of that denial in the Republican campaigns may be a desire to create a bogeyman for the false notion that carbon dioxide regulations are to blame for unemployment rates. Michele Bachmann has called the Environmental Protection Agency the “jobs-killing organization of America”, for example. Since the United States currently has no carbon dioxide regulations, this seems fantastical.

A defensible fear is that the United States ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, or its successor treaty now under discussion, would give United Nations’ bureaucrats input into U.S. domestic energy policy. That would be bad for the American economy, while surely the United Nations would accomplish nothing at a great expense. Last year, I argued that the United States should drop out of international carbon negotiations and start its own greenhouse-gas reform program.

Republican candidates are well-advised to be wary of the Kyoto concept. But they’re wrong to pretend climate change is not a danger. Slowly rising global temperatures, and the accompanying climate impacts, are supported by a strong body of research. They won’t cause the doomsday that Gore so fervently expresses, but greenhouse gas levels could plague our descendants — and will be a lot cheaper to deal with now than later.

Plus, the initial steps that would be taken to moderate greenhouse gases – improved energy efficiency, more use of natural gas and uranium, less use of coal and oil – are in the interest of the United States, regardless of climate trends. And they may be a lot more practical than supposed. See that argument here.

Photos, top to bottom: People balance as they walk on a flooded railway in Bangkok November 2, 2011. Thai authorities tried to stem growing anger among flood victims on Tuesday as water swamped new neighbourhoods and the government began mapping out a plan costing billions of dollars to prevent a repeat disaster and secure investor confidence. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj; A boy swims in the murky waters of Manila Bay, in this file picture taken March 21, 2010. REUTERS/Cheryl Ravelo/Files

The Senate just rejected President Barack Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on millionaires in order to “create or protect 400,000 jobs for teachers, firefighters, police officers and other first responders.” Whether the country needs more teachers and police is a fair question for debate. But firefighters? Firefighting is already featherbedded.

With stricter building codes, built-in sprinkler systems and the near-universal use of smoke detectors, incidence of structure fire in the United States has declined dramatically in the past generation. In 1985, there were about 2.5 million reported fires in the U.S. Since then, fires have declined steadily, down to 1.3 million last year. The report also shows that fire deaths are down from 6,000 in 1986 to 3,100 in 2010. That’s a 48 percent decline in both fires and deaths caused by fires.

Over that same period, the number of career (not volunteer) firefighters has risen from 238,000 in 1986 to 336,000 in 2010. That’s a 41 percent increase in publicly paid firefighters during the same period that safety technology has been able to decrease the occurrence of fire.

Yet national politicians keep advocating for more firefighters. During the 2004 presidential campaign, a standard aspect of John Kerry’s stump speech was a call for federal funding for 75,000 more firefighters. Now Obama has joined this fray despite the fact that pay and retirement benefits for firefighters are high on the list of what’s causing local-government financial trouble.

What’s going on here: where’s the fire?

We all fear fire, as we should. Having more firefighters sounds like a good precaution. One factor at work is that the public does not know about the decline in fire incidence. National leaders may not know it, either. That many fire departments are overstaffed is rarely mentioned, especially by firefighters’ unions. Local politicians who bring this up — most firefighting employment is by city or county government — may be perceived as attacking motherhood and apple pie.

There’s no doubt that firefighters are heroic – this was true long before the noble sacrifice of New York City firefighters on September 11. Firefighters risk life and limb to serve the public. There is the lore of firefighting — shiny trucks and impressive uniforms — which is, in some ways, a similar calling to the military. At campaign appearances in 2004, Kerry often stood with uniformed firefighters behind him. After Osama bin-Laden was killed, Obama went to New York City to visit a firehouse and be photographed with those who lost comrades at Ground Zero. In politics, it is good to associate yourself with firefighters.

Career firefighters are mainly public-sector union members who may lend their support to whichever candidates advocate more money for them. In media symbolism, firefighters are said to represent the travails of government. A New York Times front-page article headlined “Struggling Cities Shut Firehouses in Budget Crisis,” presented the notion that fewer firefighters will mean a calamity. The 23-paragraph article never mentions that incidences of fires are declining. Nor does the article mention that the number of firefighters is up significantly, even post-recession.

Many cities have begun to use fire crews as all-around responders: taking medical calls and filling other roles. Recently there was a scandal in my county when it was revealed that union firefighters were collecting for charity while on duty – that is, billing taxpayers for wages while holding out boots to ask taxpayers for more. Firefighters were able to collect money while on the clock because they had nothing else to do.

Firefighters command the respect of the public, so there may be occasions when it makes sense to send them on smaller emergency calls. But is an enormous fire engine with a three- or four-person crew really needed to evaluate a sick senior citizen.

Beyond the fact that the number of firefighters has risen even as fires have declined, the economics of career firefighting have changed. A generation or two ago, firefighting was very dangerous and physically draining: the offer of a comfortable early retirement seemed a fair bargain for a firefighters’ peril. But deaths of firefighters have declined along with the numbers of fires. Seventy-two firefighters died on duty in 2010 — “the lowest annual total” since record keeping began, according to the National Fire Protection Association. With about 1.1 million total career and volunteer firefighters in the nation, a firefighter’s risk of death on duty last year was about one in 15,000.

Yet pay and pension structures continue to reflect the old assumption that firefighting is extremely dangerous and taxing. In New York City and Boston, firefighting jobs are keenly sought-after. California firefighters can retire at age 50 with up to 90 percent of their final year’s pay. In the November Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis details how pay and pensions for police and firefighters are a leading reason for the insolvency of many California cities. In San Jose’s budget, he writes, “the police and firefighters now eat 75 percent of all discretionary spending.”

There’s no doubt government budgets must shrink. A necessary first step is a forthright assessment of what the government really needs – and it does not need more firefighters.

Photo: U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden speaks at a rally for police officers, firefighters and teachers at the U.S. Capitol in Washington October 19, 2011. Biden called on Congress to pass a proposal awaiting Senate action that would provide funding to prevent teacher layoffs and keep police officers and firefighters on the job. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts