Appalachia rising

News today that Chip Saltsman, candidate for Republican National Committee chair, is reaping big kudos from his party for passing around a CD containing the song "Barack the Magic Negro":

The controversy surrounding a comedy CD distributed by Republican National Committee chairman candidate Chip Saltsman has not torpedoed his bid and might have inadvertently helped it.

Four days after news broke that the former Tennessee GOP chairman had sent a CD including a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” to the RNC members he is courting, some of those officials are rallying around the embattled Saltsman...

“Barack the Magic Negro lives in D.C.” the opening of the song goes. “The L.A. Times, they called him that ‘cause he’s not authentic like me. Yeah, the guy from the L.A. paper said he makes guilty whites feel good. They’ll vote for him, and not for me, ‘cause he’s not from the 'hood.”

The song, written shortly after the publication of the Times column, was first played on the Rush Limbaugh radio show.

Josh Marshall sums it up:

The Republican party has decided on the racial joke issue as the vehicle to reintroduce themselves to the American people after the 2008 blow out. Am I missing something?

No, Josh, you're not. In the 2008 election, the Republicans basically chucked everything in favor of an ethnic appeal to Southern and rural whites. That resulted in them losing ground in every region of the country except Appalachia.

The Saltsman flap shows that the 2008 strategy is still in place. Until they think of something better than white tribalism, the Republicans will probably go with that, since it'll keep them from disintegrating into complete irrelevance now that their economic and foreign policy programs have utterly crashed and burned. Which means that states like Tennessee, and Appalachian politicians like Saltsman, will have relatively more weight in a party that increasingly depends on the anti-black resentment of poor whites in the rural interior South.

Break it up!

The southern third of Somalia is a wasteland fought over by rival gangs of tribalist Islamists. The middle third, Puntland, is the base for the pirates that have been plaguing international shipping. And the upper third, Somaliland, is a stable, peaceful proto-state with semi-free elections...so stable, in fact, that we use it as our base to fight piracy.

Somaliland wants, and deserves, its independence. Why haven't we given it to them? The answer is that we don't want to redraw the national boundaries left by the retreating European empires in the mid-20th century. The implicit reason, I suppose, is that redrawing borders would spark a bunch of territorial wars all over the world, because countries would see land as once more being up for grabs.

But it seems to me that, sometimes, the tribal and ethnic divisions ignored by the 19th-century European colonists are just too severe to allow some of these big post-colonial mishmash countries to remain intact. I mean - Congo? Who really thinks that tribal patchwork should be a country? It's not as if our neo-Westphalian insistence that King Leopold of Belgium's personal colonial plaything maintain its exact borders until the end of time has done any favors for the people who actually live there.

Somaliland has the opportunity to be a real African success story - ethnically united, stable, and orderly with good access to the sea. I say tear up the old British maps and let it be a nation!

Also, as an aside, I think we should break up Afghanistan...

Better government

This is exactly the kind of thing we need. For decades we debated "bigger government" versus "smaller government." That was ridiculous; what we needed all along was more efficient government. While we slashed the quantity of government services, quality went downhill.

If liberals are going to once again be the ones driving American progress, we need to focus on improving the quality of our bureaucracies. We need to make government effective, efficient, fast, and honest. As for conservatives, I think we can rest assured that they'll be stuck in the outdated "bigger vs. smaller government" thought paradigm for at least another couple of decades, so we'll have at least that long to push America in the direction we want.

Update: I should have noticed that Krugman published a column saying basically the same thing as this post (but better and more in depth) three days earlier.

Two to tango

How did China help inflate the massive U.S. housing bubble? They lent our country cheap money, so that we would use that money to buy their stuff. (They did this because A) export industries help boost a country's productivity level, and B) export industries create jobs that keep the people from rioting.)

How did we allow this to happen? We over-borrowed and over-consumed, yes, but we also elected Republican politicians who were intent on buying our votes with massive deficit spending. We wanted a big military, but unlike in previous military buildups we didn't want to pay any taxes. So we let ourselves believe the Republican fantasy that cutting taxes pays for itself. Which it doesn't.

So to pay for the big fat military, the Republicans had to issue Treasury bonds, which were almost all bought by China. That kept long-term interest rates low, making it cheap to take out mortgages. Cheaper than it otherwise would have been. Which made it more profitable for the finance industry to bundle the mortgages into CDOs and yada yada, kicking off the housing bubble.

