Friday Open Thread [12.19.14]

Andrew Ross calculates how much it would cost to provide free public college tuition:

Several estimates are now in circulation, and Robert Samuels’s 2013 book Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free presents the most detailed proposal. According to the most-recent calculations of Strike Debt, the debt-resistance group I work with, the cost would be relatively modest. The federal loan program is propped up by a motley assortment of subsidies and tax exemptions that amount to tens of billions of dollars. Strip these away, along with some other unjustifiable subsidies (GI Bill benefits and Pell Grants that are gobbled up by fraudulent for-profit colleges) and the cost to the government of public college would be as low as $15 billion in additional annual spending. That is little more than a line item in the defense budget, and a small price to pay for meeting the challenge of the 21st-century knowledge economy.

Hillary Clinton, there is your campaign project right there, since the usual health care reform proposals are now moot.

Roll Call says we might have a new governing coalition in Congress:

The hard right and the hard left ended up out in the cold last week — free to raise their fists and their profiles and make a ruckus, but ultimately powerless to stop the cromnibus. The deal represents a return — at least for a week — to the fabled establishment Washington dealmaking of yore, warts and all, like it or loathe it. It’s a return that could put the ‘do nothing’ label back on the congressional shelf — with Republicans and the president eyeing deals next year on trade and taxes, in addition to keeping the government open for business after four years of serial shutdown and default dramas.

No wonder Tom Carper has been annoying lately. He is living his dream. But such a coalition will be temporary, because we do live in polarized times, and living in polarized times is the normal condition of our politics. Brendan Nyhan calls the bipartisanship of the mid-20th century that Tom Carper dreams about “a historical anomaly.”

“At election time, candidates seduce us with promises to bring America together, but inevitably fall short and end up leaving office with the country more polarized than when they arrived. After blaming them for their failure to unite us, we turn to the next crop of presidential aspirants and the cycle of hope and disappointment begins all over again.”

Hans Noel compares our period of polarization to previous ones:

The parties were definitely polarized 100 years ago, but not on the basis of such widely held ideologies. There were ideological conflicts, to be sure, but they were not organized around a liberal pole opposed to a conservative pole. Those poles emerged, largely coming into full force by about 1950. It is hard to compare ideological conflict in the era of ideological blogs, cable news and talk radio to an era of pamphleteering and partisan newspapers. But the analysis in Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America suggests that ideology was less one-dimensional in the 19th century. Over time, liberal and conservative ideology has been sharper on every issue area, including race but also economics, social issues and foreign policy. This figure shows how well a one-dimensional model fits the opinions of writers in major political journals over time. The ideological organization increases in all issue areas from 1850 to 1990.

“President Obama, as he has shown all year, isn’t about to go quietly into the lame-duck night, even with Republicans ready to take full power down the street. With the stunning announcement Wednesday that the U.S. is set to normalize relations with Cuba, the president is closing his self-termed ‘Year of Action’ with a thunderclap,” National Journal reports.

“In doing so, Obama is serving notice to the new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that a sitting president trumps a Congress divided both along party lines and within them. The shift comes about a month after the last time the president thrust his stick into the GOP’s eye, when Obama announced he was unilaterally providing widespread deportation relief to as many as 5 million illegal immigrants. On both occasions, the president signaled that he’s willing to bet his view of history will prevail and that Republicans continue to occupy the wrong side of it.”