And here we are today.

Lesson: if you want to consume, you have to produce. If you want a huge military, you have to have high taxes. And if you ignore these facts for too long, you're in for a world of hurt.

Yay public goods, yay New Urbanism

As someone who has been banging the "public goods" drum for a couple years now, it warms my heart to see big-time bloggers like Yglesias posting things like this:

This is a nice point from Mark Kleiman, something he allegedly gleaned from a Tom Friedman column:

But there is an important insight hidden in Friedman’s breathless prose: you can’t much improve the quality of life of currently prosperous Americans (let’s say, folks above twice the median family income where they live) by giving them more of the things that money can buy. A safe neighborhood, walkable cities, fast, comfortable inter-city transport, excellent public schools and universities, scientific discovery, medical progress, clean air to breathe, an economy that is sustainable into the lives of one’s children and grandchildren, a vibrant high culture: these are primarily public goods, and need public expenditure to bring them about.

At the same time, we have reason to believe that in an affluent society such as ours a lot of the problems that people at the bottom suffer from have a lot to do with relative rather than absolute deprivation. In other words, a reduction in the volume of wealth in the hands of the wealthiest aimed at increasing the quantity and quality of public goods could make very wide swathes of the public better off.

My initial list of important public goods included infrastructure, R&D, education, and land-use planning. But it didn't include urban planning. Kudos to Yglesias and the rest of the New Urbanist crowd for figuring this out. Making our cities and suburbs more interesting, livable places is a big and important task for federal and local governments alike.

About that yuan...

Brad DeLong claims to be mystified as to why the recession is hitting American manufacturing especially hard:

This is news to me. I had been confidently expecting the dollar to fall and manufacturing to pick up and lead the economy out of the recession. Time to rethink what is going on.

Paul Krugman agrees that reducing the trade deficit is the way to rebalance our economy away from consumption and bubbles:

A more plausible route to sustained recovery would be a drastic reduction in the U.S. trade deficit, which soared at the same time the housing bubble was inflating. By selling more to other countries and spending more of our own income on U.S.-produced goods, we could get to full employment without a boom in either consumption or investment spending.

There's just one little problem: the U.S. trade deficit will have a hard time falling unless our enormous bilateral deficit with China falls. And that will be unlikely as long as China keeps trying to prop up its own economy (growing at - gasp! - only 7%!) by keeping its currency, the yuan, artificially undervalued against the U.S. dollar. (Incidentally, China's exchange rate policy not only encourages the U.S. to consume instead of produce, it helps create bubbles here by injecting massive amounts of cheap loans into the U.S., but that's another story...) This is probably the answer to DeLong's mystery, though DeLong doesn't want to admit it because he doesn't want to anger the Celestial Empire.

Krugman, however, realizes that it'll be hard to boost U.S. exports to China while China is pushing the other way:

Anyway, the rest of the world may not be ready to handle a drastically smaller U.S. trade deficit. As my colleague Tom Friedman recently pointed out, much of China’s economy in particular is built around exporting to America, and will have a hard time switching to other occupations.

Pretty much. The massive U.S. debt-and-consumption super-bubble that powered the Asian export-led development boom for 35 years has finally popped...except China's government is determined to force the party to keep going. In response, we could start a trade war with China, but instead of boosting our exports it would just make our depression worse. As long as China is unwilling to help us rebalance, we're going to have to find some other way of righting our economy, even as we try to dodge the next bubble.

The poor, oppressed supermajority

Richard Cohen comes out swinging against Rick Warren:

He went on to say, "We can disagree without being disagreeable and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans." Sounds nice.

But what we do not "hold in common" is the dehumanization of homosexuals. What we do not hold in common is the belief that gays are perverts who have chosen their sexual orientation on some sort of whim. What we do not hold in common is the exaltation of ignorance that has led and will lead to discrimination and violence.

Finally, what we do not hold in common is the categorization of a civil rights issue -- the rights of gays to be treated equally -- as some sort of cranky cultural difference. For that we need moral leadership, which, on this occasion, Obama has failed to provide. For some people, that's nothing to celebrate.

Just a quick thought- Mike Huckabee says that gays' civil rights aren't being violated because they're not getting their skulls cracked. Except, it turns out, that's not really true. Hate crimes against the LGBT community continue to rise.

Christians love to be victims. They feel that their religion is under attack on all fronts, from the war on Christmas to those godless heathens trying to teach science in science class. Pat Buchanan just penned a new op/ed where he describes hate crimes against Christians. The despicable crimes being perpetrated on these poor religious folk? They include people talking and people asking for things!

As usual, they are busy at work, going to court to get Nativity scenes expunged from public squares, demanding that statues of Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus be removed from department stores and parades, checking vigilantly to see that any and all caroling at public schools is free of such outrages as "Silent Night."

Those poor Christians. That's even worse than getting your skull cracked!

Update: the Pope (head of religion approximately 1.2 billion strong) sez teh gay are like chainsaws cutting down the rainforest of humanity!

On American royalty

I don't have anything against Caroline Kennedy. She's an educated woman and has done fine work in the field of education reform, and I don't doubt she'd be a smarter Senator than, say, James "Global Warming is a Global Hoax" Inhofe. And it's hard to deny that the Kennedy name doesn't carry with it some inherent power. As newly-libera(l)ted columnist Kathleen Parker points out,

The question for detractors isn't so much whether she's qualified, smart enough or even experienced enough. Respectively, "no," "yes," and "it may not matter" are reasonable responses. Among her qualifications is an ability to raise money and broker deals on the weight of her name. That such power is endowed by birthright doesn't diminish its political value

I don't disagree. But the salient point is, with Caroline as the new Kennedy standard-bearer, will she add to or subtract from that powerful name? "Bush" used to be one of the most powerful names in conservative politics, until Dubya came along and drove his family name into the ground. The fact that he was son of a president and grandson of the legendary Prescott Bush was supposed to be enough for us, as if political shrewdness is a dominant Y-linked gene.

Again, I have nothing against Caroline Kennedy. If she wants to run for Hillary's Senate seat, more power to her, and I don't doubt that her last name alone will be worth a few votes. Such is the power of name recognition in American politics (see also: Clinton, Biden, Udall, Schwarzennegger, and coming soon: Obama). But to simply appoint an untested scion of an important political family, one who has *zero* legislative experience, is to invite disaster in any number of ways.

For one thing, she's going about this process all wrong. Instead of appealing to her desired constituency, she's taking her requests straight to the top, even pressing controversial political figures for their endorsement, while dodging honest questions from reporters ala Sarah Palin. It even turns out that she's not particularly personally invested in the democratic process, having failed to vote in a number of elections recently.

The reality is that political dynasties will always be a part of American politics, but that doesn't mean we should roll over and accept it. For my part, I think NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo (himself a member of a minor political dynasty) would be a far shrewder pick. For one thing, his issue profile isn't embarrassingly slim. But he's also been tested by the voters in New York state, has his own political power base, and while he is not a legislator per se, he has had occasion to work with the NY statehouse and presumably understands how deals are made. Also, in a shrewd political calculation, for Gov. Paterson to appoint him would remove the leading potential primary challenger to Paterson himself when he's next up for re-election.

Hopefully, Governor Paterson won't be blinded by Caroline's star power (okay, a poor metaphor to use in this case). But I'm not holding my breath.

Obamanejad kowtows before the new American Ayatollah

OK, so the title of this post is a bit of an exaggeration. But I'm still really pissed that Obama is having Rick Warren deliver the invocation at his inauguration.

First of all, as everyone knows, Warren is a big crusader against gay rights. That is bad (and, interestingly, it's not the first time Obama has cozied up to gay-bashers). Fewer people probably know that Rick Warren called for the assassination of Iran's President Ahmadinejad on Fox News. Isn't that a little like singing "Bomb Bomb Iran"?

And then there's the fact that Warren screwed Obama over during the campaign, by holding a debate that was heavily biased toward McCain. Apparently Obama's hasn't given up the attempt to kiss some Warren boo-tay.

I understand what Obama is trying to do here - he's trying to send a message to America that he isn't Bush, that Red America will not be marginalized and denigrated during his tenure the way Blue America was during Bush's. Obama is trying to be a true uniter, and save America from cultural civil war, and I totally support that goal. I'm just not sure Rick Warren is the way to do it.

Every decade or so, America's Politico-Christianist movement (mostly conservative Southern Baptists allied with a smattering of independent megachurches throughout the West and Midwest) picks a new Ayatollah - a Grand Cleric who holds forth on mostly political matters. It was Falwell, and then it was Robertson, and then it was Dobson, and now it's Warren. They all follow the same pattern, too - each new Ayatollah starts off dealing with family counseling and lifestyle issues, portrays himself as a "kinder, gentler alternative" to his hardline predecessor, and then quietly transitions to gay-bashing and Republican fundraising. Warren has pretty much acknowledged that this is exactly what he's doing, claiming that the main differences between himself and Dobson is one of tone, not of substance.

The tragedy here is that plenty of American Christians don't believe that gay-bashing and Republican fund-raising are the core of the Christian religion. Nor do they believe that environmentalism, poverty reduction, or any of the other "religious left" issues (which Rick Warren labels "Marxism") are the core of the Christian religion. They believe that the core of the Christian religion has nothing to do with politics, but rather is a personal spiritual relationship with Jesus Christ. And political Ayatollahs like Rick Warren are selling those Christians short.

The way to unite America is not to accommodate smirking right-wing theocrats. It's to recognize the important role that religion plays in people's lives, while also recognizing that America the nation is a cooperative effort among people of all beliefs. Please, Mr. Obama, send Rick Warren home.

Too much or not enough?

Matt Yglesias has been writing a lot about unions lately, all of it positive. Today he says:

It seems that Senator Blance Lincoln (D-AR) thinks the Employee Free Choice Act is unnecessary. After all, non-union Arkansas is a bastion of prosperity! Well, actually, no, it’s poverty-stricken and features ultra low wages...Personally, I was raised in a family that believed that in a just society people who work hard at full-time jobs wouldn’t live in poverty and wouldn’t need to rely on charitable handouts to feed their families. That means high wages and unions.

Does it? California is also not very unionized, but most of the people there don't seem to be living in poverty.

One would think that the collapse of the Big 3 would at least give liberal bloggers like Yglesias and Ezra Klein pause about the idea that unions are Teh Awesome. But it hasn't. Instead, they've become far more vociferously pro-union than before, with very little substantive argument to back it up. To me, that's like the neocons claiming that we failed in Iraq because we didn't invade Iran. Instead of too much, they claim it just wasn't enough.

Which is not to say I am anti-union. I think unions can do a lot to help workers if used right, and a lot to harm workers if used wrong. The economics of unions are tricky and not well-understood. Whether unions are good or bad probably depends on the industry, the legal framework in place, the culture of labor-management relations, and the nature of global competition.

But Yglesias, Klein, and others don't see that. They think "unions --> higher wages --> good for working people," and the analysis pretty much stops there. That attitude will come back to bite liberals, because I guarantee that the bulk of America does not look at the collapse of the Big 3 and conclude that we need to re-unionize our economy. If unions are going to come back, it's going to take an honest re-appraisal of why they work in some situations and don't work in others, and how our laws and culture can be tweaked to make them work more often. If liberals don't make that re-appraisal, who will?

And the drain that swallows it

"The Senate is the saucer that cools the coffee in the cup of the House"- thus spake George Washington to Thomas Jefferson, to answer the latter's questioning of the usefulness of our often frustratingly deliberative legislative body. The Senate is indeed a strange organ, not nearly as populist as the House; it is where the vast majority of failed legislation goes to die. To an outside observer, ignorant of America's idiosyncratic legislative process, one would (rightly) assume that wrangling 435 Congressmen, each of whom has to run for re-election basically every 18 months, would be a burdensome task. Surely far more onerous, one would think, than trying to get a mere 100 Senators, who sit for the longest terms of any federal elected official, to stand up and vote 'yea' or 'nay' on any issue. Sadly, this is not the case.

Nate Silver (Yglesias to my Noah) has a good analysis up of the truly staggering amount of obstructionism seen in the Senate during the 110th Congress under Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Without going into too much detail (read his post), this graph will suffice to show that the Senate spends more of its time than ever, not on voting yea or nay, but on voting whether to vote at all.

Cloture votes have become the preferred method of Senate obstructionism. Lacking a 60-vote supermajority to guarantee a cloture vote, Reid can (and does) throw up his hands, essentially saying "Well, we would vote if we could, but the Republicans will just filibuster" and the bill dies. The very spectre of a Republican filibuster has apparently become so profoundly terrifying that the Senate Democrats give in without ever actually forcing the GOP to do it. Now, as Nate points out, there are plenty of conservative Dems who fear for their purple-state seats (like, ahem, Harry Reid) and meekly go along with this sort of thing, making the Republicans a far more effective Minority party, at least when it comes to stymying the Majority, than the Democrats ever were.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose

Solution: Get your own voters

Nate Silver has a pretty awesome piece up about how Obama won the West. Essentially, he just went out and registered an army of new voters, and those voters came out and voted overwhelmingly for him on election day. He also points out that McCain did about as well as Bush in the West, but lost big there anyway. The moral of this story? Barring some major scandal, etc. (of course) that turns all those new voters off- and it doesn't seem as if McCain's epic comedy of errors actually hurt him among Bush voters- Obama can expect to win all those states again in four years, and his heir may as well in 8.

What's the answer for the GOP? At first blush, I'd say they should find a brilliant conservative Hispanic (perhaps even a woman) to nominate in 2016. Nominating a Latino/a would cover a lot of bases for the GOP, the most important being that they'd actually be appealing to a growing section of the population instead of under-replacing southern suburban whites.

I also like Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, but he better be even more charismatic and strategically brilliant than Obama, since it's unlikely that Indian-American voters are a huge demographic that can be counted on to turn out in massive numbers. But until the Republicans can find a candidate to rally a massive new registration drive around, the Obama Dems are going to hammer them every four years.

In the meantime....

While Noah recuperates, I'll be taking over this blog in a brilliant coup for my own diabolical purposes filling in with Chris to make sure Noah's loyal readers (all six of you) aren't bored. To wit, here's an article Noah would recommend if he weren't incapacitated. Joseph Stiglitz lays out how we got here, and what we could have done differently. He is especially harsh on the decision to replace Paul Volcker with Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Fed:

The Fed controls the money spigot, and in the early years of this decade, he turned it on full force. But the Fed is also a regulator. If you appoint an anti-regulator as your enforcer, you know what kind of enforcement you’ll get. A flood of liquidity combined with the failed levees of regulation proved disastrous.

I'm not Noah, and I'm not particularly qualified to analyze Stiglitz's assumptions, but his reasoning appears sound to me. There's a reason he's the most cited economist in the world. I promise in the coming days to post on some issues which I do feel qualified to comment on, but for now, make your own judgements.

Also, in Noah's absence, I feel it's my duty to keep you all abreast Yglesias' recent musings. He's been on a trip to Finland recently, and finds a lot to love in the Finnish system.

Teaching is held in high regard not just in the abstract, but in practice as a profession a lot of people want to get into. Consequently, the teaching programs are quite selective. And the selectivity itself makes teaching prestigious since everyone knows teachers are graduates of selective programs. Which helps make going into teaching seem appealing to a lot of people. And so on and so forth in an interesting way. It seems to me that it’s easy to see how it’s socially beneficial to increase the number of talented people who want to be teachers; by contrast, it’s difficult for me to see what kind of social benefits from from increasing the number of talented people who want to be lawyers. Finland and the United States seem to be on different spots on the teacher/lawyer curve, and I don’t think it’s difficult to say which is the better spot.

Personally, I would agree that one of the unintended consequences of the conservative war on public education has been a drop in the prestige of teaching careers, but that's hardly the best argument for why teaching is not attracting good people.

Teaching has always been low on the priority list of the best and brightest in this country; more attractive during economic hard times, sure, but in long periods of growth and prosperity fewer talented people want to opt for the lower pay and relative thanklessness (and these days, with attacks on teacher tenure, lack of job security) of public school teaching. In many parts of the country, teaching (especially early-childhood education) was "woman's work", employing unmarried women or providing secondary salaries to married women to supplement the money their husbands made at "real" jobs.

Raising the prestige of teaching would attract better people, sure, but that may be putting the cart before the horse. Raising the pay of teachers, and tacking on better benefits (perhaps with some modified form of tenure to allow the guarantee of good teachers' jobs while weeding out bad teachers early) would raise the viability of teaching as a primary career for people with good educations, and by doing so, would in turn raise the prestige level of teaching and (hopefully) encourage more talented people to consider teaching as an option.

Talk amongst yourselves. Maybe after a few of these, Noah will be ready to come back and wrest control of his precious blog from the pro-teacher tenure usurper.

Short takes

I'm still hoping Ry and Chris will soon take over blogging so I can have a couple months to sit on the couch and go "blaaaarghhh," but in the meantime, here' a few links and short takes:

1. Robert Lawrence, whoever that is, says that the federally directed restructuring of the Big Three will fail, because Americans want to buy big SUVs and trucks (and if they switch to wanting little hybrids, Toyota and co. will be there). So my question is: Why don't we give the Big Three money to research and design incredibly super-lightweight giant SUVs and trucks? A giant plastic monster can still hold all your kids and tow your boat, and it still looks big and tough, and will probably be safer in a crash.

2. Chinese people apparently are getting angry because they thought their country would grow at 10% forever. Meanwhile, Chinese wages have stagnated even as growth has powered ahead, because the government has directed funds away from labor-intensive small manufacturing toward heavy industry (which creates fewer jobs). Why? Because the Chinese government is more interested in international great-power dick-measuring than in boosting its people's quality of life, and being a great power requires heavy industry.

3. I actually know Steve Chu, the new head of the Department of Energy, from my Stanford physics days. A very friendly and laid-back guy, although he's also the most expressionless human being I've ever met. I also once hugged Condi Rice when I was a freshman and she was the Stanford provost. Weird.

4. The Economist points out that infrastructure investment is the right kind of stimulus for America's economy, since it creates long-run growth benefits as well as short-term employment and demand...but it's essential that the infrastructure be useful stuff like light rail and congestion relief instead of pork-barrel bridges to nowhere.

5. Even though I'm on emotion-numbing antidepressants, this story made me cry. It starts off with a guy getting tortured and watching his mother and brother killed, and ends with him getting a surprise birthday party at TGI Friday's.

Health problems

Noahpinion will be on hiatus for a while, due to my health problems...sorry! Check back every week or so to see if I've returned to the land of the living...

Parting shot at the center-right

Can you say "belated Slate" ten times fast? Rather belatedly, Slate has come out with a good article that pretty much takes apart the idea that America is a "center-right" nation. Well, it wasn't that hard to do.

But there's something I'd like to add. People who haven't been to other countries might imagine them as commie socialist paradises, but even if you only compare the U.S. only to other rich countries, there's a lot of areas where we're more liberal. France doesn't allow Muslim kids to wear headscarves in school. Switzerland allowed this campaign poster (and the party that made it did great). Singapore tosses you in prison for having oral sex. Japan makes women change their name when they get married. It also gives you a big fat prison sentence for marijuana. Speaking of Japan, it's one of the many rich countries where women don't have the kind of economic opportunities they have here in the U.S. And the number of countries that have gay marriage is...six.

It's hard to remember this, in the age of waterboarding, domestic surveillance, and "intelligent design," but America started out as the country of individual freedom, and we still do a decent job of it...sometimes. And our system treats women and minorities better than nearly anywhere else on the planet. If people want to call that "center-right," be my guest, but I plan to cling stubbornly to my belief that we're a liberal country at the core.

One-handed economists

Ever since I learned even a little bit about economics, I've been convinced that there was a big stinking dead body in the closet of conservatism. That dead body, when I later learned the words for things, was "public goods." There are some things that the government - and only the government - can do that complement business activity instead of pushing it out of the market. Infrastructure, R&D, education. In their zealous campaign against the evils of socialism, conservatives utterly ignored this important role for government.

They ignored it to the point that "public goods don't exist" has essentially become an article of religious faith. Pseudo-econo-babbling hacks like Amity Shlaes, who talk about economics but never studied it, state this false proposition boldly and without guilt, since they never troubled themselves to learn actual facts. But real economists with conservative leanings, like Harvard star Greg Mankiw, can't come out and openly claim that there's no such thing as a public good.

So instead, when explaining why all government spending is automatically bad, Mankiw has to give a little cough and mumble something under his breath. His new line is that infrastructure spending is best done at the state and local level, not at the national level. He's admitting that public goods exist (because he has to), but refusing to admit that they exist at the national level.

As Matt Yglesias points out, this is bizzarre, since so many infrastructure projects cross state lines. Duh. But Mankiw's conservative econo-religion forces him to say that U.S. federal government spending is always purely bad. State spending can be tolerated, but federal spending, presumably, would somehow be Socialist. Interestingly, this is the same line taken by Ed Prescott in a drunken email rant against an Obama supporter earlier this fall:

Infrastructure investments are best made at the local and state level...Your religion of Statism is a not a good religion. It is detrimental to the welfare of the people. A basic tenet of my religion is free to choose and to enter into mutually beneficial contracts.

It's kind of a sad day when a brilliant economist stops doing scientific work and turns to religion. Seems to be happening more and more among the conservatives these days.